Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Diana left Dongan Hall in June 1921, and Emily returned from Africa shortly afterward to preside over her debut, soon after Diana’s eighteenth birthday on September 29. There was no question that finding a husband should not be Diana’s next step; and the purpose of the debutante season was, of course, to bring together young women and men from the right background in a marriage market. The season began out of town with an annual ball for one hundred debutantes at Tuxedo Park, at the Tuxedo Club founded by the tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard IV for New York’s bluebloods in the 1880s. The “debutantes’ first bow in town” followed at the Junior Assemblies at the Ritz-Carlton on December 2. Throughout the autumn each debutante’s mother gave at least one tea, dinner, or dance for her daughter at a fashionable venue: the Colony Club, the Cosmopolitan Club, the Ritz-Carlton, the Plaza, or Sherry’s. In Diana’s case Emily gave a luncheon at the Colony Club on December 1. Forty-three young women attended this event, including several old school friends like Emily Billings.

  In “coming out” in 1921, these young ladies were moving out of the schoolroom during a period of vertiginous change accelerated by the First World War. The late 1910s and early 1920s marked the moment when America finally metamorphosed from a land of farming and small towns into a nation of gleaming urban modernity, mass production, and mass consumption. Spared the ravages of war, America’s economy raced ahead of its decimated European competitors after 1918, exploiting American technological advantage in automobiles, airplanes, and architecture. As the American economic engine roared into life, New York roared with it. Partly because there was so little space for heavy manufacturing in Manhattan, New York was a city where consumption, rather than production, predominated. “You might do the work of ‘making’ outside the city, but you ‘made it’ in New York, and everyone who was anyone knew it,” notes Ann Douglas. A beacon of American economic success, a city defined by consumption, and a great international port, New York was the place where changing American tastes and fashions first revealed themselves.

  By the time Diana left Dongan Hall, New York’s upper-class young women were embodying some of the sharpest changes in fashion of the period. A new generation of independent, confident females had emerged from the war effort. They were quite unlike anything American and European society had ever seen before. The vote was extended to them in 1920. In an underestimated but revolutionary change they were suddenly in charge of their own mobility—on foot, on public transportation, and increasingly in their own cars. They took full advantage of this brand-new freedom, emerging from the home to disport and display themselves in the public realm. They were constantly in motion. They smoked, long cigarette holders held “aloof,” to keep themselves slim as cigarettes began to be promoted as a slimming aid. Rebellion against the attitudes of the older generation, its mature body shapes, and its Victorian artistic taste (or lack of it) was given an extra piquancy by Prohibition in 1919, which drove the new syncopated jazz music and the new dances into a countercultural underground, reinforcing the clash. A young woman drinking in public was a new development. Drinking and dancing in illegal speakeasies was even more delightful. The older generation was predictably outraged, giving vent to frequent moral panics, which were often about sex—the predilection of the “New Woman” for “petting parties” was a particular source of consternation in 1921.

  Fashionable young women, meanwhile, demanded ever greater choice over what they were wearing and how they looked. The slim, androgynous flapper, as popularly conceived, did not emerge fully with her short bob, short hemlines, and antiestablishment attitudes until later in the 1920s, but she was already evolving by the year of Diana’s debut, in lighter-weight, corset-free fashions that allowed her to slide in and out of automobiles, jump on a bus, bound along sidewalks, and dance the night away. For the first time in history, young women would soon be wearing backless dresses and skirts above the knee. There was, of course, continuity as well as change in style; the influence of the Ballets Russes in terms of color, line, and silhouette lasted until the end of the decade. As important as any specific fashion, however, was the way in which a fashionable, affluent young woman could suddenly express her individuality like the “types” in Diana’s essays: through consumption. The prevailing view was that consumption was uncomplicated, desirable, and even a patriotic duty. Shopping was perceived to be modern, and the driver of American economic success. There was a shift away from the idea of female fashion as a vehicle for displaying male wealth and power. Though this approach to getting dressed certainly did not disappear, booming American capitalism handed the New Woman the means to create her independent persona through shopping, and a range of services dedicated to adornment and the manner in which she styled herself. It was a phenomenon that fascinated male writers of the period, from Scott Fitzgerald in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” to Michael Arlen in The Green Hat.

