Empress of Fashion (44 page)

In 1986 this line of criticism reached a fresh pitch in a book by Debora Silverman called
Selling Culture: Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America.
In her book Silverman made the arresting assertion that Diana's exhibitions from
The Manchu Dragon
onward consciously and deliberately propagated the values of the Reagan era. In Silverman's view, Diana's shows reflected Reaganite love of conspicuous consumption, rejection of so-called dependency culture, and a devil-take-the-hindmost attitude. The exhibitions particularly exalted the sort of avidity displayed by Mrs. Reagan, whom Diana knew, and who was well known for her love of luxury and couture clothes. In New York, argued Silverman, politics, commerce, and culture had converged on the Metropolitan Museum so that it was dominated by a clique of designer-tycoons, retail millionaires, and grandees. The museum had allowed itself to be colonized by their values for its own ends and had become grossly commercial. Silverman objected to the manner in which Bloomingdale's was allowed to cash in on
The Manchu Dragon
by producing replicas of Chinese art; she lashed out at both
La Belle Époque
and
The Eighteenth-Century Woman
for reducing France to a parade of luxury goods without looking at the wider social context; and she excoriated a view of history that reduced it to a collection of sponsored merchandise in the museum shop. Silverman regarded the sale of
D.V.
in the museum as a particular travesty: not content with commodifying art by selling tacky replicas, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was now apparently commodifying its curators too.

Debora Silverman greatly overstated Diana's influence. As the gossip columnist Liz Smith put it in the
New York Daily News
, “her vision of Diana Vreeland as a kind of evil capitalist
deus ex machina
presiding over some imaginary link between New York society and the White House occupants [was] absurd.” Jean Druesedow, associate curator at the Costume Institute from 1984, commented that Silverman underestimated the degree of spontaneity and improvisation. Had she consulted anyone at the Costume Institute, she would have discovered that
The Manchu Dragon
was semi-imported and put together at very short notice when another exhibition collapsed, one reason why its presentation and its relationship with Bloomingdale's was not as rigorous as it might have been. Silverman complained—with justification—about Diana's ahistorical approach, but was somewhat ahistorical herself. There may have been a parallel between Diana's views about the value of society, snobbism, and luxury and those of Nancy Reagan, but Diana's concept of their worth went back to the 1930s and did not emerge as if by magic in 1981. It was also the case that while Diana knew the Reagans, and had a close mutual friend in Jerry Zipkin, she was much closer to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis than to Nancy Reagan. Silverman exonerated Onassis of all faults, even though she castigated
Allure—
on which Onassis had worked closely—because it “nourished fantasies not only of opulent nobilities of the past but of cruelty and decadence in the present.”

Moreover, Silverman made no attempt to look at Diana's exhibitions in the context of the history of the Costume Institute. She thought it was suspicious that the shows influenced designers, failing to understand that this had always been part of its mandate. Had Silverman spoken to Thomas Hoving, she might have understood that he had hired Diana to deliver crowd-pleasing blockbusters, and she might have realized that many of the “vices” for which she was castigating Diana were more appropriately attributable to him. In spite of its weaknesses, however, Silverman's book did light on some of the problems with Diana's approach to exhibiting costume. Her exhibitions were best when their themes allowed her to convey a sense of the Girl—and even the Boy—behind the clothes, and the dreams behind the designs. She was much less secure when dealing with other important issues that also affected the wearing of clothes, such as caste, military rank, religious symbolism, and the display of power, a weakness that showed in
The Manchu Dragon
.

Silverman's book also highlighted concern about the evident convergence of art, fashion, and powerful financial interests at the Met. She was not alone: Diana's 1983 exhibition,
Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design
raised other eyebrows. This was the first time a living designer had been honored by the museum, and many people felt that this was nothing more than an elaborate public relations stunt that gave Saint Laurent an unfair competitive advantage, a feeling underscored by Diana's rejection of chronology and anything close to a conventional retrospective. What she wanted to show in the exhibition was the inspired work of “the leader in all fashion today,” who had followed Chanel in understanding the new century and its changing way of life, and showed it how to dress. “This is an important point,” she wrote. “Both Chanel and Saint Laurent are equalizers. You and I could wear the same clothes; what we have on,
anyone
could wear.” But unease persisted, and a year later it deepened with the prominence given to Ralph Lauren's sponsorship of the exhibition
Man and Horse
.

