It would also be wrong to think that every American designer who appeared in Bazaar necessarily had Diana’s enthusiastic stamp of approval. There had been a trade-off between advertising and editorial since the earliest days of Bazaar. As the magazine became more successful, this became even more complex. Diana had no truck at all with the business and advertising side of Bazaar. This was left to Carmel Snow, and it was one of Snow’s great strengths that she managed it so well for so long. Nonetheless even Snow was forced to make concessions sometimes, and when she did, Diana had to help her to make the best of it. Both Carmel and Diana regarded the designs of Adrian, for example, as “tacky.” They did the minimum necessary to satisfy the advertising department, though photographs of the heiress Millicent Rogers wearing Adrian might have led the innocent reader to imagine otherwise. At the same time, Diana was known to go back to advertisers and ask them to make adjustments to colors and designs so that the clothes were good enough to merit inclusion in the magazine. “She does not indulge in cruelty nor in self-indulgence for pleasure . . .” said Billy Baldwin. “She will not bear to subscribe to an opinion that she doesn’t totally believe in. She is a warrior.”
At the same time, an endorsement of an American designer by Diana, with Carmel Snow’s support, could make all the difference to his or her career. At the very top, custom-made end, Mainbocher continued to occupy a privileged place in the fashion pages of Bazaar. He never returned to Paris, but he did refuse to allow his clothes to be manufactured by Seventh Avenue and is unlikely to have survived as he did without Diana’s help; she patronized him as the only true New York representative of the Paris prewar couture tradition. Named American designers began to emerge on Seventh Avenue to meet a growing demand for high-quality, expensive ready-to-wear clothes, a trend to which the Paris couture was also responding. Diana supported designers and designer-manufacturers of the quality of Norman Norell, James Galanos, and Ben Zuckerman but was extremely demanding. If the clothes were copies of French designs they had to be just as good. French inspiration had to be combined with an original American twist, and the clothes had to be wearable. Her motivating effect was at its most obvious with sportswear designers. B. H. Wragge, for example, was delighted to have her advice, and admiration was mutual. “My dear,” she would say of Wragge, “no one, but no one, can touch his American look—clothes with youth and energy, if you know what I mean. Clothes with breezes running through their seams.” Diana supported Claire McCardell’s most experimental ideas, including beach shirts over romper suits, which were inspired by children’s play clothes, complete with smocking; and she was extremely good at discerning trends long before they became popular—her spreads on biker boots and textured stockings still look contemporary now.
Meanwhile Diana introduced successful ideas directly from Europe herself. (“You must always give ideas away,” she liked to say. “Under every idea is a new one waiting to be born.”) The Capri sandal was one innovation of which she was particularly proud. She had first bought sandals attached to the foot by leather straps while staying with Mona Williams on Capri in the mid-1930s. Unable to replace her Capri sandals during the war, she arranged for a shoemaker in New Jersey to make copies. Once the New Jersey shoemaker recovered from Diana’s description of the sandals in Pompeii’s ruder frescoes, he built a very good business out of them as American women opted to go bare legged in summer. Diana claimed to have done even better by Charles Revson, giving him a prewar formula for red nail polish made by a Mr. Perrera in Paris, who “took care of women’s hands just for love.” Revson, who did not take care of women’s hands just for love, developed the formula and built a global cosmetics empire. Diana tried to find Perrera after the war to give him his due but he had disappeared. She thought that Charles Revson felt guilty about what he had done ever afterward. “I . . . knew that he knew that I knew that he had made this incredible fortune off of one small bottle of mine with maybe this much left in it. Yes, there was always something in his eye. . . .”