  Even Emily, who used cosmetics well before they became widely acceptable, was taken aback by the way Diana adopted exaggerated makeup as a way of establishing her separate identity while she was still quite young—which was, of course, the point. “I adore artifice. I always have. I remember when I was thirteen or fourteen buying red lacquer in Chinatown for my fingernails. ‘What is that?’ my mother said. ‘Where did you get it? Why did you get it?’ ‘Because,’ I said, ‘I want to be a Chinese princess.’ ” If the corollary of this exciting approach to defining oneself was that advertisers pounced on women as a group and exploited new anxieties about their bodies, nobody seemed to care. “When cosmetics began to be seen as an ‘affordable indulgence,’ beauty became a multimillion-dollar industry,” writes the historian Lucy Moore in Anything Goes. “In 1920 there were only 750 beauty salons in New York; that number had risen to 3,000 in 1925. . . . Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein were launching flourishing business empires capitalizing on the Flapper’s obsession with her looks.”

  Emily’s lunch for Diana at the Colony Club was followed by a ball at the Ritz-Carlton for Diana and Anne Kaufman, on December 21, 1921. New York’s newspapers, which continued to report on society events in great detail throughout the 1920s, described the ball as “one of the largest coming-out parties of the Winter” and “a very jolly event.” Diana’s preparations for her coming-out party were meticulous, if isolated: the family home was filling up with the heads of dead beasts, and no one, least of all Emily, took much interest in what she was doing. Diana had graduated from poring over picture catalogs and the Woman’s Home Companion to following French fashion closely in the pages of Vogue. Her dress for her coming-out ball was copied in white satin from a Poiret design, and she remembered it in detail: “a fringed skirt to give it un peu de mouvement and a pearl-and-diamond stomacher to hold the fringe back before it sprang. It looked like the South Sea Islands—like a hula skirt.”

  At this point in her life, Diana was going through a phase of covering herself with calcimine (otherwise known as distemper and more commonly used for painting on drying plaster), with a view to looking like a lily. “I was always a little extreme. . . . On the night of my coming-out . . . was I calcimined that night. My dress was white, naturally. And then the reds were something. I had velvet slippers that were lacquer red.” She carried a bouquet of red camellias to the ball, sent by fast-talking showman J. Ringling North of the Ringling circus family. This time Emily did snap to attention, uncertain whether to be more appalled by the circus or the camellias. “ ‘Circus people . . . where did you ever meet them?’ my mother wanted to know. I told her that for some reason J. Ringling North had taken a fancy to me and sent the red camellias.” Emily then delivered some mother-daughter information that suggests that the Dalziel household was not unduly afflicted by Victorian prudery. “ ‘You should know,’ she said, ‘that red camellias are what the demimondaines of the nineteenth century carried when they had their periods and thus weren’t available for their man. I don’t think they’re quite . . . suitable.’ I carried the camellias anyway. They were
so beautiful. I had to assume that no one else at the party knew what my mother knew.”

  Thanks to the social convulsion of the postwar years, some of the debutantes at the ball were already leading lives very different from their mothers’ at the same stage. Anita Damrosch, the daughter of the conductor Walter Damrosch, went to drama school that winter and became a professional actress. Others went on to make their mark in a more traditional manner, notably the Morgan twins, Thelma and Gloria, who would, respectively, become the mistress of Edward VIII and marry a Vanderbilt, but there was a remarkable degree of latent creativity on the guest list too. Jeanne Reynal, a great friend of Diana’s while they were both debutantes, later had a pioneering role in the abstract expressionist movement in New York as a mosaic artist, before marrying Thomas Sills, an African American painter. Maud Cabot, a guest at Diana’s debutante lunch, became a distinguished painter, exhibiting alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. She hated everything about being a debutante. “Since I was not interested in getting married, the entire structure of this social edifice was for me a hollow shell. I was a dismal failure.” Her mother’s response was to send her off to shoot a moose, though it may have been emblematic of the changing times that Maud was allowed to go to college when this failed to work.

