Empress of Fashion (46 page)

D
iana would have been wary of all attempts at posthumous apotheosis. “Should we spend this much time on ourselves?” she asked Jonathan Lieberson as he attempted to interview her. “Don't you think we should rather be
going on
with our lives?” It must be said that she did not inspire everyone she met; and those who were inhibited by her forcefulness or discouraged by the sense of failure she could induce have tended to remain silent. Reaction to Diana at a personal level depended to some extent on distance. By the end of her life it was hard to experience the exhilaration that came with exposure to her many points of view, her pizzazz, her divine spark, unless one was at fairly close range. Moreover, those who were allowed close had generally earned the right to be there, because of some pizzazz, some divine spark of their own. In old age Diana looked very different to those who knew her less well: to strangers watching—or possibly hiding—at a distance of twenty feet who saw her behaving like a terror in the manner of her grandmother, roaring at volunteers and secretaries, and looking, in the words of one observer, like a strange Kabuki clown. Her ability to sense the zeitgeist was remarkable, though not, as it turned out, infallible. “I'm an idearist,” Diana once said. “I have these spasms of ideas.” But because she
was
an “idearist,” and always worked with other people, questions of attribution do arise. It was Carmel Snow, not Diana, who first introduced Italian couture to the United States. It was the fashion editor of
Seventeen
who made Mary Quant and her miniskirts possible in America. The work that emerged from Diana's trip with Louise Dahl-Wolfe to the Arizona desert was extraordinary, but it was Carmel Snow who sent them there and Louise Dahl-Wolfe who took the photographs. “The day you give a dinner in my honor,” Diana once said to Jonathan Lieberson, “tell everybody, including me, it's for someone else.”

This does not do Diana sufficient credit. Nor is it enough to say, with some of her obituarists, that her greatest achievement was herself; or that her greatest achievement was to transform the curation of costume exhibitions; or even to assert that she was a great catalyst and impresario in the manner of Diaghilev and inspired great beauty and wealth, though this was also true. Impressive though this may be, none of it explains why Truman Capote and others thought she was a genius. Capote, of course, parachuted out of an explanation by asserting that one had to be a genius to understand what he meant. But other commentators, including Harold Koda and Richard Martin, have also had difficulty articulating exactly what it was that Diana Vreeland
did
that was so special. She undoubtedly fell into the “ill-defined, disturbing category” of tastemaker, they wrote, but she—and by implication, her achievement—was peculiarly difficult to identify. It was impossible to show her solo, they suggested: “We can only see her in the vivid gathering of her obsessions, her friends, and all who are still enthralled by her captivating style, instinct, and passions.”

One reason for this, perhaps, is that Diana's greatest achievement is barely visible to the naked eye. It lies out of sight, in memory and dreams. “I don't like to work,” she once said. “I only like to dream and achieve . . . quite a different matter.” From the time she started work at
Harper's Bazaar
, Diana asserted a privileged role in fashion for the unconscious mind, and its child, the imagination. The rational mind was, she thought, too often prosaic, too often circumscribed by hesitation and fear. Yet the inward journey of psychoanalysis was a cul-de-sac. “If you really want to know,” Diana told Christopher Hemphill, “I can't stand a dream that's stronger than my own day.” To Diana, from childhood, it was the transmission of dreams, desire, and memory outward, into the waking day, that brought intoxicating release from the banality of the world. Her old friend and rival, John Fairchild of
WWD
, came close when he said that Diana's greatest feat was bringing imagination and fantasy to fashion. But there were imagination and fantasy in fashion before Diana. What she did, indefatigably, and from a position of great influence at
Vogue,
was to assert the
authority
of the imagination—and the idea of possibility that galloped along beside it.