She had an equally keen eye for young talent, like Kenneth Jay Lane, who became one of the world’s leading designers of costume jewelry partly thanks to her tutelage. Lane was still designing shoes when Diana first met him in the 1950s. He knew he had found a true friend during their first conversation, when he asked her how to look after some new leather shoes, and she replied, “You know in the whole city of New York you can’t find a rhinoceros horn!” Diana was an early enthusiast for Lane’s jewelry, and was one of those who changed the direction of his career by making it fashionable. She was particularly fond of his pairs of enameled black and white bracelets, with jewels mounted on the white cuff, and reversed out on the black. Producing pieces for Diana and her fashion spreads was extremely demanding, but Lane would later say that her precision was a perfect education for a young designer, particularly in matters of color. They once had an argument about a shade of turquoise that went on for days, until Lane eventually wondered—by phone—if she was thinking of the color of Turkish donkey beads. “Yes! Daunkey,” said Diana, slamming down the receiver.
Indeed, Diana’s observations about color became a subset of “Vreelandia”: “There’s never been a blue like the blue of the Duke of Windsor’s eyes. . . . Red is the great clarifier—bright, cleansing, and revealing. It makes all other colors beautiful. . . . Black is the hardest color in the world to get right—except for gray. . . . Taxicab yellow is marvelous. . . . Actually, pale-pink salmon is the only color I cannot abide—though naturally I adore pink.” After Diana and Lane became friends, the young women in her office surreptitiously telephoned him for help with translation. “Once, they called and said she was talking about the color of dried blood and they had no idea what she meant. ‘Where was she last night?’ one assistant asked. ‘Let’s see . . . ,’ I said. ‘Oh, I know. Last night we went to the Russian Tea Room and had beet borscht.’ ”
As the global fashion industry expanded in the 1950s, the process by which fashion reached the pages of Bazaar became more hierarchical. Diana’s team scoured Seventh Avenue for pieces that were presented to her at intimidating run-throughs where she would, according to Bettina Ballard, sit with “eyes far off on cloud number twelve . . . while the nervous editors put the clothes of their choice on the mannequins.” Junior editors were struck by her militant self-belief in matters of taste. Once the selection was approved by Snow, the fashion team had showings for the art department to discuss how the clothes should be photographed and appear on the page. These run-throughs were an event. “DVs showings were her own bit of theater,” said A. G. Allen. “This was her stage, and she was always dressed to the nines for it.” The photographer Gleb Derujinsky remembered that Brodovitch would start the conversation by talking about the overall plan for the issue, so that the photographers understood the rhythm of the pages.
With that settled, it became Diana’s show. “A model would be there walking around in the clothes, and DV would see it as her role to talk up the clothes, trying to inspire the photographers and art department,” remembered Allen. Exaggeration was one way of doing this, particularly at those moments when she took over from the model, as Derujinsky recalled. “She would stand in front of the mirror and strike the poses that would make the dress work; or she would bend and move and poke the models into taking the right pose, with her team frantically pinning the costumes and Diana accessorizing with scarves, or ribbons, or something for the hair.” It was Diana’s turn of phrase that often stayed in the memory. “With pure Dianaism, she describes what effect she wants,” wrote Ballard. “ ‘This, my dear,’ pointing to a sequin sheath, ‘must look drowned, completely drowned,’ as if the word tasted of salt water. ‘You know what I mean, like a wet, wet mermaid sliding through the water.’ ” She did not always seem to be quite of this world. “You got the feeling she was above harsh commercial reality,” said Derujinsky, who would never forget Diana instructing two models to kneel in a pose on the floor, going out to lunch, and finding
the terrified models still in position when she returned an hour later.
Many people contributed to the fashion spreads in Bazaar in the 1950s, and assigning credit between photographer, fashion editor, art director, and stylist is difficult, not to say unwise: the point at which influence began and ended shifted with every relationship and every shoot. However, Diana’s intense feeling for all kinds of fashion and her insistence on quality and originality was critical to the continued success of Bazaar during those years. The freshness of the fashion pages continued up to 1961, a considerable achievement, when even those who were interested in clothes, like Betty Vreeland, thought that fashion was growing dull: “There is at this moment nothing more to say about fashion nothing new to show because nothing is being invented anywhere.” The changes had to be rung through accessories, she noted, and here Diana reigned supreme, with consistently sparkling spreads on shoes, belts, and jewelry. Her style philosophy that first emerged in the “Why Don’t You?” column slowly regained the upper hand as well. Diana continued to promote women of taste with style ideas of their own, persuading C. Z. Guest to be photographed wearing panels of Chinese fabric, for example; and by the late 1950s the dictatorial tone of Bazaar in the late 1940s was again making way for a more flexible approach based on the individual reader’s point of view. “Individualism emerging,” ran one fashion article in March 1961. “See expressed—triumphantly—in this issue of Harper’s Bazaar perfect individualism: the great and worthy goal that fashion has been straining as toward leaf to sun throughout this generation.”
