Saturday, March 09, 2013

Diana Vreeland: Empress of Fashion by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, review

Pink silk gowns, cabochon emeralds, hair rinsed in champagne – Diana Vreeland was a woman who knew how to live, says Helen Brown, reviewing Amanda Mackenzie Stuart's new book. 

Diana Vreeland: intelligent productiveness
Diana Vreeland: intelligent productiveness Photo: RJ Horst
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

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