In March 1936, Harper’s Bazaar launched a column by a stylish
32-year-old member of the new international elite. A list of suggestions for
fashionable living, Diana Vreeland’s “Why Don’t You…?” offered the magazine’s
middle-class readers an absurd fantasy of wealth and creativity. “Why Don’t
You…” she wrote, “give the wife of your favourite band leader an entire jazz
band made of tiny bancette diamonds and cabochon emeralds in the form of a
bracelet from Marcus?” Why not “rinse your blond child’s hair in dead champagne
to keep its gold, as they do in France?”
So far so fun. Except Vreeland was so dazzled by surfaces that she was blind
to the dangers of fascism: she advised readers to “wear bare knees and long
white knitted socks as Unity Mitford does when she takes tea with Hitler at the
Carlton in Munich”.
The satirists of the day couldn’t resist. The New Yorker’s 1937 parody
ran: “Why Don’t You… give the first maid a black eye every morning before
grapefruit? The time it takes for the bruise to spread is negligible, and the
effect is startling against dull-gold breakfast room drapes.”
Vreeland knew, on some level, that her column was absurd. But the woman who
would go on to become editor-in-chief at American Vogue from 1963-1971
was passionate about inspiring her readers, “insisting on people using
their imaginations, insisting on an idea of luxury”. And Amanda Mackenzie
Stuart’s fascinating new biography reveals her as a woman who embodied the best
and worst of fashion: its ability to delight and inspire as well as to dictate
and discriminate.
Born in 1902, Diana Vreeland was descended from a prominent American family
on her mother’s side. Her dashing English father was a social-climbing
self-invention: the son of a General Post Office employee who cultivated an
aristocratic manner after his advantageous marriage admitted him to New York’s
“Four Hundred” – named for the capacity of Nancy Astor’s ballroom. Young Diana
was a disappointment to her glamorous mother. With a large nose, heavy jaw and
slight astigmatism, she was not conventionally pretty and had a temper. It
didn’t help that her younger sister was a violet-eyed stunner.
Vreeland’s previous biographer, Eleanor Dwight, says that her career
benefited from a “deep need to wave her wand and transform the ordinary and the
flawed into the mesmerisingly beautiful. And one day, rather than being the
object of criticism by her classmates and mother, Diana, the powerful fashion
editor, would decide who was and wasn’t beautiful.” But Mackenzie Stuart is more
alive to the complexities of her subject and gives more credit to her willpower,
optimism and flair.
She quotes a remarkable passage from her subject’s diary, which sees the 14-year-old Vreeland face herself in the mirror and resolve to become a fascinating, sophisticated and popular girl. If this marked the beginning of the self-mythologising, it also worked. After her coming-out party in 1922 the press described her as one of the season’s most attractive debutantes. Two years later, she cemented her position by marrying Reed Vreeland, the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
By the time she came to work at Harper’s Bazaar, the couple was part of a cosmopolitan set in which bohemian artists clinked cocktail glasses with bored millionaires and Vreeland’s unique eye for colour had made her a tastemaker. Her career in fashion journalism would see her redefine beauty, celebrating the distinctive features of Lauren Bacall and Barbra Streisand.
She hated fashion that “fussed and trussed” and promoted clean lines, freedom of movement and clothes with “breezes in their seams”. She thrilled at the dressing-up-box individualism of the Sixties but fell foul of a Seventies feminism she did not understand.
Ending her career with some blockbuster fashion exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she died in 1989, believing that women of the 21st century would take four baths a day and paint themselves “like heathen idols”, “all for beauty and intelligent productiveness”. Her final words were: “Don’t stop the music. Keep dancing.”
Full review
She quotes a remarkable passage from her subject’s diary, which sees the 14-year-old Vreeland face herself in the mirror and resolve to become a fascinating, sophisticated and popular girl. If this marked the beginning of the self-mythologising, it also worked. After her coming-out party in 1922 the press described her as one of the season’s most attractive debutantes. Two years later, she cemented her position by marrying Reed Vreeland, the most beautiful man she had ever seen.
By the time she came to work at Harper’s Bazaar, the couple was part of a cosmopolitan set in which bohemian artists clinked cocktail glasses with bored millionaires and Vreeland’s unique eye for colour had made her a tastemaker. Her career in fashion journalism would see her redefine beauty, celebrating the distinctive features of Lauren Bacall and Barbra Streisand.
She hated fashion that “fussed and trussed” and promoted clean lines, freedom of movement and clothes with “breezes in their seams”. She thrilled at the dressing-up-box individualism of the Sixties but fell foul of a Seventies feminism she did not understand.
Ending her career with some blockbuster fashion exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she died in 1989, believing that women of the 21st century would take four baths a day and paint themselves “like heathen idols”, “all for beauty and intelligent productiveness”. Her final words were: “Don’t stop the music. Keep dancing.”
Full review