Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Blass sensed, like many others, that there was something artificial about Diana, even in her sixties, but he came closer to a sympathetic understanding than many, even if he took her story about being brought up in Paris at face value while dismissing much of what she said as untrue:

  She was an amalgam of stories and half-truths and outright lies that served her ideal, and which sometimes seemed a charade, but in New York, amid kindred souls, was utterly comprehended. And for that reason, despite her Paris birth, her love of French clothes, her polished soles, her frequent evocations of Chanel, Bébé Bérard and Queen Mary—all those things we have come to associate with this vague antique world of Vreelandia—I think Diana was deeply American. She combined Twain’s reverence for the reinvented self with Barnum’s love of showmanship, and she spent her life perfecting this blend.

  Blass thought her surrealist conception of her self saved Diana from disappointment many times; and that her skill as an editor had nothing much to do with some mysterious ability to put her hand on the pulse of the zeitgeist.

  Rather, it had to do with something more powerful, more innate, a belief held in common with others who had been born outside New York, and which saved them, too, on many occasions—and that was her perception of herself. Diana saw the world through her own eyes, and that was truth enough for her.

  Diana went back to work very quickly after Reed’s death in 1966, and though Alexander Liberman would later attribute her “wildness” in the years that followed to the absence of Reed’s calm and restraining hand, it was the 1960s that grew wilder and Diana who caught the mood. In 1965, the year of Vogue’s Youthquake and the very short miniskirt, race riots erupted after Malcolm X was killed in February, the bombing of North Vietnam intensified sharply, and ground-troop numbers soared. Antiwar feeling among college-educated youth intensified in response. The year of Reed’s death was marked by widespread campus riots as U.S. troop numbers in Vietnam rose to four hundred thousand and Timothy Leary encouraged the young to turn on, tune in, and drop out. Betty Friedan, who had published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), giving moderate feminists an organizational voice for the first time. Across America the personal was rapidly becoming the political. The Food and Drug Administration had licensed the Pill for use in 1960, finally making sexual freedom for women possible; but in 1966 the equation of premarital sex with personal liberation still felt radical.

  Against this background fashion itself exploded. From the midpoint of the decade, ideas came from wholly unexpected directions; the global market for clothes expanded as never before; and new trends came and went faster than they ever had. To complicate matters further, the structure of the fashion industry also changed rapidly in the second part of the 1960s. Much of this was driven by the Youthquake. By 1970 one-third of the American population was under twenty. This huge demographic shift profoundly affected the way clothes were sold. Even the grandest designers introduced prêt-a-porter lines, stimulating a huge expansion in ready-to-wear. By the mid-60s Mary Quant’s shop Bazaar (she hated the term “boutique”) had spawned hundreds of imitators, to the extent that designers like Quant and Barbara Hulanicki of Biba in London took over from the couture as the leading experimenters in fashion. The boutique owner-designers produced cutting-edge ideas in brand-new materials and created instant trends. Unencumbered by couture schedules, they reacted instantaneously to fresh ideas from the street and brought new designs to the market in a fraction of the time, which speeded up short-lived fads. The arrival of the jet not only meant more travel for everyone, including the more spiritual young journeying to the East in search of enlightenment. It also meant that boutique design—and thus youth fashion—traveled fast across the Atlantic in both directions, influencing haute couture, ready-to-wear, and the mass market in both the United States and Europe. These changes delighted Diana. She hired Carrie Donovan from the New York Times and put her in charge of a boutique column in which fashionable young women like Baby Jane Holzer and Sharon Tate dropped in on small shops in London, Paris, and New York and tried on everything that appealed to them.

  The rise of ready-to-wear, boutique, and youth fashion coincided with a further destructuring of clothes themselves that was brilliantly charted by Diana in Vogue’s pages from 1966 onward. Her composite approach to editing meant that haute couture and more conventional designers and society figures always had their place; but in Vogue’s most prominent spreads the woman in a little mink throw disappeared altogether, to be replaced by Turquerie, caftans, Lurex stockings, hot pants, miniskirts, and white kid boots. Since neither 1960s fashion nor Diana ever moved forward in a straight line, it is courting danger to assert that there was one issue of American Vogue in which she achieved a paradigm shift, a moment when the fashion of the long 1950s crossed over to the mode of today. But it was arguably the April 1, 1966 issue, on page 117, where a “Vogue’s Eye View” editorial titled “Girl in the Chips” presented the magazine’s readers with a photograph of the first black supermodel, Donyale Luna, with her hair cut in a Vidal Sassoon bob, wearing a contemporary, pop-arty “fast little shift” made by Paco Rabanne from acetate poker chips. The dress was almost see-through and the effect of Guy Bourdin’s photograph was to draw the eye to Luna’s lithe body and her implausibly long limbs.

