Vreeland, Diana (1903–1989)

Parisian-born fashion icon, style setter, and innovative editor of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar , who created the annual extravagant fashion exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as consultant to its Costume Institute. Born Diana Dalziel in Paris on July 29, 1903; died at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City on August 22, 1989, of a heart attack; daughter of Frederick Y. Dalziel (a Scottish stockbroker) and Emily Key (Hoffman) Dalziel (an American socialite); had apparently little formal education, aside from the Brearley School in New York City for a few months, and ballet classes with Russian choreographer Michel Fokine; married T. Reed Vreeland (a banker), in 1924 (died 1966); children: Thomas R. Vreeland, Jr. (who became an architect in California); Frederick Vreeland (who entered the diplomatic service and served as American ambassador to Morocco); grandchildren: Alexander Vreeland (U.S. director of marketing for Giorgio Armani).

Awards:

various, including Council of American Fashion Designers Salute for her work at the Metropolitan Museum; chevalier of the French National Order of Merit; and honors from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Italian fashion industry.

As World War I approached, family left Paris for New York (1914); made her debut (1922); following marriage in New York City, lived in Albany where husband was a banker trainee (1924–28); moved to Europe; briefly ran an exclusive lingerie shop in London; returned to U.S. (1936); began writing a column for Harper's Bazaar, "Why Don't You" (1937); was fashion editor of Harper's (1937–62); moved to Vogue as fashion editor (1962), became editor-in-chief (1963); dismissed from Vogue (1971); took four-month hiatus and traveled to Europe; became consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1972), producing a range of costume exhibitions for 14 years.

Selected writings:

Allure (Doubleday, 1980); (memoirs) D.V. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).

"I want this place to look like a garden, but a garden in hell," said Diana Vreeland, when she invited her friend and decorator Billy Baldwin to transform her Park Avenue apartment. She wanted it red, her favorite color: "It makes all other colors beautiful." Notes art historian Mario Praz, if "the surroundings become a museum of the soul," then Vreeland's apartment was her own theatrical backdrop; it remained unchanged for more than 30 years. An invitation to dinner at her home, where she served simple American food along with her anecdotes and distinctive ideas, was prized. Although Vreeland's relatively small apartment on Park Avenue could accommodate only about eight for dinner, the illusion was luxurious. Her guests were a range of famous faces, from entertainment superstar Mick Jagger to Jacqueline Kennedy . Candles and incense were always burning, while her numerous bibelots personalized the room: photos of friends, schools of brass fish, a Zuolaga scene of Easter Sunday in Seville which was a gift from her husband, porcelain leopards, horn snuffboxes from Scotland, seascapes of shells, needlepoint pillows she made herself, a plaster cast of her mother, her favorite portrait by William Acton, and more. Her material things, though not of great monetary value, had style and personal significance. "She wanted it to seem as though hers was a home of leisure—the flowers, pillows, scents, objects—but in fact, everything was obsessively organized," noted her friend and colleague Katell le Bourhis .

Her scarlet office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute during her years there as a special consultant reflected the same kind of underlying discipline. After her death, a staff memorandum was featured in a 1993 show commemorating Vreeland. Among the list of what her red oilcloth-covered table must "ALWAYS HAVE" were "green or brown pencils in pencil holders," including "Thuro Black editorial pencils—these are hard to get" and a carton of Lucky Strikes. There was a diagram detailing exactly how her 1:30 pm lunch table should be set, with assigned places for her yellow raisins, cigarettes and lighter, bottle of scotch, and black coffee.

Vreeland, whose life bridged more than 80 years of cultural change, was a visionary, famous for her aphorisms, discourse, and mode of dress. She became an icon in the world of fashion who transcended her position as a fashion editor to influence more than half a century of attitude and style. She also propelled fashion into the forefront of culture through her popular fashion extravaganzas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. When she died in 1989, Newsweek called her, "The seismograph of chic … [whose] most famous creation turned out to be herself."

Vreeland's critics alluded to Gertrude Stein 's "Very interesting, if true" to characterize her memoirs, D.V. In the book, she wrote that her parents, who met in Paris, were part of the transition between the formal Edwardian era and the modern world. Her Scottish father Frederick Y. Dalziel was a "continental Englishman"—a stockbroker who never made money. Even so, the family lived well in Paris where Diana was born in 1903.

