Trailer for Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
'She had this taste for the extraordinary...she took the mundane and the mediocre and she made it ravishing, and she made it OK for women to be ambitious, for women to be outlandish and extraordinary and for women to garner attention.' - Anjelica Houston
I’ve been asked what criteria I use to determine whether or not someone is a “Scandalous Woman?” Most of the women that I have written about were either Scandalous for their love lives or because they operated outside the normal boundaries of society as they were dictated by the mores of the time. For example, Elizabeth Blackwell would be considered scandalous because she dared to apply to medical school to become a doctor in the 1840’s, at a time when women were barely educated apart from reading, writing, and a little light math. Exploring the sciences considered beyond a women’s intelligence.
I’ve been asked what criteria I use to determine whether or not someone is a “Scandalous Woman?” Most of the women that I have written about were either Scandalous for their love lives or because they operated outside the normal boundaries of society as they were dictated by the mores of the time. For example, Elizabeth Blackwell would be considered scandalous because she dared to apply to medical school to become a doctor in the 1840’s, at a time when women were barely educated apart from reading, writing, and a little light math. Exploring the sciences considered beyond a women’s intelligence.
So why Diana Vreeland
one might ask? Why write about her? Most people, if they think of Vreeland of
all, have an image of a woman with helmet like black hair, wearing a great deal
of rouge, making pronouncements like ‘Pink is the navy blue of India.’ Recently
I took a documentary out of the library entitled ‘Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has
to Travel’ directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, her granddaughter-in-law. Watching the film, seeing how Vreeland
reinvented herself over the years, moving from Harper’s Bazaar to Vogue
as editor-in-chief at an age when most people are retiring, I was inspired by
her joie-de-vivre, by her ability to look ahead when others were looking
back. For a woman who was largely
self-educated, what she accomplished in her lifetime was quite remarkable. Like
many Scandalous Women, Vreeland was
her greatest creation.
By the time of her
death in 1989 at the age of 85, Vreeland was a cultural icon. She’d inspired a
one-woman Off-Broadway show starring Mary Louise Wilson, she was the
inspiration for Kay Thompson’s character in the film Funny Face. In the 1941
musical Lady in the Dark by Moss
Hart, Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin the character of Alison Du Bois was based on
Vreeland. She even advised Jackie Kennedy on what to wear when she became First
Lady helping to connect her with designers such as Oleg Cassini. Not many
magazine editors become celebrities in their own right, Vreeland was one of the
first. She appeared on TV talk shows, talking about fashion, that it was an
important part of history. Whippet thin, she was instantly recognizable with
her jet black hair, scarlet fingernails and rouged cheeks and ears. Red was her
signature color from her nails, lips, cheeks to her the living room in her Park
Avenue apartment which she had designed to look like ‘a garden in hell.’
Diana Vreeland went
to work, at a time when women of her social class spent most of their time
doing charity work, those ‘ladies who lunch,’ when they weren’t playing tennis
at the country club. While living in London, she opened a lingerie shop. When she and her husband moved back to the
states, she went to work as an editor at Harper’s
Bazaar, moving from writing a column entitled ‘Why Don’t You?” to becoming
the fashion editor for the magazine for 26 years. How did she get the job? Well
Carmel Snow, the legendary editor of Harper’s
Bazaar, saw Vreeland dancing at the St. Regis hotel, wearing a white Chanel
lace dress with a bolero, roses in her dark hair. Snow was struck by Vreeland’s
innate sense of style and offered her a job. It came at the perfect time,
although her husband was lucky enough to have a job during the Great
Depression, the couple were going through money like an alcoholic goes through vodka. Money was incredibly important to her and she
made no secret of it. Vreeland worked for a living until she was too ill to be
productive.
Some of her suggestions for her column are
hilarious, for example dressing a child like a Spanish Infanta for a
fancy-dress party or wearing 12 diamond roses but the message was clear. Why be
dull when you can be interesting? It was a mantra that Vreeland lived by. As a child, she was told by her mother Emily,
“It’s too bad that you have such a beautiful sister and that you are so
extremely ugly and so terribly jealous of her. This, of course, is why you are
so impossible to deal with.” Awesome parenting skills there Mom! You know that
old saying ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” Diana and her American
debutante mother had a contentious relationship although it turns out, they had
a lot in common. Her mother was a free-spirited woman who hung out with a
bohemian crowd, and was involved in a divorce scandal. All her life, Diana
Vreeland was looking for someone to idealize, to look up to, but never found
her. Instead, she turned herself into someone that others could idealize and
look up to! How clever is that? To become the thing that you were looking for? Like
the Duchess of Windsor, Diana realized that dressing well was the best revenge.