  Maud Cabot’s view of the season was emphatically not shared by Diana, who had been longing to find a husband for years so that she could get away from home. Her debutante year was a triumph. She attended Fokine’s newly opened studio at 4 Riverside Drive; she was photographed playing tennis at Hot Springs, Virginia, and at the United Hunts Meet with her friend Barbara Brokaw at Belmont Park; she took part in amateur theatricals as a member of the Junior League; and she became an editor of a publication called The Debutante Calendar, which announced that she was “keenly interested in amateur journalism.” Diana also threw herself into the music, dances, and fashions of 1920s New York and the Harlem Renaissance. She adored the newly fashionable lowlife mistrusted—and unvisited—by the older generation, and sneaked off with her more daring friends to the Cotton Club in Harlem and to watch Josephine Baker perform on Broadway. She loved the idea of being thought “picturesquely depraved” for going to cabarets and nightclubs. One very good reason for frequenting such places was privacy: the purpose of going to nightclubs way downtown was “to avoid running into my mother and father—and doing what I loved to do best . . . dancing.” Like many of her fashionable contemporaries, Diana reacted against the sanitized Castle ballroom dances of the prewar era in favor of something more authentic, in an atmosphere where, at least temporarily, class distinctions meant little. “By the time I was seventeen, I knew what a snob was. I also knew that young snobs didn’t quite get my number. I was much better with Mexican and Argentine gigolos (they weren’t really gigolos—they were just odd ducks around town who liked to dance as much as I did). They were people who knew that I loved clothes, a certain nightlife, and that I loved to tango.”

  In 1922 the press complimented Diana on her looks for the first time. Photographs show her favoring both the fashionable straight-line chemise, and the exoticism of Bakst. Diana was “one of the most attractive of this season’s debutantes” and the “lovely daughter of Mrs. Frederick Dalziel.” Vogue, which started life as a New York society magazine and still covered the comings and goings of the city’s fashionable elite in great detail in the early 1920s, described her as a “smart figure” and variously admired her way with her furs and a chic leather hat, “one of the new notes in millinery.” The only sour note was struck by a gossip columnist in Southampton who speculated that now that Miss Dalziel had enjoyed such glittering social success she would probably be deserting Southampton and going off to Newport with her elegant new friends. Three years after Diana first explored the idea in her diary, sheer determination, much thought about what constituted high style, and self-aware development of an alluring personality had brought her to the point where she had indeed become the Girl—and a young woman whose debut was as successful as her mother’s in 1896. To onlookers who knew both of them, she seemed very like Emily—theatrical, stylish, articulate, amusing, full of energy, very made-up, with a host of admirers—but in the idiom of the modern young woman.

  But if Diana was enjoying success for the first time in her life, it soon became obvious that Emily was much less happy. The place Emily chose to make this clear was Harper’s Bazar, spelt with one ‘a’ until 1929. This was one of two American magazines aimed at affluent women, though unlike its rival Vogue, Bazar covered more than fashion and was designed to appeal to an educated female elite. In February 1922, in the middle of Diana’s debutante year, Emily published an article in Bazar bemoaning her return to New York in terms calibrated to undermine Diana. “She assures us that she would rather discharge a Winchester than a chef; that bringing up a leopard for a good bead is easier than bringing out a debutante daughter. As she has done both within the last twelve months, we assume that she knows,” concluded a snide editorial preamble. The gist of the article, titled “Ten Thousand Miles from Fifth Avenue,” was that the pleasures of so-called civilization in New York were inferior to “primitive” life in the African forest, where in spite of the dangers one was protected from all cares. On her return to the modernity of New York, Emily wrote, she was swamped by problems with servants and irritated by inane comments about Africa at society parties. The message was unmistakable: Emily would rather be in Africa, the amusements of New York society were trivial, and those who enjoyed them were foolish. By inference this included her debutante daughter.