In many ways Diana's exhibitions at the Costume Institute were ahead of their time. Exhibitions of living designers are no longer unusual; and exhibition-inspired merchandise in museum shops is now so routine as to provoke indignation if it is not forthcoming. Meanwhile, criticism of Diana's later exhibitions had little effect on the public response. Both
The Eighteenth-Century Woman
(1981–82) and
La Belle Époque
(1982–83) brought in well over 500,000 people, and no fewer than 631,422 visitors went through the galleries to look at the work of Yves Saint Laurent (1983–84). Diana was always reluctant to accede to the idea that fashion was art: “I've never understood that—about art forms,” she once said. “People say a little Schiaparelli design is an
art form
. Why can't it just be a very good dress?” She never pretended to be an academic curator. Yet she made a strong case for fashion as culturally significant while creating a whole new audience for costume. Her exhibitions at the Met induced many people to visit the museum for the first time, just as Hoving had intended. And her success persuaded museums much farther afield, including the V&A and the Louvre, to open up their own collections too.

B
y the time
Selling Culture
appeared in 1986, Diana was eighty-three and in no position to defend herself against its wilder accusations. She had long had problems with her eyesight—a photograph she took of Marina Schiano reveals how little she could see even in 1976. In conversation with George Plimpton in 1983, she complained that there were days when she had trouble making out anything at all. She was diagnosed with macular degeneration, which by its nature slowly became worse. It eventually left her with so little peripheral vision that she effectively became blind, though her abilty to see continued to fluctuate unpredictably until the end of her life. She went to great lengths to disguise this condition. When she mentioned her deteriorating eyesight to Christopher Hemphill during their recording sessions, she even presented it as something positive: she no longer had to cope with the gaze of strangers or, indeed, with seeing too much. “The curious thing is that now I can approach anyone myself. This started about ten years ago. As soon as I started going blind, I lost all my shyness. I was never shy in business, but I always had a terror of meeting people. Now, instead of
suffering
this terrible thing of seeing everyone and everything much too clearly . . . it's very easy for me to speak to anyone.”

By 1985 emphysema had set in. Her grandson Alexander came to live in New York after his marriage to Sandra Isham in the fall of 1985. He took up a position as head of communications for Ralph Lauren, and they became very close. She continued to entertain. Andy Warhol had dinner with her in July 1985 and wrote in his diary that she had started to have people looking after her at night, including a young woman who sat with her while she slept. In spite of being ill, he observed, she drank four vodkas and smoked about fifteen cigarettes. In 1985 André Leon Talley began coming to the apartment to read to her. In the years that followed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was another who often called twice a week to read. The nurses who stayed overnight with Diana kept records that suggest she was not the easiest of patients. She was told firmly by her secretary at 550, Dolores Celi, that she was not to mix Ritalin with vodka, after an “episode” in May 1985. Diana paid not the slightest bit of attention. “On my arrival Mrs. V was sitting up drinking vodka,” wrote one nurse in the record book. Guests came for dinner and stayed late; Diana entertained them as she had always done, but there were long and difficult nights after they left. She kept up a cheerful front; but friends thought she was lonely at times, and behind the facade the nurses recorded that from time to time she was “very depressed” and “very upset about everything.”