Bazaar was certainly not radical. It was aimed at the reader “who thinks of herself as a woman every minute,” and counseled her to eschew confusion, aiming for beauty in everything she did. Throughout the 1950s, however, Diana gave Bazaar a contemporary and specifically American point of view. The American “girl” in Bazaar—whether a model or a society figure, in sportswear or more formal clothes inspired by French couture—was a stylish young woman in her early thirties. Diana’s Bazaar pages posited American dynamism in contrast to the stasis of European couture. Models of the 1950s like Dovima and Suzy Parker were good at looking aloof. But in Bazaar they exuded energy and enjoyed their own physical health. The Girl they stood for was elegant, no longer a debutante, probably a young married woman, but one who was young at heart. She was, in many ways, like Diana in the 1930s. The fashion on Bazaar’s pages may have been bought by the middle-class and middle-aged, but on the page it was enjoyable, interesting, and for women who moved. It did not become jaded.
Time and again Diana’s love of beautiful clothes was reflected in language captured by Bazaar’s copywriters. Flicking through Bazaar the reader might encounter a “lean coat of Stafford silk shantung that shines like wine in the candlelight,” shoes that were a “spiderweb of black patent leather,” “a suit that changes its face, according to accessories,” “a little hold-your-breath jacket,” or “checks at the peak of their long career.” She might be offered “a cobalt blue suede oxford, a spark red suede pump, a meadow green suede pump,” a “dress of charm and self-containment for late afternoon” or “the leopard and fox, the ocelot and lynx—coming in together this year in sharp-tailored, sharp-patterned, chopped-off coats that create a lovely diffusion about the face.” She might be told to prepare “for a very pink spring. Pink is inescapable, all the way from peony through coral to flamingo.” And she might be asked to apply a little imagination too: for the day “not too far off, when the trees will be not quite leafless and there are buckets of purple lilacs on the street corners and you will see someone—maybe yourself, in a suit of white Italian silk with a shirt of Irish lace.”
Such language took the fashion on Bazaar’s pages to a level much envied at Vogue. It also lent itself to yet more parody. This time, however, Carmel Snow decided that her magazine was going to be on the right side of the joke. Stanley Donen’s film Funny Face, which appeared in 1957, was very loosely based on the story of Richard Avedon’s meeting with his first wife. Avedon acted as “visual consultant,” with two of his favorite models, Dovima and Suzy Parker, in walk-on roles. Bazaar’s staff was roped in to help, and the magazine was credited. The story was set in a fashion magazine called Quality. Fred Astaire starred as photographer Dick Avery; Audrey Hepburn played a bookseller turned fashion model; and there was an art director called Dovitch. But the great spoof in this camp romp was Kay Thompson, as Quality magazine’s editor, Maggie Prescott. Other than her Balenciaga hat, which was a joke at Snow’s expense, Maggie Prescott was entirely Diana, from her arrival in the office in the morning to a chorus of “Good mornings” from dazzled underlings to her exhortation to “every designer on Seventh Avenue” to “Think Pink!” Funny Face has none of the depth of Lady in the Dark. Nonetheless, as its story line develops, Maggie Prescott is revealed to be a surprisingly practical and wise old bird, with several Vreelandesque lines: “It’s movingly dismal,” she says. There were regular injunctions to give things pizzazz. There were also a few sharp digs. “One doesn’t talk to Maggie Prescott,” says Dick Avery at one point. “One listens.” Diana did not see the funny side. “Mrs. Vreeland marched out saying, ‘Never to be discussed,’ ” Barbara Slifka recalled. “I’m too real for teasing,” said Diana years later.