  Just over a year later Vogue published a major article about big-game hunting in the Rockies, in which Emily featured prominently. The effect, whether it was intentional or not, was to reposition the Carmencita of New York society as the beautiful and daring goddess of hunting, and to deflect attention from Diana as a social success and young woman of style. Before long, however, Emily’s public rejection of the modernity of New York for the “authenticity” of the wild came back to haunt her, for she was far less secure about social acceptance than her article implied. After Diana made her debut, Emily put it to her that she should become a member of the exclusive Colony Club. There was a strong family connection: Mary Weir had been a founder member, Emily had belonged for many years, and Diana’s debutante lunch party had taken place there in December 1921, so membership should have been more or less automatic. Diana was not much interested in what she saw as a middle-aged establishment, but Emily persuaded her that it was somewhere to have her hair done, that it might be useful to her in later life, and that she should at least agree to attend an interview. Emily then received a letter telling her that Diana had not been admitted. It transpired that she had been blackballed because she was “fast”—a fine example of a 1920s intergenerational clash. Diana was a “jazz baby,” a young woman who dressed well, wore makeup, smoked, and had boyfriends, and this had apparently been read as a sign of loose morals by the committee ladies.

  To Diana’s astonishment, Emily was exceedingly upset by this rebuff. It was one of the few times she ever saw her mother in tears. What Emily perhaps suspected was that the committee’s rejection of Diana was aimed more at Emily herself, as punishment for her all too public comments in Bazar—and for being fast. Diana, on the other hand, was quite untroubled. At a party at the end of her first post-debutante year she met Thomas Reed Vreeland.

  “I believe in love at first sight because that’s what it was. I knew the moment our eyes met that we would marry. I simply assumed that—and I was right,” said Diana. They met at a Fourth of July party in Saratoga in 1923 and were formally engaged the following January. In falling in love with Reed Vreeland, Diana was following the pattern of her own parents’ marriage, where the man married upward. The Vreeland family was not in the “Four Hundred” or The Social Register. By the time of their engagement, Reed’s father, Herbert H. Vreeland, had been a distinguished and sometimes controversial president of the Metropolitan St
reet Railway Company, but he had left school at fifteen and worked his way up from the bottom of the streetcar business, starting as a gravel shoveler. Unlike Diana’s British father, however, Herbert Vreeland and his family regarded his humble beginnings with pride.

  As always, Town Topics was on hand to ponder such matters. Diana was positioned as one of the elite, as the great-granddaughter of the late John Washington Ellis. Choosing to disregard both Herbert Vreeland’s career and the fact that Reed was a graduate of Yale, a member of the prestigious Scroll and Key society, not to mention President of the university’s famous Glee Club, and Popocatepetl (director) of its a capella group the Whiffenpoofs, Town Topics hinted sadly that Diana was marrying beneath her: “I am sorry I cannot go on record, for unfortunately I have never met the young man who will lead Diana away from the altar,” sighed its anonymous correspondent. The fact that The Social Register was “strangely silent” on the matter of Diana’s fiancé was a cause for concern, though the author took heart at the revelation that his family was resident at 135 Central Park West and had a country house in Brewster, New York. This seemed to suggest, said Town Topics, that young Vreeland was “financially O.K.”

  Oddly, Town Topics did touch on an aspect of the relationship between Diana and Reed that would never really change. Almost from the beginning it was Diana who made the life into which Reed stepped, though this already had less to do with her family background than her stylish originality, which was attracting wider attention. Shortly before they met she had been invited by the owner of Vogue, Condé Nast, to one of his celebrated New York parties where he famously mixed up guests who intrigued him but who would never otherwise have stood in the same room. Being invited—without one’s parents—to a party by Condé Nast was a very great honor. The evening more than lived up to its promise, for the guests included Josephine Baker in a white Vionnet dress cut on the bias with four points and not much more. “Everybody who was invited to a Condé Nast party stood for something,” said Diana. “I was so thrilled to be asked. There was no living with me for days.”