Diana Vreeland

by Dwight, Eleanor

• ISBN13: 9780688167387
• ISBN10: 0688167381
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-03
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

In the early 1960s Jackie Kennedy wrote to Diana Vreeland: "you are and always will be my fashion mentor." Vreeland helped the young First Lady create her famous "Jackie look" which was imitated all over America. She had inspired readers of Harper Bazaar''s with her brilliant tips from the mid 1930s to the early ''60s and ran Vogue as editor-in-chief in its most innovative years (1963-1972). Then for thirteen years she organized the hugely successful annual costume history shows at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Known for her flamboyant personality, her striking looks, and impeccable taste, Diana Vreeland changed fashion forever. Now, we can begin to assess her immense contribution in Diana Vreeland. This lavishly illustrated biography includes more than 300 full-color and black and white photographs many from Vreeland''s own family scrapbooks and collection which have never been seen before, of family and friends and the talented people in the fashion world whom she inspired -- designers, models, and celebrities. Diana Vreeland herself was not beautiful. Her appearance was so striking, however, that it revealed nothing of her beginnings as an awkward and difficult child who was born in 1903 into a socially prominent New York family. How she succeeded in transforming herself and developing a brilliant career is chronicled in this fascinating biography by Eleanor Dwight, the author of the highly praised Edith Wharton -- an Extraordinary Life. We see the ambitious ingenue marrying the strikingly handsome Reed Vreeland in 1924, and embarking on a six-year sojourn in England where during frequent trips to Paris she learned how to change herself into a soignee and sophisticated young matron. Vreeland began her fashion career at Harper''s Bazaar in 1936, writing a playful column entitled "Why Don''t You." At the magazine Vreeland thrived, asking questions like "Why don''t you rinse your blond 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?" Vreeland exerted great power over the magazine''s content working with editor-in-chief Carmel Snow and legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. When Snow left Bazaar, Vreeland did not get her job. The fashion world waited in anticipation; surely, Vreeland would move on to something important. In 1963 she became the editor-in-chief of Vogue, a phenomenally powerful position. She transformed Vogue from a ladylike, conventional publication to one incredibly daring and electric. Her sensitivity to the rebellious energy of the sixties and her understanding that fashion was theatre and that she should give readers large doses of fantasy -- "what they never knew they wanted" -- enlivened Vogue. She sparked reader''s imagination by sending leggy, vibrant models to the far corners of the earth to be photographed on the edges of cliffs or in picturesque settings on tropical islands. In Diana Vreeland, we see her in the midst of varied and elite social circles -- from the British aristocracy and literati of her London days, to her glamorous New York and Southampton set, to the talented fashion world of designers, editors and photographers, to her friends in France who lived in villas and chateaus and included the Windsors and Rothschilds, to Andy Warhol''s set of young rebels in the seventies. She fostered the careers of many youthful figures whose talents she immediately spotted including Lauren Bacall, Mary McFadden, Issey Miyake, and Richard Avedon. We see her attending Truman Capote''s famous Black and White Ball to celebrate his book In Cold Blood, where she discovered a beautiful teenager named Penelope Tree whom she made into a famous model. We see her partying with Jack Nicolson, lunching at Warhol''s Factory, and entertaining Garbo for tea. Her social calendar read like a Who''s Who of the New York intelligentsia, and included lunch dates with powerful women like Katherine Graham and Suni Agnelli. We see her enthroned in her famous red apartment, the "Garden in Hell" and strutting through Vogue''s offices terrifying adoring proteges. We see her frustrating the staff of the Metropolitan Museum as she piped music and perfume through the ventilation system to create the exotic atmosphere for her costume shows. Along the way we meet and see the work of photographers like Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Cecil Beaton, and David Bailey, spot her encouraging designers like Oscar de la Renta, Christian Dior, and Elsa Schiaparelli and mothering models like Carmen, Lauren Hutton and Marisa Berenson. Vreeland''s profound influence left its imprint on culture and society. Ultimately, the flamboyance that made Vreeland a success would bring about her sudden downfall at Vogue. But, always able to reinvent herself, she took a position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art''s Costume Institute. While there, she masterminded costume extravaganzas -- drawing on all her knowledge, enthusiasms and using her fabulous eye. Elegant, insightful, strikingly beautiful, and filled with amusing anecdotes, Diana Vreeland reveals the complex, intelligent, and caring woman behind the famous persona. When Diana Vreeland became blind before her death in 1989, she said it was because she had seen so many beautiful things in her life. And when she died she became a legend.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. x
New York Childhood	p. 1
Mrs. Reed Vreeland of Hanover Terrace	p. 23
"Why Don't You?"	p. 43
The War	p. 57
Harper's Bazaar	p. 79
Jackie and Diana	p. 113
Getting Started at Vogue	p. 125
Swinging into the Sixties	p. 143
The High Vogue Years	p. 161
The Last Collections in Paris	p. 175
The Entr'acte	p. 187
The Costume Institute	p. 209
Expeditions to the East	p. 229
Fun in the Seventies	p. 249
The Last Act	p. 263
Epilogue	p. 286
Notes	p. 288
Bibliography	p. 296
Acknowledgments	p. 299
Photograph and Illustration Credits	p. 300
Index	p. 302
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

New York Childhood

When a guest arrived at the Park Avenue apartment of Diana Vreeland, he was greeted in the alcove before the front door by a full-length painting of the glamorous but fey young Diana in a pink cotton gingham and white organdy dress under a green parasol. Once inside, he was surprised by the bright shades of red and objects suggesting a life rich in the present and exciting in the past.

