Empress of Fashion Read online

  Empress of Fashion

  A Life of Diana Vreeland

  Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  www.harpercollins.com

  Dedication

  To Michael

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Paris Opening

  Chapter 2: The Girl

  Chapter 3: Becoming Mrs. Vreeland

  Illustrations 1

  Chapter 4: Pizzazz

  Chapter 5: New Look

  Chapter 6: Youthquake

  Illustrations 2

  Chapter 7: Wilder Shores

  Chapter 8: Old Clothes

  Chapter 9: Endgame

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Permissions

  Photo Credits

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  My maid here at the Crillon is driving me crazy. . . . I’ve been having fittings in the morning all week long and Betty, my maid, is down on her knees sticking pins in my hem—but she won’t look in the mirror.

  “Ah madame,” she’ll say, “Quelle belle robe.”

  “Betty,” I’ll say, “Don’t look at me, look in the mirror.”

  “Mais madame, comme c’est jolie.”

  “Betty!” I said, “Look in the mirror! What I want is in the mirror. What you want, you can’t see because you won’t look at it.”

  Diana Vreeland (1903–89) believed in the power of the reflected image with something close to religious fervor. She once observed that without a mirror, “you lose your face, you lose your self-image. When that is gone, that is hell.” Her faith in the magic of the looking glass propelled her through a long life, and into a distinguished career at a time when it was unusual for a woman from her background to work at all. She joined Harper’s Bazaar in 1936, officially becoming its fashion editor for twenty-three years from 1939; she was editor in chief of American Vogue from 1963 until 1971; and from 1972 she was special consultant to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she launched fifteen groundbreaking costume exhibitions. She was regarded, at her peak, as the empress of American fashion, or as one admirer put it: “the High Druidess of fashion, the Supreme Pontiff, Perpetual Curate, and Archpresbyter of elegance, the Vicaress of Style.” She is thought—by some—to be the cloth from which twenty-first-century editors in chief of fashion magazines are cut.

  However, Diana often insisted that she was really an amateur at heart. Her resistance to being defined by her working life was noted by the British photographer Cecil Beaton while she was still at Harper’s Bazaar in the 1950s: “She is indeed such a powerful personality in her own right, and so little dependent on the fashion world for her terms of appeal, that many of her friends never think of her in connection with printer’s ink,” he wrote. Growing up as cubism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, Diana had the appearance of a multifaceted artifact herself, a creature of planes, angles, and polished surfaces, interpretable from multiple viewpoints, frequently in motion and in vivid color. She may have favored her reflection in the mirror; but she was remembered by many in vibrant three-dimensional reality as she erupted into a room. “She didn’t merely enter a room, she exhilarated it,” wrote Nicholas Haslam, who worked in the art department of Vogue in the early 1960s. “And all eyes immediately locked on her, hypnotised. . . . Her actual presence was like a sock on the jaw. You knew you were seeing a supernova.”

  Her face was the most famous part of her. “Mrs. Vreeland’s head sits independently on top of a narrow neck and smiles at you. Everything about her features is animated by amused interest,” wrote Beaton. Provided she was engaged or charmed, the overwhelming impression was of a brilliant glint that spread outward from narrow brown eyes, beneath Vaselined eyelids, across high cheekbones exaggerated with great streaks of rouge, with which she also powdered her ears, turning them a shade of terra-cotta. The centerpiece of this face was a very large beaky nose above a huge, wide crimson mouth and a pointed aggressive jaw. The effect was framed by jet black hair, sometimes in a snood, veneered into place from her hairline with such a high metallic sheen that it is said to have clinked when a waiter bumped it with a tin tray. Beneath her head Diana maintained the slender, supple body of a dancer until the end of her life, but she held it in a curious sloping posture. When she moved, her pelvis thrust forward and her upper body sloped backward as she glided ahead. Once she gained momentum she assumed the lolloping gait of a dromedary, topped with a light sashay, a walk she said she copied from the showgirls of the Ziegfeld Follies. Even when seated she was animated: jabbing, pointing, prodding, and kneading the air, the fingers of one hand spread outward, a cigarette clasped in the other, displaying to advantage long, red, perfectly manicured talons. “Like everyone else, I was not introduced to her but to her index finger, extended as a kind of barrier to trade,” wrote Jonathan Lieberson, who met her in the 1960s when Diana was in her sixties too. “She was improbable in the extreme: a strange figure, sitting closed cross-legged, with erect spine, stroking the arch of an extended foot, her fingers stretching . . . her mouth and out-thrust jaw in constant motion.”