Her childhood harbored some family problems, which Vreeland characteristically did not dwell on. The Dalziels, who lived for pleasure, displayed little emotion. Her mother Emily Key Hoffman was a beautiful American socialite who had numerous lovers. Diana, who emulated Emily's sense of drama, loved dancing, especially the tango, and "adored" dressing and making up to go out. As a young woman, Vreeland covered her upper body with stark white theatrical makeup, reveling in the contrast of makeup and scarlet nails against the background of her escort's black dinner jacket. Later in life, her makeup routine would include those trademark scarlet nails and lipstick, scarlet streaks of rouge on her cheeks, forehead and earlobes. She enjoyed asking her companions, "Is it Kabuki enough?" (Japanese Kabuki theater was among her loves.) "Performance is all I cared about as a child," she said, "and it's all I care about now. I don't go to see a great play, I go to see a great interpreter."

According to her memoirs, Vreeland's education consisted of observation; she had very little formal schooling. Most days, she and her sister would go to the Bois de Boulogne to play; Wednesdays, she went to the Louvre with her grandmother's secretary. In the Paris of her childhood, the women of the demimonde, the beautiful actresses and mistresses of royalty and the rich, were the great personalities. Seeing their clothes in the park stimulated her lifelong passion for fashion.

Her other passion was horses. In 1914, the Dalziels moved to New York to escape World War I. When there was an outbreak of infantile paralysis in the East, she and her sister were sent to Cody, Wyoming, where Vreeland claimed she learned to ride from Buffalo Bill Cody. In New York, her formal education consisted of several months at the exclusive Brearley School for Girls. She also studied ballet with Russian masters, including choreographer Michel Fokine, and developed a discipline which would later serve her well.

Two years after making her debut in 1922, she met T. Reed Vreeland, a handsome Yale graduate, while on vacation in Saratoga, New York. Diana admired his glamour and professed she only felt comfortable about her looks after she married. Days before the ceremony in 1924, a scandal involving her mother and a lover appeared in the newspaper, and on the wedding day the guests did not arrive because her mother had forgotten to mail the invitations. The newlyweds moved to Albany, where Reed had a job as a bank trainee, and their first child Thomas was born. The family then moved to Europe when Reed was hired by a bank in London, and Diana gave birth to her second son Frederick.

For Vreeland, who educated herself by reading, books were a major influence; the family read aloud together and eventually amassed several thousand volumes. While in London, she ran a custom lingerie business where she first met Wallis Warfield Simpson, the future Duchess of Windsor , as a customer. Like Diana's father, her husband was not a successful capitalist. Though he and Diana never spoke of business, they managed to live luxuriously and travel to offbeat places in a Bugatti, accompanied by a housemaid and a chauffeur. "When I lived in London," she told New York Magazine, "if you were sufficiently well-born and well known, you could mount bills forever." The Vreelands were a popular couple in the social whirl of London and Paris. Appearing everywhere as a fashionable young woman, Diana was handed complimentary couture clothing—a prix jeune fille—from the top designers before the war.

As a lover of haute couture, after their return to New York in 1936, Vreeland missed Europe, which was to be always a more comfortable environment for her. Notes fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert , "In Europe, the great style setters were never beauties. Diana knew that she fit into that tradition." One night in New York, Carmel Snow , the Harper's Bazaar editor who made Harper's the most innovative fashion magazine of its time, noticed Vreeland dancing at the St. Regis, wearing a white laCECoco Chanel dress with a bolero jacket and red roses in her hair. Her flair caught Snow's eye, and she was invited to write a column for the magazine despite her protest that she lacked experience. Vreeland needed the income, and Snow needed a new editor who traveled in international society. In summer 1936, Vreeland's "Why Don't You" column debuted in Harper's Bazaar, providing fantasy in the midst of hard economic times. Vreeland remembered it as frivolous, but the column was widely read. "Why don't you wash your blond child's hair in dead champagne to keep it gold, as they do in France?" she'd ask. Vreeland was flattered when humorist S.J. Perelman parodied the column in The New Yorker.

The following year, she was promoted to fashion editor, a position that required an amalgam of talents—film director, propmaster, seamstress, and beautician. On a visit to the museum of Pompeii, she observed the figures of a woman and her slave making love preserved in volcanic ash. Vreeland copied the slave's footwear: a strap between the toes, thin layers of leather for a sole, and a strap around the ankle attached to the heel. Voilà: the thonged sandal.

Diana Vreeland">

Of course, you understand, I'm looking for the most farfetched perfection.

—Diana Vreeland

From the magazine's art director Alexey Brodovitch, she learned to develop a photo spread of contrasting scale by opposing two pictures. Vreeland incorporated the uncommon images of photographers like Man Ray and Richard Avedon, and she developed a long working relationship with Louise Dahl-Wolfe , who photographed American fashion outdoors. When the war cut off fashion news from Paris, American designers were inspired by Vreeland's imagination. But when Snow retired in 1958, she alerted the publisher, the Hearst organization, that Vreeland did not have the discipline and judgment to be editor-in-chief. Snow's niece, Nancy White , was named her successor, and Vreeland stayed on for four more years. During her 28-year career at Harper's Bazaar, she earned less than $20,000 annually. In 1962, when Vogue courted her with money and, wrote Vreeland, "an endless expense account and Europe whenever I want to go," she became Vogue's fashion editor.

