Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  The implication was that while Quant’s designs (“at first, more thought-up clothes than designed clothes”) were intriguing, they were not necessarily right for the women of the United States. When it came to innovative youth fashion ideas, Diana was more confident about featuring fashion that came to New York straight from Paris, particularly the work of Emanuelle Khanh, whom she described as the “vanguard and heroine of young French fashion.” A former haute couture model, Emanuelle Khanh particularly endeared herself to Diana with her philosophy, inherited from Chanel, that clothes should follow the line, silhouette, and movement of a woman’s body; and Diana was also enchanted by the interpretations of youth fashion emerging from the Paris couture salons of the ever-inventive Balenciaga. Indeed Diana later maintained that she always saw the new ideas of the 1960s at Balenciaga first. “I didn’t go much for this street-up business . . . because it seemed to me I’d always seen it at Balenciaga. . . . Balenciaga, for instance, did the first vinyl raincoats, like the gendarmes wear, you know, in the winter in Paris. The cape and the boots and the short skirts and the elaborate stockings . . . Balenciaga was incredible.”

  Once she had decided that the popularity of London’s new young designers were more than a passing phase, Diana campaigned to devote an entire issue to them in 1964 but eventually elected to spread the material over several issues. The September 1 cover was shot by David Bailey; the September 15 issue featured British tweeds from Mary Quant and Wallis Shops, accessorized with stockings from Mary Quant and Polly Peck; Alan Brien wrote about the pioneering theater director Joan Littlewood; and the novelist Edna O’Brien offered American readers a glimpse of “Four Eligible Bachelors in London.” These issues also included “limber little wool suits” from “the nifty Americans” and a selection from André Courrèges’s latest collection from Paris, featuring silver hipster pants that revealed the midriff, pink glitter boots for evening, and skirts that bared the knee accompanied by white kidskin boots.

  In the end it was these Courrèges designs that caused an explosion and not the English innovators; and it showed that the conservatism of Vogue’s readers was not to be underestimated. “That was something,” said Diana. “. . . a top, a bare midriff, and a belly button showing. The letters came in. ‘This is a house where magazines are put on the coffee table, and now we find it impossible to put Vogue there. As the mother of a nineteen-year-old son . . .’ ‘My God, lady,’ I thought. ‘Let him go! Send him away! One night in Tangiers! Tunis! Cairo!’ ” Accustomed as she was to the more audacious approach of Bazaar, the tizzy of some of Vogue’s senior editors also surprised Diana. “ ‘Why did you run a picture like that?’ the staff wanted to know. ‘Because I’m a reporter,’ I said. ‘I know news when I see it! What are we talking about, for Christ’s sake—pleasing the bourgeoisie of North Dakota? We’re talking fashion—get with it!’ ”

  Vogue touched only lightly on the politics of the early sixties, though in her first “Vogue’s Eye View” even Diana, the most apolitical of women, shared a widespread, optimistic delight in the Kennedy presidency and its forward-thinking initiatives: “It’s possible to feel on your cheek, like a fresh wind, the hopeful veer of events: the quick forward surges in education, in science, in the courts of law, in the assemblies of nations. To look back with surprise and pleasure on a year in which many good things happened, and many bad things did not (war was avoided; a group of persons over sixty years old joined the Peace Corps; an election was held in which the electorate showed a bizarre, delightful tendency to think for itself.)” It was Nicholas Haslam who broke the news to Diana of Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, having heard it on his illicit radio in the art department. He rushed to find her in Janssen’s, the restaurant on the street floor of the Graybar Building where they sometimes met for lunch. “I blurted out, ‘Diana-the-president’s-been-shot-and-they-don’t-think-he’s-going-to-live.’ She looked aghast, paused for a moment, and then said only, ‘My God, Lady Bird in the White House! We can’t use her in the magazine.’ ” Later, after they watched the funeral together, she said to Haslam: “He had a golden touch, Jack. . . . The world will get grayer now.”