  Those trying to describe her often reached for avian imagery. “An authoritative crane,” said Cecil Beaton. “Some extraordinary parrot—a wild thing that’s flung itself out of the jungle,” thought Truman Capote. “An Aztec bird woman,” suggested Vogue feature writer Polly Devlin, though she also proposed a Kabuki runaway. Diana’s appearance could cause confusion. On a trip to Kyoto, it was said that her Japanese hairdressers thought she was a man before they decided she was Chinese. (“As you know, that’s not the most popular thing you can be in Japan . . . but they were very polite. And once you get a person totally wet with half their make-up off, you see something.”) It is less often remarked that Diana Vreeland was actually ugly, an ugliness made worse by having mild astigmatism which could make her squint. Polly Devlin was forcefully struck by Diana’s unattractiveness on their first meeting, and equally amazed by how quickly the ugliness seemed to melt away. “There’s a word not much used nowadays, ‘limned,’ which is to illuminate, to edge in color,” she wrote. “She was always limned, set in shock against her background.”

  One reason Diana had such a mesmerizing effect was the sound, as well as the sight, of her. “When she laughed, she slowly and deliberately intoned each ‘ha’ of ‘ha-ha-ha,’ much, I imagined, as one of the denizens of Hogarth’s Gin Lane might have done,” wrote Lieberson. Bystanders were rooted to the spot by the peculiar swooping cadences of her gravelly bass voice, which could rise to a booming bark and fall back down to a whisper in the course of one sentence, its colors darkened by years of smoking. The rhythm of her speech was unpredictably emphatic, punctuated by the throaty laugh, a descending scale that went M-m-m, and (since she took a positive view), the word “duh-vine.” She could generally be relied on to light upon at least one italicized word every few seconds, more often when telling a story. She had a predilection for rolling her rs as in “rrrighto”; and faux French pronunciation, so that “corduroy” became “cord-du-roi,” “tiger” became “tee-gray,” and “video” was pronounced as in “Montevideo.” Though
she could bridle (or worse) at unrefined language, she had an acute ear for gamey slang and reminded Beaton of Falstaff, a very different physical type. But even her manner of speech was less interesting than what she actually said.

  By the time she joined Harper’s Bazaar, Diana had cultivated a verbal brilliance that was all her own, her talk interspersed with Delphic remarks that were captured by listeners like butterflies, only to flutter weakly on the page. “Pink is the navy blue of India” was one much-quoted aperçu with which she became bored. “Blue jeans are the most beautiful thing since the gondola,” was another, and there were thousands more in the manner of “One thing I hold against Americans is that they have no flair for the rain. They seem unsettled by it; it’s against them: they take it as an assault.” She attributed her oblique point of view to the astigmatism:

  I have astigmatism, like El Greco. I’m not comparing myself with El Greco for a minute, except that we both have the same physical disability. Partly because of his disability he saw things that most people don’t see. I see all sorts of things that you don’t see. I see girls and I see the way their feet fall off the sidewalk when they’re getting ready to cross the street but they’re waiting for the light, with their marvelous hair blowing in the wind and their fatigued eyes. . . .

  Not everyone admired her. Some people thought she was frightening, abrasive, disagreeable, a bully, and even a freak. Others did not forgive her for her social life in her seventies, when she was photographed with Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, and Jack Nicholson. Coco Chanel said she was the most affected woman she had ever met. Salvador Dalí maintained that she lied all the time, a charge echoed less fiercely but nonetheless insistently by others who knew her better than he did. Polly Devlin thought that her “slanting knowing eyes” missed much about the soul but “nothing, nothing to do with the body.” The designer Charles James, whose work she overlooked, excoriated her. The first time he met her Jonathan Lieberson thought she was not exactly fake but artificial in the extreme: “At the time, though, I recalled a remark made about Max Beerbohm: ‘For God’s sake, take off your face and reveal the mask underneath.’ ” Many more people thought she was plain eccentric, though this was one charge she rebutted. “I have not one eccentricity—that I know of. . . . I think most eccentrics are just go-ahead kids, like Hank the Yank, Henry Bath, the Marquess of Bath and owner of Longleat, who went through the whole War with a duck on a chain . . . praying for bombs to fall so that his duck would have a pond. To me, that’s not eccentricity—that’s how he felt about his duck.”

  Others adored her and thought she was extremely funny. Cecil Beaton described her as having the humane wit of Madame de Sévigné. The art historian John Richardson loved her for her worldly tolerance, her powers of perception, and her engaged friendship. Nicholas Haslam did not take long to discover that behind her astounding exterior “lay a much-heralded mind not only of dazzling fantasies . . . but of originality of thought, and a carefully shrouded or, rather, disguised loving tenderness.” At Diana’s memorial service in 1989, it was observed that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sobbed from beginning to end. Vogue Contributing Editor André Leon Talley regarded Diana as one of the two most important women in his entire life. A host of creative and talented people in the world of fashion, including models, photographers, designers, and some actors, not only credit her with launching their careers but have said they felt better for having known her. Ferle Bramson, Diana’s secretary during her tenure at the Costume Institute, echoed the feeling of many when she said that her boss was so creative and original that liking or disliking her was, in the end, irrelevant.