  As 1966 gave way to the “be-ins” of Central Park and the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, Vogue too moved toward the overlaying of different lines, volumes, and fabrics, layering design upon design, and mixing new pieces with vintage clothing. The feel of the magazine shifted as fashion, people, and aesthetics subtly altered once again. Though Diana did not have much time for real hippies, regarding them as unkempt and generally disgusting, she engaged enthusiastically with the style of hedonistic countercultures of the late 1960s. From 1967 onward there was hippy inspired fashion from Haight-Ashbury, which manifested itself in psychedelic prints, sandals, headbands, and “ethnic” styles; and romantic fashions inspired by Beau Brummell—velvet skirts, silk waistcoats, knickerbockers, and large floppy hats. Alongside this there was “Nifty American” fashion: inventive sportswear aimed at active women who were constantly on the move, “the kind of fashion American women live in, look marvellous in . . . the fashion they made famous all over the world.” Hemlines fell and rose again; but even when the trend was toward a more covered-up look, Vogue led the way in emphasizing the need for a healthy diet, serious exercise, and a toned, dancer’s body that could cope with the stripped-back look of Donyale Luna in a Paco Rabanne minidress and a leotard as well as a caftan.

  In the end it was the fashion eclecticism that emerged during the second part of the 1960s that was arguably more significant than any one style. It was part of a wider process of liberalization that had been going on for two decades but finally reached a point in the mid- to late-1960s where individual autonomy became a defining idea. This profound social change manifested itself in the way both women and men were choosing to dress and style themselves. “On the whole, fashion had become less a matter of designer diktat and more a question of personal choice—in fact it could be asserted that the mini was the last universal fashion,” writes the fashion historian Valerie D. Mendes. A wealth of competing fashion ideas handed power back to the consumer, at the expense of the designer, the fashion magazine, and anyone or anything else deeming themselves an authority in matters of style. In certain households this shift led to fine intergenerational battles about clothes and length of hair; but Diana saw it as liberating for readers of Vogue. The reader was finally free—within limits—to become her own editor: “It’s your show and you run it your way—you pick, you choose, you take what you want and make the most of it.”

  The “do whatever” zeitgeist of the late 1960s was close to Diana’s longstanding and passionate belief in inventiveness. It chimed with her conviction that the American woman of the 1960s could style herself as whoever she wanted to be, given just a little im
agination. “Do whatever” in Vogue appeared to resonate with the youthful, anti-authoritarian, hallucinogenic feeling of the hour; but it was no different from the aesthetic of the “Why Don’t You?” column. Indeed, Vogue in the late 1960s often read in much the same way: “You take the most discreet black sweater and you hang fifteen gold necklaces on it [sic]—in fifteen different lengths and fifteen different textures and fifteen different designs; and some are precious and some are bunkum,” said Vogue. The idea was to put one idea on top of another. Discretion contrasted with surprise; simplicity contrasted with extravagance. “Invent yourself. Improvise—underplay, overplay, create. . . . Modern fashion isn’t a setpiece, it changes every day.”

  Diana’s embrace of the free spirit of the 1960s had an electrifying impact on Vogue’s fashion spreads. “I was saved by the 60s,” Avedon said. “Because the clothes were so extraordinary.” The models sent to him by Diana were just as remarkable. Diana reinforced her stamp on Vogue’s imagery by unearthing yet more young women whose quirky, kooky beauty, long limbs, and chemistry with the camera projected the spirit of the hour and played to her latest fantasy of the Girl. “The girl herself is the extravaganza that makes the look of the sixties,” wrote Vogue on March 15, 1968. “Every couturier, consciously or not, knows her as the vital ingredient in his designs.” From 1966 onward, as fashion became more eclectic, Diana offered the readers and designers an ever greater range, sending Funny Girls like Barbra Streisand rather than models to Paris to be photographed in clothes from the collections; and conversely, printing the names of favored models and encouraging them to express their individuality.

  Unusually, Diana had to impose the model Lauren Hutton on Richard Avedon. The second of Diana’s Laurens, Hutton, who was christened Mary, had actually renamed herself after Lauren Bacall, and they both came to epitomize a classic, fresh-faced blond American look. At five feet six, with a slightly asymmetrical face and famously gap toothed, Lauren Hutton was anything but conventional model material at first glance. But when he first met her Avedon rejected her, not because she looked odd but because he thought she was too ordinary, “a broad.” In reality Lauren Hutton was not ordinary. She was brought up in Florida, in an atmosphere of subterranean violence, too much alcohol, and a stepfather who wanted her out of the house as much as possible so that he could have Hutton’s mother to himself. By way of outdoor amusement he taught Hutton how to fish and catch a rattlesnake with her bare hands. “There were five things besides my stepfather that lived in our backyard in that swamp that could have killed me: four different kinds of poisonous snakes, 300 pound alligators,” said Hutton. When she met Diana, Hutton had borrowed two hundred dollars from her mother to go traveling in Africa. But the plan went awry and she found herself working as a house model for Dior in New York to keep a roof over her head.

