No history of 20th-century style would be complete without recognising Diana Vreeland as central to its conception: 'the high priestess of fashion', as she was known by her acolytes, and the most famous editor of her era, with a career that spanned five decades.
'Style was a standard,' she declared, remembering her 26 years as fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar (she joined the magazine in 1936, departing in 1962 to become editor-in-chief of American Vogue). 'You gotta have style. It helps you get down the stairs. It helps you get up in the morning. It's a way of life. Without it you're nobody. I'm not talking about lots of clothes.'
If Coco Chanel reinvented the way that women dressed in the 20th century, introducing streamlined modernism and chic simplicity, then Diana Vreeland transformed the idea of why we get dressed, with her playfully imaginative take on the art of fashion.
So it is unlikely to be mere coincidence that both women should have remade themselves with such success, from obscure beginnings, into their own remarkable creations, with unwavering attention to detail. That Vreeland may prove to be as iconic a figure as Chanel seems more likely with the release of a compelling documentary about her life, The Eye Has to Travel, out later this month.
Born in Paris in 1903 to an American débutante mother (née Emily Key Hoffman) and an English stockbroker father (Frederick Young Dalziel), baby Diana sailed with her parents to New York in April the following year, at the age of eight months, to be raised in the Upper East Side. In 1907 her sister Alexandra was born: a blonde beauty apparently more favoured by their mother than dark Diana, with her big nose and unconventional features.
Vreeland in an early portrait Photo: GEORGE HOYNINGEN-HUENE. © R J HORST
Vreeland's somewhat unreliable but hugely entertaining memoir, DV, gives some indication of the family dynamics, while also obscuring the truth of her childhood. She dated the move from Paris to New York as 1914 (thereby knocking more than a few years off her age), adding some extravagant embroidery about a French childhood spent alongside Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.
Certainly, the fantasy of Diaghilev was to be evident in her adult career - both in terms of an imaginary Russian landscape that appeared in her fashion shoots, and the wholly justified idea of herself as an artistic impresario - but the reality of her childhood was rather less glamorous.
A glimpse of the painful truth emerges in her account of 'the most terrible scene between my mother and me. One day she said to me, "It's too bad that you have such a beautiful sister and that you are so extremely ugly and so terribly jealous of her…" … I never bothered to explain that I loved my sister… Parents, you know, can be terrible .'
Yet out of rejection came Vreeland's determination to create herself according to her own choices and taste; and as the fashion writer Judith Thurman observes in The Eye Has to Travel, her ability 'to erase the memory of a glum, unlovely little girl in whose body she had once been trapped' was key to her vision as a fashion editor: 'A primal yearning for singularity often gives one an unerring instinct for it.'
Indeed, Vreeland's evolution from ugly duckling to fashion empress - thereafter returning in the third act of her career, having been fired from Vogue in 1971, to reign over the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute - serves also as a reminder not to ignore slow starters, or to regard failure as a block to future success.
Her career may never have blossomed, however, without the security of marriage. At 20, Diana had fallen in love with a debonair Yale graduate whose appearance gave her the self-assurance that she had so far been lacking. 'I never felt confident about my looks until I married Reed Vreeland,' she confessed. 'He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen.'
The young couple had two sons - Tim (Thomas Reed Jr) born in 1925, and Frecky (Frederick Dalziel) in 1927 - and after several years in New York the family moved to London in 1929, where Reed worked for an American bank. There Diana made a home for the family in Hanover Terrace on the edge of Regent's Park, and proceeded to befriend everyone from Wallis Simpson to Cecil Beaton, while also discovering the delights of French couture, and Chanel in particular, on regular trips to Paris. 'She is an aesthete without being either a snob or an intellectual,' wrote Beaton, approvingly. 'It is completely refreshing.'
It was England, she later claimed, that taught her everything she would need for her subsequent career, with what she perceived as exemplary British standards of housekeeping and conversation. 'That's why I could go to work for Harper's Bazaar when I left England - I knew how to work because I knew how to run a house. My God… the only chance in my life I ever had to learn anything was those 12 years in England!' (In fact, she was in London for less than half that period.)
She adored her encounters with the Royal family, having been presented at court to King George V and Queen Mary - 'it was luxury in depth ' - and remained an ardent admirer of the Queen. 'She always wore matching clothes. The toque. You know the Queen Mary toque. Then the fox. Then the tailleur. Then the boots. All the same colour: pale blue, pale lavender, sometimes cream, sometimes white, pale green, pale rose…'
But Vreeland had a different royal role model for herself: 'I'd like to have been Elizabeth the First. She was wonderful. She surrounded herself with poets and writers, lived at Hampton Court, and drove that little team of spotted ponies with long tails. Their manes and tails were dyed the same colour as her hair - you know royalty - red !'
Red was to become her signature - the colour of her nails, her lips, her famous Manhattan salon. For, in her own words, 'red is the great clarifier - bright, cleansing, and revealing. It makes all colours beautiful. I can't imagine becoming bored with red - it would be like becoming bored with the person you love.'
But it was dressed all in white (a lace dress and bolero by Chanel, with roses in her hair) that Vreeland made her entry into the world of magazines: spotted early in 1936 by the then editor of Harper's Bazaar, Carmel Snow, dancing with Reed at the St Regis hotel in 1936. The Vreelands had returned to New York, in the depths of the Great Depression, and were running low on funds; 'I was going through money like one goes through… a bottle of scotch, I suppose, if you're an alcoholic.'
