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5.0 out of 5 stars
She Was the REAL Deal, Feb 8 2003
So it's come to this: The New York Times wrote some months back of a hot designer who got a summons from Vogue--yes, Vogue, of all magazines!--at a time when a shot of publicity would have done him a lot of good. The deal fell through. The designer was willing to co-operate, but only up to a point. He just couldn't bring himself to give the magazine his "signature" outfit. No; that was too much--he would not give his signature creation to what he called "that comic."It was not ever thus, as amply and inspiringly proved by Eleanor Dwight's biography of Diana Vreeland, that grandest of grande dames. Diana Vreeland was a homely girl born into a beautiful family; in fact, her mother once told her, "It's too bad . . . that you are so extremely ugly." Her response was a program of self-improvement. Dwight says "she emulated her classmates in how to dress; she worked on becoming tidy, enlarging her vocabulary, improving her manners." Eventually, having not found the ideal girl to model herself upon, she decided, "I shall be that girl." If her mother exaggerated, it is nevertheless true that Vreeland was definitely not beautiful or even pretty. She was plain at best. But that was merely the surface nature gave her to re-make, and re-make it she did. She made herself original, arresting, witty, slightly madcap and rather amazing. She didn't have mere fashion--she had style, her own sensibility. By the time she took over the top spot at Conde Nast's Vogue, in 1963, she had been many years at Harper's Bazaar, where she had re-invented the job of fashion editor. At Vogue, she re-invented fashion magazines, hiring and nurturing (and occasionally driving crazy) the very best photographers and sending them and models to shoot in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. She also sent astonishing and urgent memos to her staff. One read simply, "Bring me shoes with chains on them." Another said all of the staff should wear bells at the office. Fashion editor Carrie Donovan explains: "You know the sort of bells. Bells little kittens wear so they don't get lost in closets." So they all bought and wore little bells immediately and, Donovan says, "By the time she came in, we were all walking around with bells on. She pretended she didn't notice anything." She <did> appear to notice everything else and to express it inimitably: "Pink is the navy blue of India! The best thing about London is Paris! Without emotion there is no beauty! The only real elegance is in the mind. If you've got that, the rest comes from it. Never fear being vulgar, just boring." She did not shrink from spending Conde Nast's money, though in time Conde Nast did, and in 1971 she was abruptly fired. Down but hardly out, she went on to take on and take over the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. She re-invented that, too. Finally, in 1989 and after a long illness, she--well, it's impossible to say that she died. Ordinary people die. Vreeland simply passed into legend, where she can be found today. In this book and in the literally hundreds of websites that spring up if you type her name into Google. Through Eleanor Dwight's excellent writing, Vreeland comes alive in this book, and a fresh, clean breeze blows through it with the help of hundreds of photos that express what Vreeland was all about: beauty, style, elegance, allure. The real stuff--not the plated. If that's what you want, buy this book. If, for some perverse reason, you want the opposite--want mere fashion, sullen faces, heroine chic and such--then go to a newsstand and get "that comic."
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