To Diana the imagination liberated the possible: with a little imagination something ever more “wonderfull” was just around the corner and ever present in the here and now. It was implicit in “Why Don't You?” and the “haikus” with which she sent creative people off to Japan, the Pyramids, and the Painted Desert, willing them to return with something better than her first idea. It was explicit in her cries of “Give 'em what they never knew they wanted,” and “The most boring thing on
earth
is to be
of
the world of what you do.” After Diana, her hallucinatory spreads in
Vogue
, and her exhibitions, the imagination and the possible were never out of fashion bounds again. “I call it a ‘dream' because so many things exist within it. Of course, it's both physical and mental . . . and spirituelle. I know of no other word for it. . . . It brings out all the different sides that make up the
whole
.” Diana's visionary quest had roots deep in her own past: but it stamped itself indelibly as another way of motivating and judging clothes, pushing back the boundaries of fashion and extending its vocabulary, literally and metaphorically. “I'm looking for something else,” she said. “I'm looking for the
suggestion . . .
of something I've never seen.” Diana might not invariably have welcomed twenty-first-century probing of the darker realms of the fashion imagination, but it is impossible to imagine the work of designers like Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, or Marc Jacobs without her.

T
o do Diana justice, finally, it may be necessary to move away from the pages of
Bazaar
and
Vogue
, away from the Costume Institute's galleries, and even away from Diana herself, for we may be looking in the wrong place. Instead, our gaze might usefully swivel toward someone who has been both invisible and ubiquitous throughout this story—the woman flicking through
Vogue
's pages with whom Diana was, at heart, aligned. Diana always insisted throughout her working life that she was an amateur who had wandered into the world of fashion because she needed the money. It was, she once said, the only way she knew. Far from aligning herself with the producers of fashion and the fashion industry, her real interest was in the woman who wanted to close a gap: the gap between the way she was and the way she wanted to be. The question that interested Diana was: how do you do it?

The answer, according to Diana, did not lie in transforming or reinventing one's persona in a forced and unnatural way. Rather, it was about becoming the “best” version of oneself; and to do that, one had to become one's own editor, one's own curator. As Carol Phillips noted: “Vreeland understood that, encouraged it, predicted its sweep, believed in it.” During the 1960s at
Vogue
, the extent to which Diana developed the philosophy of “Why Don't You?” was radical. What she promoted for the individual was groundbreaking: a shift from a set, appropriate way of dressing and styling oneself to a belief in the reader as a creative force in a world of possibilities. Diana encouraged the reader to explore the art of living through
Vogue
, in a collaborative act of self-expression. During the 1960s the speed at which new fashions and trends emerged and disappeared accelerated, and fashion splintered. But the way in which Diana kept pace with this mattered less than the way she handed over power to the woman reading the magazine. And for all her love of the opulent and luxurious, she always believed that this kind of independence was accessible to anyone with imagination, anyone with pizzazz.

If this created new sets of pressures and expectations, Diana did not see it. She took a romantic view of curating one's own existence. “Editing is
not
just in magazines. I consider that editing should be in everything—thoughts, friendship, life. Everything in life is editing.” Her perspective, as Stephen Jamail once pointed out, was “the bright prospect and the long view.” There was a belief at the time of her death, and in
Diana Vreeland: Immoderate Style
, that this view of the world made her a glorious relic, a thing of the past. She thought that vanity did not equal narcissism; that ambition did not equal greed; that nothing could happen without self-discipline; that optimism, not misery, drove creativity; that victimhood was not inevitable; that dreams came true; and that trusting to imagination and fantasy brought a world of wonders to reality. “I think I've been a realist. I think fantasists are the only realists in the world. The
world
is a fantasy. Nothing's remarkably real,” she said.

This view is not, in fact, so very far from contemporary cognitive-behavioral thinking. Except for dire tragedy or grinding poverty, Diana was known to say, life had its up-and-down trips. “You must choose one,” she said. “The down trip makes for a bad liver, bad digestion and fewer friends. The up trip is naturally delicious and never ceasing. I believe in people who are on the up trip.”

Fashion theorists have finally caught up with Diana too. When innovative academic work on fashion first emerged in the 1980s, the ground was broken by Elizabeth Wilson in a book called
Adorned in Dreams
. Although Wilson was a committed feminist, she challenged those who rejected fashion as trivial or symptomatic of false consciousness. Fashion, she suggested, has the power to mark out identity in a way that we should embrace rather than distrust. It even has the power to subvert. “Socially determined we may be, yet we consistently search for the crevices in culture that open to us moments of freedom,” she wrote. Fashion, she continued, acts as a vehicle for fantasy. “There will . . . never be a human world without fantasy, which expresses the unconscious unfulfillable. All art draws on unconscious fantasy; the performance that is fashion is one road from the inner to the outer world.” Immense psychological and material work goes into the production of the social self, and clothes are an indispensable part of that production. This is what makes it so compelling but causes us to react to fashion with ambivalence as well.