  Vogue did “use” both the new president and his wife in 1964, with Mrs. Johnson photographed by Horst. But as if in response to the end of Camelot, Vogue’s sparkle dimmed slightly in the early months of 1964. The fashion pages in the months following Kennedy’s assassination seemed to retreat in almost retrograde fashion to the safety of demure, blond, soft 1950s prettiness, a countertrend to the Space Age ideas that started to seep in during the spring. Nonetheless Diana’s investment in younger fashion continued, and Vogue’s spirits rose again throughout the year. Diana followed up the photograph of the Beatles with a much longer feature article by Betty Rollin in September 1964 that alluded to a new antiestablishment spirit. Rollin brought the “fury” and “sadness” of singer-songwriters like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Tom Paxton to the attention of Vogue’s readers, mentioning in passing the Free Speech Movement that was starting to gain momentum at Berkeley. “Aside from new topics, there is something decidedly new about the way topical songs have caught on,” she observed. Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul, and Mary, put the popularity of songs written for demonstrations and picket lines down to the spread of television and radio. Another singer, Phil Ochs, commented: “In the fifties young people had a rebellion without a cause. In the sixties we have so many causes we don’t know what to sing, write, or just do something about first.” Political engagement, observed Rollins, was newly fashionable. “It seems,” she wrote, “it is no longer square to care.” As political turmoil in the world beyond Vogue gained momentum in 1964, however, Diana pulled back from too much overt discussion of the issues that would convulse America for the rest of the decade. She looked instead for trends, particularly those that played themselves out through fashion; and she put her own stamp on the decade as she did so.

  “Youthquake” was Diana’s celebrated expression for the most significant social and cultural development of the 1960s—the rise of the young, who did not wish to dress like their parents, as an independent style force, a phenomenon she embraced in January 1965. The youth of the sixties no longer waited at home for life to start, she noted:

  There is a marvelous moment that starts at thirteen and wastes no time. No longer waits to grow up, but makes its own way, its own look by the end of the week. Gone is the once-upon-a-daydream world. The dreams, still there, break into action: writing, singing, acting, designing. Youth, warm and gay as a kitten, yet self-sufficient as James Bond, is surprising countries east and west with a sense of assurance serene beyond all years.

  It was an international wave that had already hit London and Paris. The new jump-off age was about to be the exhilarating new reality in America too—and she could even back it up with statistics:

  The year’s in its youth, the youth in its year. Under 24 and over 90,000,000 strong in the U.S. alone. More dreamers. More doers. Here. Now. Youthquake 1965.

  Even in the Youthquake issue of January 1965, however, close inspection reveals that Diana was careful about how she introduced youth fashion to Vogue’s American readers. She had already formed the habit of breaking down resistance by putting new fashions on the right people. The Courrèges trouser suit was first photographed in March 1964. Once Diana thought it might be pushing aside the two-piece suit, she showed it on a series of society women, and on reigning queens like Sirikit of Thailand. In the Youthquake issue, she initially tackled very short miniskirts by aiming them at Vogue’s “daughters.” Heidi Murray Vanderbilt, the young Marisa Berenson, Condé Nast publisher Edwin Russell’s daughter Consuelo, and Catherine Carlisle Hart, the daughter of Kitty Carlisle and Moss Hart, were profiled next to a model wearing white skirts three to four inches above the knee, patterned tights, and long “bangs.” One of Diana’s favorite garments, the leotard, was back again too, at her instigation, with three sleek leotards specially designed for Vogu
e by Jacques Tiffeau and made to order by Bonwit-Teller: “Now the body itself is the great fashion-power—the long flow of the body-line, strong, supple, beautiful—the look of youth.” In Diana’s view 1965 was the Year of the Body. A long, slender body was “the body that is fashion. Strength flows along the long, slender curves; every line is pulled up and held with easy discipline against a spine as pliant as steel-spring.” But this did not mean the despotism of youthful figures, Vogue was quick to say. There was no need to feel bullied by youth fashion. Clothes might be worn tighter and narrower on the body; skirt lengths might be shorter, but hemlines varied at different times of day, and the choice was an individual one: “It’s entirely up to you: 1965 belongs to the woman with active tastes.”