In the spring of 1962, a young reporter with the New York Times came to 550 Park Avenue to interview Diana about her new job as Vogue magazine's top editor. She found that the apartment was like its owner - "outrageous, individual and warm," shocking but appealing with its brilliant hues and fascinating objects.

Carrie Donovan had observed Diana at work and she drew a vivid picture of her older colleague, who at that time was not much known outside the fashion business. As Donovan wrote, inside the industry Vreeland was considered "probably its most colorful personality," viewed with "a combination of awe and astonishment." Designers craved her appearance at their fashion shows: "When she jots down the number or name of a model during a showing, other editors are quick to do the same."

Donovan also described how she looked - her way of walking and her unusual face "with flat planes, brown eyes, a generous mouth and strong, aquiline nose." And, Donovan added, "Mrs. Vreeland's colorful manner of speaking is part of the legend. Fixing the listener with a steady gaze, she rolls out declarative sentences in a booming voice that has an electrifying effect on the people around her. At least one word in every sentence is emphasized."

As readers learned, Diana Vreeland was not only expert at creating beauty and excitement, but also at recognizing the exquisite when she saw it. She transformed herself, her apartment, her magazine pages and later her Costume Institute exhibitions. But how she did this remained mysterious. The casual observer would not know of the hard work and many carefully chosen ingredients that made up Diana Vreeland creations.

As one approaches the story of her life, can one get beyond the carefully choreographed performance, the marvelous details, to learn the whole story - the facts that she would have preferred to leave shrouded in mystery?

Where Diana was born and raised was always a mystery. Once she claimed to have been born in Vladivostok, as she told her grandson Nicky. He was studying filmmaking in the 1970s, and decided his grandmother, "Nonina," was the perfect subject for a profile. He went to the red living room and she emerged from her bedroom all set to perform. She faced the camera and began: "I was born in Vladivostok." Her story unfolded from there. When she had finished, Nicky realized the camera hadn't been working. With apologies he adjusted it and they started again. She began the same way: "I was born in Vladivostok," and she continued her tale to the end, word for word, exactly as before.

Another time she said she was born in the Atlas Mountains - "in a nomad community, accompanied by Berber ululations."

Her appearance gave little away about her true origins. A curious stranger encountering this strange-looking woman in the 1960s might have guessed that she was a White Russian émigré of noble birth, or the daughter of a Cherokee chieftain or Bengali rajah, or as those in New York's garment district suspected - a Sephardic Jew.

The true story of her beginnings is to be found in an album carefully kept by her father. She was born in Paris, at 5 Avenue Bois de Boulogne (Avenue Foch since World War I) in the summer of 1903. Her American mother, Emily Key Hoffman, and her English father, Frederick Young Dalziel (pronounced the Scottish way: dee-YELL), had been married two years earlier, at St. Peter's Church, Eaton Square, the fashionable Anglican church in London's Belgravia. The couple were living in Paris because Fred was working as the French representative for a South African gold mining company.

She didn't stay long in Paris, for on April 2, 1904, the Dalziel family sailed for America on the SS Ryndam . Little Diana, beginning at the age of eight months, spent her childhood in New York City living at several addresses in the East Seventies until she was married twenty years later.

The setting of her early life was determined by her mother's friends, family and social position. On their return from Europe, the Dalziels took their place in the world in which Emily had grown up, a society of the well-to-do and the well connected. Emily knew the Vanderbilts and the Astors, and the staid New York upper-crust society in which money and position mattered above all else. But her New York friends also had flair - they were bohemian and cosmopolitan, at ease in London, Paris and the south of France. As a result, her daughter Diana later saw herself as a member of the leisured class. "She always emphasized that that's where she came from and that's where she stayed," Frecky Vreeland recalled, "that was the link she never broke."

Emily brought home a husband who was neither rich nor socially prominent, qualities valued in her world. Fred was sophisticated and charming, however. As Diana's sister described their father, he "wasn't distinguished in his family but was very good-looking, which is why [my mother] married him." His grandson remembered that "he had a wonderful sense of form, of class and elitism."

Later Diana saw her father's forebears as a great source of pride - brave Scots, whose motto was "I dare." The Dalziels, however, had not lived in Scotland for generations. Frederick Dalziel, Diana's father, grew up in London and spent two years at Brasenose College, Oxford, leaving in 1893 without a degree. In New York he became a stockbroker. Though he lived in New York until his death in 1960 ...

Excerpted from Diana Vreeland by Eleanor Dwight Copyright © 2002 by Eleanor Dwight
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.