Table Of ContentEmpress 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.”
D
iana 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