  As hats disappeared from younger women’s heads, what applied to dress also applied to hair. During one of her trips to London to assess new English designers, Grace Mirabella met Vidal Sassoon, who was revolutionizing hairdressing with his updated version of the 1920s bob—geometric cutting, working with the hair’s natural strengths, and liberating women from unnatural permanents, weekly trips to the hairdresser, and interminable sessions under the dryer. Mirabella persuaded Sassoon to call on Diana, who was far from convinced. “As I walked into her office, Mrs. Vreeland, with an air of stern authority, said, ‘Many of my friends are talking about you but are scared to death of your scissors.’ ” When Sassoon replied that they had good reason to be because his team was poised to give New York the London look, Diana pointed at a girl sitting in her office and ordered him to cut her hair in one of his looks. Sassoon immediately realized that the assistant’s hair was much too fine to hold any of his cuts in place and refused to do as she commanded. “This is the wrong head of hair to demonstrate my work,” he said. At this point Diana sat up. “Mrs. Vreeland said, ‘Interesting. Sit down.’ She turned on a tape recorder and we talked fashion, art, architecture and about the people we admired. She let her hair down in a way that was so unexpected that I was tempted to suggest I cut it.”

  By the end of 1964, Vogue was running much longer fashion spreads than ever before; and Diana’s chances of imposing her vision on its pages improved greatly when she persuaded Richard Avedon to defect from Bazaar in late 1965. She had encouraged him to come to Vogue with her in 1962, as Bailey had suspected she might, but Avedon was bound by contract to the Hearst organization, felt the arrangement to be unbreakable, and thought no more about it. But as he put it later, “The spy system was incredible.” Forty-eight hours before he was due to sign a new contract with Hearst, Diana phoned him and said: “I just want to know something. Are you even remotely interested in talking to Vogue?” She rang at the right moment. The cheapskate behavior of the Hearst executives during contract negotiations had so angered Avedon that, like Diana before him, he was ready to hear what Alexander Liberman had to offer. Liberman, meanwhile, was more than ready to talk to Avedon. In spite of Diana’s own predilection for the new band of English photographers, who included Norman Parkinson and Lord Snowdon as well as David Bailey, Irving Penn’s imagery had continued to dominate Vogue after Diana arrived. His work had lost none of its quality—indeed it had gained from Jessica Daves’s departure—but Diana and Liberman both thought that the beautiful stasis of Penn’s work needed to be counterpointed by an equally powerful feeling of vitality elsewhere. New technology was already revolutionizing the distance between photographer and model in the active, aggressive photographs taken with hand-held cameras by British photographers like Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Brian Duffy, but Diana and Liberman believed that Vogue needed an injection of dynamism from an American staff photographer in every issue, and that Avedon and Penn would fire each other up. Diana also knew that, unlike many other star photographers including her new friend David Bailey, Avedon had long ago come to terms with the practical limitations of a fashion shoot, including the reader’s need to see the clothes. (“If it’s art I want, I’ll go to an art gallery,” Diana once told Bailey.)

  Once Avedon had agreed to transfer his allegiance to Condé Nast, Diana set about hiring the fashion editor and stylist Polly Mellen to work with him. Mellen had joined Bazaar as a fashion editor in 1950 and had been championed by Diana, but she left after her marriage in 1952. She returned to Bazaar in 1960, only to find that she did not care for the atmosphere of Nancy White’s regime. Even though Richard Avedon was still there, the magazine had, in her view, “gone beige.” When Diana asked her to go to Vogue and work with Avedon, Mellen moved as fast as she possibly could. Her arrival to work with the new celebrity photographer caused some resentment among her new colleagues. “Who needs friends?” said Diana. “Go and do your stuff.” Within weeks she dispatched Mellen to work with Avedon in Japan on a shoot that came to define Diana’s tenure at Vogue.

