Diana Vreeland may have devoted her energies to concocting fashion fantasies for magazine pages, but she surely would be pleased to find her life surveyed in a new coffee table book. ‘I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity,’ she once declared, and it’s reverence, not vanity, that fills the pages of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel.
The book, published by Abrams this autumn, introduces a new generation to the world of DV. A 26-year veteran of US Harper’s Bazaar who went on to edit US Vogue and found the Costume Institute , Vreeland became as famous for the talents she fostered as for her rich, varied career.
‘The sense of fantasy in fashion has been her main contribution,’ says author Lisa Immordino Vreeland, a granddaughter-in-law of the editor. ‘She put it on the pages and she gave this freedom to let people create.’
It was under her tenure that the magazine began to work with photographers like Lillian Bassman, Martin Munkacsi and Richard Avedon. The lush images—Marina Agnelli and her endless neck, Veruschka dancing in the desert, models in conversation across the fold—serve as a primer on the career of a woman Truman Capote called ‘one of the great Americans.’
She was certainly one of the wittiest, coining aphorisms like ‘Pink is the navy blue of India’ and ‘A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika.’ She peppered her pages with ‘Why don’t you...’ exhortations like, ‘...use a gigantic shell instead of a bucket to ice your champagne?’ and ‘...wear violet velvet mittens with everything?’ Her daily memos sent staff scattering to attend to tasks she assigned before even rising from bed.
It’s this zip and immediacy that leads Immordino Vreeland liken Vreeland to an early blogger.
‘She was blogging before anyone else was when she was doing those memos,’ Immordino Vreeland says. ‘It really took a whole new energy to the magazines.... A big reason for doing a project like this is to make people look back and see that she was unbelievably modern.’
Along with the book, Immordino Vreeland produced a full-length documentary film and an exhibition for Venice’s Museo Fortuny, both coming in 2012. She said that what struck her most as she interviewed past Vreeland colleagues for the projects was that they remembered her not only for her modernity and excessive suggestions, but for her generosity of spirit and humour.
‘She didn’t take herself too seriously,’ Immordino Vreeland said. ‘There’s this one saying she had, which was, “It’s not about the dress you wear, it’s about the life you lead in the dress.”’
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