For all the magazine’s successes, and the reverence with which Carmel Snow was held in the wider world of fashion, senior executives in the Hearst organization began to worry about her in the mid-1950s. She was in her late sixties but declined to contemplate retirement. Richard Deems of the Hearst organization raised the question of her succession for the first time in 1955, but she rebuffed him and would not even acknowledge that the conversation had taken place. “The inevitable was coming, but she refused to face it,” writes her biographer Penelope Rowlands. “She seemed to think that by staring it down . . . it would somehow go away.” Part of the problem was that as she aged, she drank heavily and ate little. Her physical frailty became obvious to those beyond the staff of Bazaar. Geraldine Stutz, then an editor at Glamour, watched her at the Paris collections. “She had bones showing all over the place, little bird bones. She was a little unsteady, sometimes after lunch, and sometimes generally. Dick Avedon was the great cavalier of all time. He was ever attending, he’d put his hand under her elbow.” Avedon commented that at sixty-eight Snow already seemed like an old woman. “She was pickled in alcohol and that was sort of preserving her,” said her niece Kate White.
By 1956 there were new pressures bearing down on Carmel Snow. There were constant battles with the Hearst executives. As she flagged physically she became no less decisive but much more peremptory. The business side of the magazine became more invasive as printing and paper costs rose; and there were constant clashes with the Hearst organization over covers, in a push to drive up sales and increase advertising revenue. Though Snow fought hard to hold back the tide, advertisers were allowed to acquire more power. Penelope Rowlands notes that, surprisingly, the death of William Randolph Hearst deprived Snow of a key ally. Though they sometimes clashed head-on, and he detested most of the artists whose work she published in Bazaar, especially Bérard, whom he called “faceless Freddy,” he respected her strength of character and her successful touch.
By the mid-1950s Brodovitch, who had a troubled domestic life, was drinking heavily too. He had always had projects of his own beyond Bazaar. Frustrated by the increasingly commercial constraints at Bazaar, he reserved his most innovative work for elsewhere. The magazine managed to maintain its energy, thanks to good fiction publishing and its fashion pages, but it was beginning to lose its avant-garde cutting edge quality. Eventually the men of the Hearst organization took the matter of Snow’s succession into their own hands and told her she had to go. The new editor they appointed was none other than Snow’s niece Nancy White, editor of Good Housekeeping. Nancy had always adored her aunt Carmel. And Aunt Carmel was very fond of her niece but she did not regard her as nearly tough enough for the Bazaar job, and she
was incensed at the decision and the way it was taken. The understanding was that Snow would hand things over to Nancy White during a transition period of several months in 1957, and that Snow would be gone by 1958, but it was anything but smooth. “The time that followed was an agony,” writes Penelope Rowlands. “Carmel refused to acknowledge her niece’s existence, attempting to do her own work as if nothing had changed. And she didn’t do so tranquilly.”
Carmel Snow was not the only person who was discontented. Diana would never have dreamed of proposing herself as a successor to Snow, regarding such a move as vulgar, but she was most unhappy at the way she was passed over, particularly since the fashion pages had held up so well while Snow and Brodovitch declined. “When Mrs. Snow got the word that she was no longer going to be editor, Diana Vreeland went in and said, ‘Was my name mentioned?’ ” reported Dorothy Wheelock, Bazaar’s long-standing—and long-suffering—theater critic. “Mrs. Snow said, ‘Your name never came up, Diana,’ incensed at the very idea that Diana could take her job.” It has also been suggested that, once she was prepared to discuss the idea of her successor, Snow actively blocked any possibility that Diana should succeed her, arguing that she was too narrowly focused on fashion, and lacked both the judgment and the necessary business acumen to be editor. It was an assessment with which many on Seventh Avenue concurred. The disdain with which Diana treated advertisers was felt to be a particular problem. “She was impossible with advertisers. She snubbed all the advertising department—quite rightly. She was much too eccentric and really frankly original. [Hearst management] couldn’t take it,” said one colleague.
Empress of Fashion Page 19