Diana Vreeland was the apotheosis of the fashion editor. After she moved to New York in the mid-1930s and, needing money, took a job as a columnist at Harper’s Bazaar, the society girl transformed herself into an in-crowd ringmaster and then a public spectacle after she was named editor-in-chief of Vogue in 1963.
The whip-smart mind, devil-may-care whimsy, explosive imagination and sheer fashion genius that were hers are the heart of “Memos: The Vogue Years,” a coffee-table collection of her dictated, typed and carbon-copied, felt-tip-annotated directives to the staff. It is the latest addition to the Vreelandiana shelf, this time from her grandson Alexander, who manages her estate and edited the book.
He and his wife Lisa, creator of the 2011 Vreeland book and documentary, “The Eye Has to Travel,” have turned Nonino, as Alexander knew her, recognized the persistence of her appeal and have turned her legacy into a cottage industry.
If you are a lover of fashion, you need this book. But the same is true if you love to hate fashion and its menagerie of human grotesqueries. For the so-ugly-she-was-stunning Vreeland was the grandest grotesque of all. She was an original, sui generis. All who have followed — from the hooting Carrie Donovan to the oversized Andre Leon Talley, to the be-shaded Anna Wintour — pale in comparison. As fashion magazines have evolved into in-house newsletters for the garment and entertainment industries and their editors into reality-show cartoon characters, the need for a Vreeland has endured and kept her relevant, if only as a reminder of what’s been lost.
Memos presents itself as a sort of management manual, illustrating what it calls her unique leadership style and “genius for inspiring creative people.” But it’s really an exhibition of the whirlwind DV and the exuberance with which she plunged into the depths of superficiality.
“For goodness sake, beware of curls,” Vreeland wrote in February 1967. “We are not looking for endless variety — we are looking for fashion. Also, beware of little-girl gestures — fingers in the mouth and all that . . . as they are terribly, terribly vulgar.”
Six months later, she returned to the subject. “Rethink these terrible looking curls next to the face,” she ordered. “We agreed long ago they look dipped in salad oil . . . they also look like poor white trash people. . . with their broken hair, no hairdresser, no money, no vitality — and the will to live is gone.”
It’s different for Vreeland’s rich. “Living easily in grand hotels and the security of Swiss banks leaves one free from the stupid struggle of pleasing anyone but oneself,” she wrote in 1967.
Many of the memos in the book are concerned with the expected: silhouettes (“Would you all take trouble to keep the sleeves high and a long narrow arm . . .”), seasonal colors (“Let’s promote grey. For everything . . . Greys from gunmetal, smokey to pink Quaker greys”), impractical fabric (“All of you remember a crepe shirt has to go to the cleaners”), feet (she is Tarantinoesque in her devotion), and pearls (“Please alert Kenneth Lane that we are going to need a great deal of them”).
But there are also serious matters at hand. In 1969, Vreeland wanted passamenterie belts. “Go to the Tunisian and Moroccan shops,” she directed Bibi Winkelhorn, her accessories editor. “Let’s give the Arabs a boost, they are very down in the mouth because of the war.” That would be the Six-Day War against Israel.
Often, the famous sought Vogue’s attention. Cher’s “dream is to be in high fashion,” Vreeland observed in 1968, before warning, “wash her face” because her “thick opaque” makeup wouldn’t photograph well. She was more respectful of the young Candy Bergen. “Her house she says is the most fascinating house in the world,” Vreeland wrote in 1970. “She says [her bedroom] is like a children’s dream of a fairy-tale princess’s bedroom . . . She is delighted to ride her Arab horse for us.”
At other times the roles reversed. “Very secretly and through strange sources, I have heard that you are going to give a very beautiful party,” Vreeland wrote in 1969 to Baron Alexis de Rede in Paris, importuning him to allow Vogue to cover it. “I think your apartment is the most beautiful thing in the world.”
No surprise that she told her editors in 1969 that “the look of povery [sic] is now démodé and makes us sad.”
No doubt, she made Cecil Beaton chortle when, in the run-up to a 1964 photo session with the Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, she ended her letter, “. . . And wouldn’t it be terrible if she behaved like a mule?” A year later, when he was set to shoot a British aristocrat, she told Beaton, “Naturally include the children . . . as you are such a wow at photographing very small English children in very large rooms . . .”
Real life rarely intrudes, as fashion was a cure for that depressing reality. Vreeland’s greatest contribution to society may be as a reminder of the enduring value of its frivolity.
“No war or pestilence in history has ever stopped fashion and manners in dress from progressing and changing,” she wrote in 1969 to college student seeking to do a paper on her. “It is an indomitable force to adorn and to please, to change and create.”
That could have easily served as her obituary. Or this, about the way her red DV signature was tilted by Vogue’s art director, Priscilla Peck. “Priscilla is a tilter . . .” Vreeland wrote. “I don’t tilt.” Tilted, tilter and tilt are all underlined in red.
Michael Gross is the author of the forthcoming book “House of Outrageous Fortune” (Atria). His next is on fashion photography.