Addressed by her staff as Mrs. Vreeland (her friends called her Dee-Ann), she proceeded to remake Vogue in her own image, which meant shaking up the status quo and creating friction with some of the staff. "In many ways, she acted like a brilliant theatrical producer," recalled Alexander Liberman, editorial director of Condé Nast publications. "She visualized Vogue as theater." When editor Jessica Daves retired angrily, Vreeland's name replaced hers as editor-in-chief on the January 1963 Vogue masthead. Vreeland's style was an intrinsic part of her persona. "What she presented was not who she was," wrote Avedon. "Diana lived for imagination ruled by discipline." At Vogue, she wore a simple "uniform" of black sweater, beige skirt, and comfortable, ankle-strap low-heel sandals. She loved aristocratic luxury of earlier periods, and she also embraced the avant-garde. After years of wearing her hair in a snood, she opted for a jet-black helmeted mane. Maintenance in all things was key: an early enthusiast for physical fitness, she was sleekly groomed and fashionably thin; her many bags and shoes were religiously maintained with daily polishing and waxing by her maid. Described by Cecil Beaton as an "authoritative crane … [who] walked like a ballet dancer," Vreeland was noted by her collaborator on Allure, Christopher Hemphill, for a voice which "almost allows one to see the italics she speaks in[;] her choice of words is even more arresting than her delivery. She naturally introduces foreign words into conversation" and "gives the impression of inventing her own syntax as she goes along." For example, she broke down corduroy into its original components—cord du roi. Vreeland became famous for her observations—like "Peanut butter is the greatest invention since Christianity," or "Pink is the navy blue of India."

With a credo of "Give them what they never knew they wanted," Vreeland sent her photographers and models to locations around the world for the exotic images that transformed fashion journalism. To describe her vision of the magazine's essence to Kate Lloyd , her assistant features editor, Vreeland used the phrase "Vogue is the myth of the next reality." Though in her 60s when she came to the magazine (her colleagues thought of her as years younger), she understood the times—the 1960s youth culture, rock 'n' roll, John F. Kennedy's presidency, and the Vietnam War. In a world of material affluence, she not only reported on the latest fashion news but also influenced it. Vreeland coined the word "youthquake" and welcomed miniskirts and bikinis, "the biggest thing since the atom bomb." Young people were creating their own styles, in dress and behavior, and Vreeland's enthusiasm for this youth movement was reflected in the pages of Vogue. For Vreeland, Mick Jagger was "the creature of the '60s," while the pouty French actress Brigitte Bardot represented the '50s: "Her lips made Mick Jagger's lips possible," she wrote in Allure. She found the perfect model for the bikini, the German countess Veruschka . When Veruschka wanted her name mentioned in Vogue, Vreeland agreed, launching the cult of celebrity-models. She discovered Twiggy , used women of color, and moved beyond conventional beauty by using women with strong features.

During her tenure, she highlighted the work of photographers such as Avedon, Beaton, Irving Penn, and Deborah Turbeville . Avedon worked with her at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue for over 40 years, and paid her high tribute: "Vreeland invented the fashion photographer." Photographers, who learned not to take what she said literally and to understand her idiosyncratic code, gave her the imaginative pictures she wanted. The paparazzi style—the snapshot that caught the unintended and revealed personality—fascinated Vreeland. "Laying out a beautiful picture in a beautiful way is a bloody bore. I think you've got to blow it right across the page and on the side, crop it, cut it in half, combine it with something else … do something with it." A perfectionist, she worked closely with photographers, supervising reshoots until she was satisfied. Unprecedented composite photos were used to create the perfect whole: legs, arms, torsos were mixed and matched. Artifice for dramatic effect was a hallmark of her style.

While Vreeland's years at Vogue were that of an unmistakable innovator, Liberman notes that she was an uncontrollable force at the magazine, and the planning required to run the publication was not there. As the 1970s ushered in feminism and a new austerity in light of economic recession, her extremes—editorial and financial

—wereseen to be getting out of hand. Vreeland had alienated many Seventh Avenue designers by featuring fashions that were not practical or available in stores. They felt that Vogue needed redirection, and in 1971 Vreeland was dismissed. Associate editor Grace Mirabella became editor-in-chief of the publication.

