Vreeland

Diana Vreeland (1903-1989). American journalist. Diana Dalziel was born and raised in Paris at the turn of the century by very sociable American parents. She married Reed Vreeland, a American banker with whom she had two children. They spent the first years of their marriage in Europe. They were both handsome, intelligent, and elegant, and they led an intense social life. These were the years of Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s the beautiful and the damned. When they returned to America in 1936, Carmel Snow, then the editor at Harper’s Bazaar, impressed by Diana’s original elegance, offered her a job at the prestigious magazine. And so, at the age of 33, she began her career in the field of fashion that would make her one of the most famous people on the planet. She would never arrive in the office before noon, but by 8 in the morning she was already on the phone with the entire editorial staff by phone, from her bathtub. Her audacious and sophisticated column, Why Don’t You? in which she would give advice, often patently absurd advice, to middle-class American women (wash your hair with champagne or sleep in a Chinese bed), actually constituted a subtle and highly intelligent idea: it was a way offering, in the heart of the Great Depression, a reassuring sense of continuity. In 1962 she became the editor-in-chief of Vogue and, as her first official act, she had the walls of her office painted bright red, her favorite color, then she completely modified her own physical appearance, and then finally hurled herself headfirst into the work of remaking the magazine. Diana had understood that times had changed, and that the way people dressed needed to take its inspiration from the street, and that the monthly should open up to an array of more relevant and up-to-date contents. She chose for this “youth-quake,” as she described it with a newly coined term, a number of models with unusual forms of beauty, such as Veruschka, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, while such exotic landscapes as Turkey, Libya, or Israels served as the backgrounds for their clothing. She was never a fashion journalist, but she dictated fashion. In 1971 she resigned from Vogue to become a special consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum where, for fifteen years she organized sensational exhibitions: among them, The World of Balenciaga; Yves Saint-Laurent 25 Years of Creativity; The Glory of Russian Costume. When she died, The New York Times ran the news on the front page, calling her “a legend.” In 1994, the Metropolitan Musem recalled her life with a major retrospective show.