  The model for the shoot was Veruschka, otherwise known as Vera von Lehndorff. As soon as she became editor in chief, Diana started looking for faces and bodies for the new age, and dispensed with great American goddesses of the 1950s like Dovima, Jean Patchett, and Sunny Harnett. The luminously beautiful Jean Shrimpton was the first of Diana’s alive 1960s faces, but Veruschka followed close behind, not only redefining beauty but the role of the model in the process. Diana had met Vera von Lehndorff while she was still at Bazaar, in 1961. She had been highly complimentary, but in 1961 Lehndorff’s looks were ahead of their time. At over six feet, she was regarded as too tall. Her face did not quite fit either. “I had this baby face and was at the same time sophisticated because of my length and height, so it was very difficult. My face belonged in Elle, but my body was Vogue so nothing worked,” she said. But Lehndorff was no ordinary mannequin. She was the daughter of a Prussian count who had been shot for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler; her family had spent the war in labor camps and been left homeless in 1945; she studied art before she was discovered as a model at the age of twenty; and there was an air of performance art about her modeling career from the outset.

  Rejected by New York in 1961, Lehndorff retreated back to Europe and tackled the problem in a manner after Diana’s own heart. “ ‘Vera’ was not the person, not the name to successfully embark on the journey to become an internationally acclaimed fashion model,” said Lehndorff. “That person, her behavior and appearance, had to be reinvented to successfully stride into the new era of fashion.” She discarded “Vera” and reinvented herself as “Veruschka.” “One year on, my second trip, it was Veruschka who arrived in New York with another walk and another talk. Eccentric, feline, charming, and well-spoken, she was the exotic blonde arriving from the borders between Western and Eastern Europe.” This time “Veruschka” took control, walking into the studios of many of the leading photographers without a portfolio, demanding to see their work. It worked so well that Irving Penn sent her over to Vogue.

  When she became editor in chief in 1963, Diana realized that Veruschka’s tanned, lean body, her long legs, her bone structure, her wide, perfect mouth, and her huge blue eyes, not to mention her remarkable ability to metamorphose, were suddenly of the moment. Veruschka began to appear in Vogue, photographed by Penn, from 1963, but her Veruschka persona acquired a new sheen once she met Avedon. “Our sessions together were very intense, both working independently with a great awareness of our own tools but always moving toward a meeting point of creative synchronicity.” Whether or not they had a sexual relationship scarcely mattered. “What Antonioni was saying in the photo-shoot scene between David Hemmings and myself in Blow-Up was happening with Avedon in a much more subtle way. We were mentally connected from the time I entered the studio to when I left at the end of the day.” For his part Avedon thought Veruschka was the most beautiful woman in the world. He loved her extraordinary ability to refashion herself at will in front of the camera. “Veruschka’s bones, her body, her extraordinary length have compelled her to invent her own person. . . . Veruschka is the only woman I permit to look at herself in the mirror while I am photographing her. The mirror makes most women aw
are of their weaknesses. . . . Veruschka knows that it is what’s peculiar to her that’s beautiful and she works to bring it forward.”

  The team for Japan included Ara Gallant, hair artist or possibly hair sculptor, since even “hairdresser extraordinaire” does not begin to do justice to the colossal explosions of hair fantasy that became his trademark. (Born in the Bronx as Ira Gallantz, Gallant was another who fled his background for “the land of Style” and changed himself into something more exotic.) Gallant gave models vast tresses that spun, whirled, and soared into the air. “He made hair expressive,” writes Holly Brubach. “In Avedon’s photos of leaping, skipping models, even their hair [was] energized.” Gallant achieved “flying hair” using Dynel, a synthetic fiber that came in many colors. It was much loved by Diana, who described her Dynel period as one of the happiest of her life. The Japan trip was hard going but marked the beginning of an intense working relationship between Gallant, Mellen, and Avedon. “Some of the conditions were very harsh but this is part of what made the magic. We were all in a team constantly working towards the resolve and result,” said Mellen.