Characteristically, Vreeland forged ahead with stoicism. After her husband's death of cancer in 1966, she had continued her lavish lifestyle and now needed to work. Her friend, Metropolitan Museum curator Thomas Rousseau, suggested to the museum director, Thomas Hoving, that Vreeland become a special consultant to the Met's Costume Institute; her salary would be contributed by a number of friends. Although that financial arrangement did not materialize, Vreeland signed on in 1972 and more than proved her worth in revitalizing the institute, a primarily scholarly wing of the museum, giving it high visibility. Her annual exhibits, beginning in 1973, attracted hundreds of thousands of new visitors to the Metropolitan and made it a focal point for the Beautiful People, the monied upper class who were her friends, bringing in new patrons and thousands of dollars in donations. Her involvement was timely: Vreeland's spectaculars supported a new trend in the museum world—commercialization and expansion to keep them viable, including glittering fund-raising events, blockbuster exhibits, and retail shops. For 14 years, she would conceive a range of annual costume spectaculars which strengthened her position as stylemaker extraordinaire.

Although Vreeland knew what would sell to the public and patrons, not everyone was happy with her performance. Her selective historical view was solely from the standpoint of style and fashion, which concerned some museum officials; her outrageous bills, accumulated during scouting trips for costumes around the world, did not endear her to the financial powers at the museum; and she angered some of the curatorial staff when she called on her socially prominent and designer friends to critique an exhibit prior to opening.

During the 1980s—the "Me Decade" with its newly rich elite seeking status through cultural affiliation and a Reagan presidency that garnered criticism for its sense of aristocracy and fantasy—some critical voices were raised about corporate sponsorship of Vreeland's exhibitions and their content. Luxury, opulence, and glamour—an emphasis on surface over substance—were a constant, no matter what the period or subject. Richard Martin and Harold Koda, curators of her own 1993 tribute at the Costume Institute, offered another interpretation in the exhibition catalogue. Unlike the traditional museological approach of a curator, Vreeland worked more like the editor she was, interpreting costume, creating elements of mystery and magic, and employing a nonchronological, subjective late-20th-century view of history.

From the start, Vreeland's exhibitions reflected her experience with fashion photography. In her first show, which featured the work of haute couture designer Cristobal Balenciaga, she animated the mannequins—a figure in a flamenco dress appeared to be dancing—and she used lighting like a studio photographer, employing shadows to form a path through the gallery. Some subsequent shows would include period posters and paintings, providing background to enhance the costumes. Borrowing works from some curators to satisfy this styling, however, conflicted with their more academic approach.

Many of Vreeland's exhibitions generated criticism for various reasons, from their suitability to their historical accuracy, but this did not stop her from attracting great numbers of museumgoers. Among her spectaculars were "Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design" (1974), for which the inclusion of Barbra Streisand 's costume for the then-unreleased film Funny Girl raised questions; "The Glory of the Russian Costume" (1976), with a catalogue written by Vreeland's friend, Jacqueline Kennedy (both women were instrumental in negotiating with the government of the Soviet Union to lend costumes and accoutrements; asked by government functionaries her opinion of the Soviet Union, Vreeland lauded Russian cheekbones and the simplicity of Russian dress); and "The Manchu Dragon: Costumes of China, the Ch'ing Dynasty," which drew criticism from historian Deborah Silverman who claimed that the exhibit projected a fantasy of wealth, power and leisure within a fashion-show environment, without regard for historical accuracy or context.

"The Eighteenth Century Woman" (1981) focused on women's luxurious dress, but ignored contemporary social criticism of such extravagance in France before the Revolution and failed to explain the meaning of the revolutionary dress code of sans-culottes, the common man's trousers versus the aristocrat's knee breeches. "The Belle Epoque" (1982), for all its beauty and influence on designers and perfume manufacturers, was a misnomer; it was not a French golden age, but a fin de siècle, a period of decline and political and social upheaval to end the century. The focus was on women who had intrigued Vreeland from childhood—demimondaines, actresses, and mistresses who derived their own power from powerful men. Vreeland featured women's cycling outfits as sportswear, but gave no indication that this was controversial clothing that symbolized the new freedom and mobility of women.

Glamorous fund-raising events launched each exhibit and the crowds continued to pour in, but the critics were vigilant. Silverman noted that particular themes were apparent in Vreeland's period exhibits: elites about to collapse, and the power of women derived from their appearance and seduction rather than their intelligence.