From 1985 Diana worked more from home and did everything more slowly. As time passed, she went in to the museum less and arrived later, though she telephoned her aide-de-camp Stephen Jamail and her research assistant Katell le Bourhis several times a day. She relied on them heavily, along with Jean Druesedow of the curatorial staff, for
The Costumes of Royal India
, which ran from December 1985 to August 1986. She continued to act as the public front of the exhibitions for the press, made contacts and opened doors, but Jamail, Le Bourhis, and Druesedow coordinated much of the installation while Diana animated and directed in the background. In a conversation with Le Bourhis and Jamail on February 13, 1985, the ideas she floated for the
The Costumes of Royal India
included using Andy Warhol's elephant; talking to the British designer Zandra Rhodes, who had just come back from India; designing one of the backdrops as a page from an Indian miniature; and installing a water garden at the entrance: “Water, flowers, moonlight, to reflect moonlight would be wonderful . . . and good for the costumes.”

The exhibition was part of a yearlong Festival of India and curated in association with Prince Martand “Mapu” Singh of Kapurthala, whose connections had unlocked many princely cupboards in India to reveal late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century garments that had never been seen beyond palace walls. Designers found it inspirational. In New York, Liz Claiborne featured scarab-print tunics, jodhpurs, and Nehru jackets the following season, and it had such an effect on Diana's old friend Hubert de Givenchy that he dedicated his January 1986 collection to her. The Party of the Year that opened the exhibition in 1985 was outstandingly glamorous, even by its own standards: guests included Rajmata Gayatri Devi of Jaipur and an assortment of maharajas and maharanis alongside Cher, Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, and many more.

But although Diana had commissioned a spectacular pink tunic and skirt to wear for the occasion, she never appeared. Her place at one of the dining tables stayed empty. As far as André Leon Talley was concerned, her absence cast a pall over the whole affair. He telephoned to find out what had happened the next morning, and she asked him to dinner. For the first time ever, she received him in bed; and then she dropped a bombshell. “André, I've had such a wonderful life and now I've decided to take it easy. Look, I've done so much for so many people. Look at all the boys I helped down on Seventh Avenue. I have done so much for friends like Oscar, Bill, and Halston. Now I am going to sit back and relax. It's time now to just lie here and enjoy life, from this room. Quite simply, I've had it!” In fact Diana was just able to preside over one more exhibition, almost entirely from home. It was called
Dance
, and its theme was party clothes from the eighteenth century through to the sixties, the Twist, and the Peppermint Lounge.

In spite of her emphysema, Diana managed to record the introduction to the audio guide for
Dance
. Margaret van Buskirk, her secretary at the museum, went to the apartment with the recording crew to discover that Diana was having one of her less blind days. The crew had gone to 550 Park Avenue at short notice. Margaret had no time to smarten up, and was wearing a baggy sweater and a dirndl skirt. “Oh Margaret,” said Diana in dismay, “[a] young girl should be all arms and legs.” She managed a few more short press interviews, including one with André Leon Talley for British
Vogue
in December 1986: “Great dance dresses have a spirit of their own,” she told him. “They project allure into the wearer and into the evening. To dance is to experience a vitality and a lust for life that exists in each of us.” Her visits while the exhibition was being assembled were few and far between. “She came in one day to look at the installation in progress and was wheeled from gallery to gallery, saying what was wrong, asking that lights be moved and shoes changed and mannequins repositioned, that some be given hats and others . . . hats removed,” Andrew Solomon recalled. “She seemed an impossible old lady who couldn't let go of her control and who was making everyone's lives miserable for no good reason. And then they did everything she'd said, and it was transformed. Her nearly sightless eyes could pick out things my youthful vision could not; enfeebled, she was still supreme at the discipline of chic.” The exhibition was in part a final journey through the twentieth century with Diana. It included clothes adapted for social dancing by Irene Castle, and the Duke of Windsor's midnight blue evening tails. For the first and last time Diana included a picture of her mother in one of her exhibitions: Miss Emily Key Hoffman at her happiest, dressed as an Assyrian dancer, photographed at the Carbonite Studio by James Lawrence Breese. “We live out our parents' lives,” Diana once said to Nicholas Haslam; and perhaps Emily Dalziel would indeed have been happier had she led the life of her less-loved daughter.