The debate rages on. Diana understood that fashion means far more than just clothes: that it tells the world what we are, and that its power lies in the intimate way it bridges the gap between our fantasies and the outer world. The transformation wrought by fashion can change the way we see ourselves and the world sees us. “I shall be
that girl
,” wrote Diana in 1918. The Girl rescued her from surrender to the downward trip. The Girl propelled her upward. Even in 1918 Diana was years ahead of her time. At the age of fourteen she was thoroughly postmodern; and bang up-to-date.

Still, you have to begin somewhere. It's like when I was thrown by the taxi last year—I didn't tell you about that? I told no one. First of all, it would have become an
histoire.
And I knew that if I ever gave in . . .

It was three weeks before the “Vanity Fair” show opened at the Museum. I had one foot in the door of a cab, the cab started to go and I was thrown back on my head and dragged along the ground. The whole time—this is
while
I'm being dragged—I kept thinking, “You've got three weeks to go—you've
got
to be all right.” And then the driver saw me, stopped the cab and looked at me on the ground.

“Oh my God,” he said, “What have I
done
?”

“You started to move,” I said, “and I wasn't in the car. Why did you move?”

“I have no idea!”

“Now listen, there
is
a mirror—but never mind. No bones are broken. No one's hurt. Let's get on with it.”

So I got in the cab and the driver said to me, “Lady, I've got to tell you something—this is my first night out in the cab and you're the first person I've driven.”

“You've got to begin somewhere,” I said. “Never look back, boy! Never look back . . . but still, you've got to look in the mirror to see if the person's in the car!”

Acknowledgments

I
have many people to thank for their help with this book. It would not have been possible without the generosity of members of the Vreeland family in giving a stranger total freedom to proceed and their kind insistence that the book should reflect my point of view, not theirs, thereafter. I am most grateful to Tim Vreeland, Freck Vreeland, and Alexander Vreeland for talking to me about Diana; to Nicholas Vreeland for his time and insight; and to Phoebe Vreeland and Daisy Vreeland for their assistance. Lisa Immordino Vreeland was particularly helpful in forwarding elusive information gleaned from her own research, and in arranging a private screening of her documentary about Diana,
The Eye Has to Travel
. I would also like to thank Diana's niece, Emi-Lu Astor, for giving me access to family albums assembled by her mother and grandmother, and for her observations about her aunt.

I was greatly assisted by three biographers: Hugo Vickers, biographer and literary executor of Cecil Beaton, and a friend of Diana Vreeland in the 1980s; Penelope Rowlands, author of
A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters
; and Dodie Kazanjian, cobiographer, with Calvin Tomkins, of
Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman
. Penelope provided several introductions to people who worked with Diana at
Harper's Bazaar
from the 1930s onward, and has been exceptionally generous with advice and information at every stage. In the course of writing
Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman
with Calvin Tomkins in the 1990s, Dodie Kazanjian interviewed many people who knew Diana well but who have since died. I am most grateful to her for making her immaculate records available through the Archives of American Art, for her kindness in allowing me to quote extensively from her work, and for introducing me to Anna Wintour. I am also indebted to Grace Mirabella for talking to me at length and for lending me her connoisseur's collection of Vreeland memos.

Many of Diana's colleagues and friends shared their memories of her and her world with me, including A. G. Allen, David Bailey, Lillian Bassman, Gigi Benson, Harry Benson, Marisa Berenson, Ferle Bramson, Dolores Celi, Felicity Clark, Bob Colacello, Gleb Derujinsky, Simon Doonan, Jean Druesedow, the late Eleanor Dwight, the late Dorothy Wheelock Edson, Jeanne Eddy, Jason Epstein, the late John Esten, Mary Fullerton Faulconer, Gwen Franklin, Carmel Fromson, Tonne Goodman, Nicholas Haslam, Carolina Herrera, Margaret van Buskirk Heun, Harold Koda, Kenneth Jay Lane, Boaz Mazor, Martha McDermott, Polly Mellen, Annie Hopkins Miller, Beatrix Miller, Betsy Newell, Audrey Oswald, Priscilla Rattazzi, John Richardson, Lynn Riker, Gloria Schiff, Babs Simpson, Valerie Steele, Susan Train, June Weir, and others who prefer to remain anonymous.