A Horst portrait of Vreeland in her red salon in Manhattan, 1979 Photo: HORST P HORST, 1979. © ESTATE OF HORST P HORST/ART + COMMERCE
It may seem surprising, therefore, that her earliest contributions to the magazine were whimsical suggestions of extravagance, in her 'Why Don't You?' column. 'Why don't you rinse your blonde child's hair in dead champagne to keep its gold as they do in France? Or pat her face gently with cream before she goes to bed as they do in England?' 'Why don't you own… 12 diamond roses of all sizes? Wear them all at once one night, in the hair, on your bag, up and down your dress.'
But rather in the same way that Hollywood escapism was appreciated during this era of economic gloom, Vreeland's fantasies were relished as often as they were derided, and still retain their charm today. ('Why don't you tie an enormous bunch of silver balloons on the foot of your child's bed on Christmas Eve?')
With the outbreak of war in 1939 came a change of tone, although Vreeland proved reluctant to leave Paris - where she had been ordering couture - until the last moment, when a friend insisted that she boarded what was to be the last passenger ship to sail before battle commenced. 'I'll never forget that afternoon,' she later recalled, 'coming down the rue Cambon - my last afternoon in Paris for five years. I'd just had my last fitting at Chanel. I don't think I could have made it to the end of the block, I was so depressed - leaving Chanel, leaving Europe, leaving the world of… of my world.'
Never inclined towards lengthy mourning, Vreeland made a new world for herself as fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar, shooting New York collections with considerable panache, and setting out for all-American locations - notably, Arizona, where she proved to be her own best model in a memorable photograph by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, posing in black trousers, white shirt, sombrero and rose.
And she also benefited from Carmel Snow's visionary choice of photographers and literary breadth (it was Snow who had run Bill Brandt's portrait of TS Eliot and landscapes of the Brontë parsonage in Haworth, and paired Truman Capote with Cartier-Bresson, commissioning the pair to do a story on New Orleans in 1946).
So began Vreeland's brilliant collaboration with Richard Avedon, on fashion shoots and portraiture. In retrospect, observed Avedon, 'Diana lived for imagination ruled by discipline, and created a totally new profession. Vreeland invented the fashion editor. Before her, it was society ladies who put hats on other society ladies.'
Vreeland with Richard Avedon, 1964 Photo: MAGNUM PHOTOS
Much to Vreeland's chagrin, she was passed over as editor of Harper's Bazaar in 1957, when Carmel Snow was deposed, in favour of Snow's niece. Despite the appearance of nepotism, Snow was as enraged as Vreeland; not least, according to Judith Thurman, 'at the thought of her timid niece (the fashion editor of Good Housekeeping, who specialised in cosy features on wash-and-wear for the American housewife) trying to fill her shoes'.
Still, Vreeland continued to work as fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar for five years, producing one of her greatest coups in 1961 when she delivered the first pictures of the young Kennedys in the White House, photographed by Avedon.
Eighteen months later she was rewarded with the editorship of Vogue: 'They offered me a large salary, an endless expense account, and Europe whenever I wanted to go. That's what hooked me.'
Vreeland's arrival, at the age of 60, coincided with a broadening of global horizons, fuelled by her undiminished appetite for innovation, yet underpinned by her knowledge of the past. Hence her editorial spreads ranged from Swinging London to the most distant regions of Japan, featuring a new generation of models, musicians and celebrities (Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Twiggy, Veruschka, Penelope Tree, Lauren Hutton, Jane Birkin, Catherine Deneuve), while continuing to celebrate the style of old friends, like Pauline de Rothschild and Wallis Simpson.
According to Anjelica Huston, who first met Vreeland in 1959, and modelled for her throughout the 1960s, '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.'
She was also fearless in her approach to what constituted suitable material for a glossy magazine - willing to run a story by Truman Capote on the murders that were the subject of In Cold Blood, Irving Penn's ethnographic studies, and Jackson Pollock's experimental new art. Thus a still-life of a flower - transformed by Penn into a painterly masterpiece - was as likely to find a place in her pages as a picture of an expensive handbag.
And yet, for all her mastery of fashion, and her ability to judge its tidal flows, Vreeland's reign could no more last than that of King Canute. The tide turned against her at Condé Nast, when the free-spending 1960s were deemed excessive, and a new decade marked a more cautious approach.
Vreeland - already grieving for the death of her beloved husband in 1967 - had her own, singular version of a breakdown after being toppled from the Vogue throne, and replaced by her down-to-earth former assistant, Grace Mirabella. She checked herself into hospital, where she remained unhappily in bed, until so many of her friends started visiting that the best party in town was in full swing around her.
It was the same loyal coterie who found her a new role at the Costume Institute (and funded her salary there), and Vreeland's comeback was every bit as flamboyant as a Ballets Russes première. As always, her attention to detail was consummate: her orchestration of the 1976 Diaghilev exhibition incorporated a great quantity of Chanel's perfume, Cuir de Russie (itself inspired by a Russian romance), to scent the museum air.
Towards the very end, when she was bedridden with emphysema, her closest friends (including Oscar de la Renta and Jacqueline Onassis) still came to her red-walled apartment; 'a garden in hell', she remarked, but it remained heavenly to those who loved Vreeland and her vision.
And they came, too, to her memorial service at the Metropolitan Museum in 1989 - where the music ranged from Maria Callas to the Rolling Stones, just as she wanted. 'Don't stop the music,' she had cried out on the last night of her life, her voice strong again, as if at a party, before she slipped into a coma. It was a finale of which the great Diaghilev himself would have been proud.
The Eye Has to Travel is out on 21 September .
0 comments:
Post a Comment