  Diana Vreeland was such a substantial presence while she was alive that there is a perception that much has been written about her since her death. Surprisingly, however, she has never been the subject of a full-length biography. There have been many profiles, articles, and one highly critical book. In 1982 she published a memoir, D.V., which she happily described as “faction,” developed from her earlier photo essay, Allure. After her death in 1989, the Costume Institute mounted a brilliant and illuminating exhibition about her, accompanied by a publication that included many reminiscences by friends and colleagues and an essay that focused on her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s book, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, is a beautiful evocation of images from Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and her exhibitions at the Costume Institute, a timely reminder of the extraordinary work Diana stimulated as well as her own; and Lisa’s documentary of the same title captures Diana with great verve and nuance with the help of those who still remember her. Eleanor Dwight’s superbly illustrated Diana Vreeland revealed new material about her upbringing and marriage, but its text was of necessity short and its focus external.

  There is therefore a case for a longer account, partly because fashion itself has changed. It has vastly expanded its reach, insinuating itself into places unthinkable half a century ago. There has also been much fresh thinking about it as a phenomenon in academic circles, across several disciplines. Where fashion was once regarded by academics as too trivial for serious examination, or too mired in false consciousness for feminist scholars, it is now being reinterpreted more subtly. This is leading to a reevaluation of those involved in its making. The job of editor in chief of a fashion magazine is a century old; the women who have done it successfully have exercised enormous power at the center of a vast web of production and consumption, and the scale of their power is unusual even today. Quite as important, there is reassessment of fashion as the phenomenon that encapsulates what Baudelaire called “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” nature of modern life. If this is true, it raises a question about Diana herself: is it possible that her achievements have been seriously underestimated? Some friends and colleagues certainly thought so. One of them was the Hollywood agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar, as Diana later recalled:

  Swifty Lazar took me with him to buy something in Bloomingdale’s basement. And at every counter, he said, “This is one of the greatest women of the century! This is Diana Vreeland!”

  “Who could this be that we’ve missed?” I could see people thinking, “It’s not Chanel, it’s not Garbo, it’s not Monroe.”

  The puzzled reaction of the Bloomingdale’s shoppers was understandable. A long career on fashion magazines, a series of innovative costume exhibitions, and a trail of Sphinx-like remarks do not explain Swifty Lazar’s assertion that Diana was one of the greatest women of the twentieth century, and Diana herself thought it was nonsense. “Look, nothing I’ve ever done is extraordinary,” she said to one interviewer. Truman Capote, however, also thought she was a genius. Mrs. Vreeland, he wrote, was one of the great Americans who had contributed more than anyone to improving the level of taste of the American woman. This was not an assessment of the American woman with which Diana agreed. “Alas, I am afraid she looks worse than ever,” she wrote to an old colleague in 1972. But Capote was adamant (if self-serving): “She’s a genius but she’s the kind of genius that very few people will ever recognize because you have to have genius yourself to recognize it. Otherwise you just think she’s a rather foolish woman.”

  This book is for nongeniuses interested in the nature of Diana Vreeland’s talent and achievements. For all the fanfare of her appearance and her personality, her gifts were elliptical. Yet they were real. They were consistent. They were visible early in her life, and what happened to her in her early years, and as a young married woman, lent them a particular intensity, giving her what the make-up artist Pablo Manzoni called a “leitmotif, a continuity” that lasted throughout her professional career and until she died. Diana regarded a chronological approach to anything as consummately tedious, but hers was a life in which chronology counted for a great deal. Far from agreeing that she constantly reinvented herself, as some have maintained, this book contends that her later achievements can better be understood by looking at those early years, by paying close attention
to her omissions and evasions about her past, and by peering into the interstices between the facts of her life and her later fictions. It does not pretend to be an exhaustive account of her fashion enthusiasms, or her friendships, which would run to several volumes.

  It is not clear whether she would have welcomed much probing beneath her dazzling lacquered surface, for Diana Vreeland was a very private person. “Keep your secret,” she once said. “That’s your power over others.” On the other hand she greatly enjoyed recognition when it finally came to her, particularly if it arrived unexpectedly. It was sweetest of all when it enabled her to get the better of her most critical friend, Jerome Zipkin. Jerry Zipkin was a celebrated man-about-town in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, best known for being Nancy Reagan’s “walker” after she became first lady in 1981. He was famous for his ability to undermine his fragile society-lady friends and reduce them to tears. But he underestimated Diana’s standing in the world of fashion, not to mention one of her abiding characteristics: the ability to jump, in just a few seconds, from the negative to the positive while keeping an open mind about the latest trend, before swooping triumphantly to a perspective that was all her own:

  I want to tell you that a few years ago Jerry took me down to Palm Beach, which at that point, I knew about as well as I know Bloomingdale’s, not having been there in 40 years, and the first thing we do is tour Worth Avenue. . . .

  “You haven’t seen anything yet,” he said. “I’m going to take you to a place where I doubt you’ll get in.”