Vreeland's "Twenty-five Years of Yves Saint Laurent" (1983) was the first museum tribute to a living designer, and her most obviously commercial exhibit, "Man and the Horse" (1984), celebrated her lifelong equestrian passion. The latter provided its sponsor, Ralph Lauren, with a unique advertising and marketing opportunity for his $350,000 grant. The generous grant enabled Lauren's name and logo to appear on everything from the Costume Institute's benefit invitations to the exhibit gallery walls. Lauren's designs, criticized as lacking in originality, would be elevated by association with the museum. Admiring the "integrity of man and the beautiful beast," Vreeland used the precision and chic related to horsemanship as components in her exhibit. In acknowledgment of her childhood adventure out West, she included Buffalo Bill Cody's jacket.

By 1983, Vreeland's eyesight had grown weaker and she was becoming frail. During preparation time for "Royal India," which was scheduled to open in December 1985, she communicated mostly by phone and came to work infrequently. Even in a wheelchair, she wore shoes that grabbed attention, black slippers with large 18th-century rosettes. Vreeland told Veruschka that she didn't need to see anything; she could visualize the show down to its minute details. Veruschka was so fascinated by Vreeland's descriptions that she forgot that Vreeland was nearly blind. In 1985, the Council of American Fashion Designers lauded Vreeland for her contribution to fashion as art and bringing it to such a vast public. She died of cancer four years later, on April 22, 1989, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

Vreeland was a hard-to-identify, charismatic, obsessive visionary. Critics questioned her artifice, choice of surface over substance, and successful elevation of fashion as art, tempered by subjectivity instead of historical context. In the catalogue for "Diana Vreeland: Immoderate Style" (1993), the Metropolitan Costume Institute's own tribute to Vreeland, she has the last word on style: "The energy of imagination, deliberation, and invention, which falls into a natural rhythm totally one's own, maintained by innate discipline and a keen sense of pleasure. These are the ingredients of style."

sources:

Avedon, Richard. "In Memorium; Diana Vreeland," in Vanity Fair. January 1990, p. 158.

Baldwin, Billy, with Michael Gardine. Billy Baldwin: An Autobiography. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1985, pp. 244–245.

Beaton, Cecil. The Glass of Fashion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954, pp. 359–361.

Collins, Amy Fine. "The Cult of Diana," in Vanity Fair. November 1992, pp. 177–190.

Curtis, Charlotte. "Sort of an Empress-of-Fashion Thing," in The New York Times. June 17, 1984, p. 13.

Darnton, Nina. "Museums of Modern Garb," in Newsweek. February 27, 1989, p. 78.

Kanfer, Stefan. "Madame de Style," in The New Republic. July 30, 1984, pp. 37–40.

Koenig, Rhoda. "The Voice of the Peacock," in New York Magazine. June 4, 1984, pp. 75–76.

Kornbluth, Jesse. "The Empress of Clothes," in New York Magazine. November 29, 1982, pp. 30–36.

Langway, Lynn, with Lisa Whitman. "High Priestess of 'Allure,'" in Newsweek. September 22, 1980, pp. 51–52.

Martin, Richard, and Harold Koda. Diana Vreeland: Immoderate Style. NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993.

McGuigan, Cathleen. "The Divine Madame V," in Newsweek. September 4, 1989, p. 62.

Morris, Bernadine. "Celebrating the Flair that was Vreeland," in The New York Times. December 7, 1993, p. B14.

——. "Diana Vreeland, Editor, Dies; Voice of Fashion for Decades," in The New York Times. August 23, 1989, p. 5.

Mullarkey, Maureen. "Fake It! Fake It!," in The Nation. November 1, 1986, pp. 437–440.

Storr, Robert. "Unmaking History at the Costume Institute," in Art in America. February 1987, pp. 15–23.

Talley, André Leon. "Bridled Passion," in Vogue. December 1984, pp. 358–405.

——. "Lady in Red," in House & Garden. May 1989 p. 216.

Vogel, Carol. "Vreeland's Touches," in The New York Times. April 1, 1990, pp. 61–63.

Vreeland, Diana. D.V. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

——, and Christopher Hemphill. Allure. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980.

related media:

Allure (27 min. sound recording), adapted from the book by Diana Vreeland and Christopher Hemphill, produced and recorded by Matthew Nast under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; first performed January 1982.

Funny Face (color film, 103 min.), starring Audrey Hepburn , Fred Astaire, and Kay Thompson ; directed by Stanley Donen, 1957 (Astaire's role is based on photographer Richard Avedon, who is credited as visual consultant; as a magazine editor, Kay Thompson ["Think pink"] satirizes Vreeland).

Blowup (color film, 111 min.), starring Vanessa Redgrave , David Hemmings, Sarah Miles, Veruschka; music by Herbie Hancock; directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966.

Laurie Norris , freelance writer, New York, New York