She might not be the most beautiful woman but she would be the best dressed
woman.
On the other hand,
Diana worshipped her handsome father Frederick Dalziel who she resembled.
Although he came from a middle-class background in England, her father
successfully cultivated an upper-class mien which went over well when her
parents moved from Paris to New York soon after she was born. Although she
later wrote that she grew up in Paris, in a home where Diaghilev and Nijinsky were
regular visitors, she actually grew up in New York. Paris, however, would
always be her spiritual home. Her husband Reed Vreeland, a handsome, impeccably
dressed Yale graduate who worked as a banker, had many of the same qualities as
her father, along with one additional one, an inability to be faithful. Still
they remained married for 43 years until his death in 1966 from cancer. His
love gave her the self-assurance that she was lacking. True to her nature,
instead of wearing black for mourning, she wore red. Their two sons were
something of an afterthought in their parents’ mad, social whirl. While she may
have been a distant mother, she was a warm and generous grandmother and
great-grandmother in her later years.
Vreeland redefined
the role of fashion editor at Harper’s
Bazaar. Fashion shoots no longer featured society types wearing the latest
fashions. Vreeland used professional
models, including Lauren Bacall who was featured on the cover of the
magazine. “Today only personality
counts…I do not believe we should put in the magazine so-called society, as it
is démodé and practically doesn’t exist….but ravishing personalities are the
most riveting things in the world.” While at Bazaar, Vreeland popularized the turtleneck and the bikini which
scandalized America. Vreeland later featured a photo of Mick Jagger in Vogue magazine before the Rolling Stones
were a huge success simply because she liked his look. She had her finger in every aspect of the photo
shoot, she oversaw the photography and worked with the models to create the
look that she was going for. Diana and her husband also entertained all the
European emigres at their apartment on Park Avenue and their country home in
Westchester.
When Carmel Snow
retired, Vreeland was passed over as editor-in-chief of the magazine
(apparently Snow thought Vreeland didn’t have what it takes for the top job),
the job went Snow’s niece Nancy White instead. Vreeland stuck it out for a few
more years before Vogue (now owned by
the Newhouse family) snapped her up after she charmed Mitzi Newhouse. Despite
publicly stating that she wouldn’t change anything in the magazine, Vreeland
swept in and changed everything! It was the swinging sixties and Vreeland, at
the age of 60, embraced all that was new particularly the fashions, models and
photographers coming out of Great Britain. Vreeland also pushed for models who
weren’t perfect or were unusual like Twiggy, Penelope Tree, Edie Sedgwick,
Anjelica Houston, Veruschka and Lauren Hutton. She didn’t want cookie cutter
blondes or brunettes, she wanted individuals with personality who turned their
flaws into assets the way that she had. "If you had a bump on your nose,
it made no difference so long as you had a marvelous body and good
carriage." What’s amazing as that she managed to accomplish so much
despite never arriving at the office before noon! (She made up for by staying
at the office sometimes ‘til midnight, fortifying herself with a peanut butter
and honey sandwich, a glass of scotch and a shot of B-12 at lunch.)
Vreeland lasted only
8 years at Vogue done in by the
expensive photo shoots (Vreeland thought nothing of sending a photographer to
photograph white tigers in India and then not using the photos in the magazine)
and the changing times. Vreeland’s Vogue
was all about fantasy and not the reality of women’s lives in the 1970’s. Vreeland
always had her detractors, while many found her visionary, others found her
erratic, impossible, abrasive and clueless. After she was fired from Vogue, she went to work as a consultant
for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curating the annual fashion exhibition for
the Costume Institute. It was a job that she initially thought she wasn’t right
for since she didn’t come from an academic background but she was just what the
museum needed. She had an eye for what would draw people to the museum. From her
first show on Balenciaga in 1973 until 1987, Vreeland put on 15 exhibitions and
put the Costume Institute on the map. Shows
on Costume in Film, La Belle Époque, the 18th Century Woman, and
Russian Costume, the exhibitions were incredibly popular. Although it’s now
called the Anna Wintour Costume Institute, it really should be named after
Vreeland who put the institute on the map. Or at least have a gallery named
after her (that’s my humble and cranky opinion).
Further reading:
Alexander Vreeland (editor): Diana Vreeland: The Modern Woman: The Bazaar Years, 1936-1962, Rizzoli, 2015
Amanda Mackenzie Stuart: Empress of Fashion - A Life of Diana Vreeland, Harper 2012
Diana Vreeland: D.V., Knopf, 1984