The Diana Vreeland Papers are in the Manuscripts and Archives Division in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library. Assistant curator Thomas Lannon and his staff were unfailingingly efficient throughout my many visits. I am especially indebted to Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, for her advice and expertise; to Jennifer Farley, assistant curator, with Ann Coppinger and Molly Sorkin, for making it possible for me to view the museum's holdings of Diana's clothes; and to Melissa Marra for her help with the chromes of Louise Dahl-Wolfe. I am equally obliged to Harold Koda, Nancy Chilton, Julie Lê, and the staff of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for their help, together with Gwen Roginsky in the Editorial Department and Julie Zeftel and Dina Selfridge in the Image Library. Shawn Waldron, archive director at Condé Nast, and Lisa Luna at the Hearst Corporation gave me every possible assistance; and so did James Martin and the staff of the Richard Avedon Foundation in New York, especially Michelle Franco. I am also indebted to Jordan Auslander for his genealogical research and to Serena Balfour, Charlie Burns, Julia Fryett, Jean Halford-Thompson, Andrew Harvey, Jennifer Rhodes, Phylis Rifield, Judith Searle, Sue Ryder-Richardson, and Jenna Tinson of Front Row for their efforts on my behalf.

Many libraries and other organizations assisted with research. I would particularly like to thank Mark Bartlett, head librarian, and Carolyn Waters, writer services librarian, and the staff of the New York Society Library, whose assistance in locating and allowing me to photograph back issues of
Harper's Bazaar
and
Vogue
I greatly appreciated; Carol Elliott and Leslie Calmes of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson; Etheleen Staley and Takouhy Wise of the Staley-Wise Gallery; Mark Ekman and the staff of the Paley Center for Media; Karen Canell, head of special collections & FIT archives at Fashion Institute of Technology; Sharon Stearns at the development office of the Brearley School; Michael Jones at the development office of the Staten Island Academy; Calvin Tomkins and the staff of the museum archives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Jim Holmburg and Sarah-Jane M. Poindexter of the Filson Historical Society; James Moske, managing archivist museum archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Abi Gold of the Michael Hoppen Gallery; Monica Karales; the staff of the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History at the New York Public Library; the staff of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the staff of the New-York Historical Society Library; George Turns of Durham Research Online; Elizabeth Boardman of Brasenose College, Oxford; Andrew Brown of the Crown Estate; Timothy Livesy, archivist of Highgate School; the staff of St. John's College Library, University of Cambridge; Philippe Chapelin; the staff of the British Postal Museum & Archive; the staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, particularly the Vere Harmsworth Library; the staff of the London Library; and in the UK, above all, the staff of the National Art Library at the V&A.

I am most grateful to my agent, Clare Alexander of Aitken Alexander, for steering me in the direction of writing about Diana in the first place, and for her help throughout; and to Terry Karten, editor extraodinaire at HarperCollins Publishers in New York, for all her support, ably assisted by Sarah Odell. I owe many thanks to Susan Llewellyn for her sharp-eyed copyediting and the charming way she grappled with my Scottish English, and to Lydia Weaver and her production team. My gratitude goes to Dr. Heather Tilley for her help with the
Vogue
chapters; and to Alana Adye, Pippa McCarthy, Saskia Stainer-Hutchins, and Schuyler Weiss for research assistance at other times. This often involved them in exasperating tasks for which they were greatly overqualified, but they attacked everything they were asked to do with diligence, intelligence, and great good humor. The mistakes that remain are all mine.

I am greatly indebted to friends on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Peter and Virginia Carry in New York, whose hospitality must by now have earned them a place in the record books; and to Beverly del Castro, Maurice and Elizabeth Pinto, Jane Deuser, William Lamarque, and Max Silver for making my frequent trips to New York so enjoyable. I would particularly like to thank Frances Campbell and Judith Mackrell for their advice, and Candia McWilliam and Martine Stewart for reading the manuscript in draft. I am extremely grateful to Carol Walford for her calm and steady presence throughout, and all her help. To Marianna Hay, Daisy Hay, Michael Hay, and Freddy and Matthew Santer, I can only say this: Diana Vreeland once described fashion as an intoxicating release from the banality of the world. In my case it's not fashion, it's you.