  Hutton was spotted at Dior by Vogue fashion editor Catherine di Montezemolo and invited to come in and model at one of Diana’s run-throughs. Hutton decided during this visit that she was in the fashion equivalent of a dank Florida swamp and retreated into a corner, only to find herself at the end of Diana’s celebrated index finger. “You. You have quite a presence,” said Diana. “So do you, ma’am,” said a flustered Hutton. Diana saw in Hutton a quirky, 1960s take on the Lauren Bacall American girl and dispatched her to Avedon who had, by now, dismissed her three times. Not knowing what to do with her, Avedon asked her where she came from. “I said Florida, and he asked, ‘What did you do there?’ ” Hutton replied that she played in the woods. “He asked, ‘Woods?’ and he looked up from behind his equipment. ‘What did you do in the woods?’ I said, ‘Well, there were lots of snakes and turtles, and I would run and jump over them and leap over the logs.’ . . . He got up. He uncurled himself, put a little X on the floor, and said, ‘Go over there and run and jump.’ ” Although they were seen as a radical innovation in 1966, Avedon’s pictures of Hutton running and jumping marked the introduction to 1960s Vogue of Munkácsi’s active, athletic fresh-faced “farm girls jumping over fences” in Bazaar a full thirty years earlier. Hutton would turn out to be a model with an extraordinary range, but in 1966 she had the special magic of a tomboy who became an American beauty.

  Penelope Tree, by contrast, came to epitomize Vogue’s flower-power period and materialized in front of Diana at a party, just a few months after her discovery of Hutton. On November 28, 1966, she went to dinner with Ronald and Marietta Tree before Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, where she encountered their seventeen-year-old daughter. Penelope Tree was wearing a skimpy, see-through dress by Betsey Johnson that appalled her father but thoroughly impressed Diana and became the talk of the night. Diana telephoned Tree the next morning and sent her straight to Avedon. “She was gawky, a little hunched over, with stringy hair, absolutely not a beauty at all,” said Polly Mellen. When Tree came to the studio for a sitting in July 1967, Mellen thought she looked like a gangly little urchin. “I came out and said to Dick, ‘I don’t know. She doesn’t fit the clothes. Look, the arms are much longer than they should be.’ He said, ‘She’s ready. Don’t touch her. She’s perfect.’ ” Diana agreed. “I am really fascinated by how beautifully built she is,” she wrote to Avedon. “I suggest that we use some highlighting on her cheekbones and that we are of course very careful with the eye makeup that it will not close the eye but will open it. . . . she takes on a definite authority in clothes as she has a real feeling for clothes and not just a selfish feeling for clothes.”

  Penelope Tree’s first major appearance in Vogue took place in October 1967, modeling “new fashion raves” and accompanied by an article called “The Penelope Tree,” by Polly Devlin. “She projects the spirit of the hour,” wrote Devlin, “a walking fantasy, an elongated exaggeratedly-huge-eyed beautiful doodle drawn by a wistful couturier searching for the ideal girl.” Tree was photographed by Avedon in a sequence of four poses in a black bell-bottomed pantsuit, straight hair flying; and in a huge close-up with the enormous Briolette of India diamond in one eye. Diana’s campaign to confer fashion authority on Tree continued in January 1968 in a feature called “Fantastree”—fourteen pages of fashion that turned on the idea of romance: organdy pantaloons ruffled over moccasined feet, lace at the wrist, and ruffles up to the chin. It took imagination to wear romantic fashion romantically, said Vogue, and Penelope Tree was the girl who knew how to do it, who had the special kind of gesture to make lace cuffs blow about, who woke up in the morning and just knew that she should wear dozens and dozens of tiny Indian silver bells on her fingers. Tree seemed magically to capture the hippy-trippy spirit of the day, but that was the least of it. She was witty and intelligent too. “Penelope Tree is the girl of her dreams,” said Vogue. “What she is in her imagination she becomes in reality—Greek boy, maja, Indian chief . . . all mystery and seductiveness one moment; in the next, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.”

  Diana appears to have divined something of herself and her past in all her favorite models of the 1960s. She loved Veruschka’s capacity for reinvention and her instinct for self-fashioning. Lauren Hutton was Diana the huntress, a daredevil beauty whose feeling for the wild and for Africa can only have brought to mind Emily Dalziel at her most dashing. Penelope Tree, meanwhile, came from a smart Anglo-American background that was similar to Diana’s own. At one point Diana had three generations of the family photographed for Vogue: Penelope’s mother, Marietta, her grandmother, Mrs. Malcolm E. Peabody, and her half sister Frances FitzGerald. She also commissioned an article about Ronald Tree at his house in Barbados, presenting the whole family as glamorous, intelligent, and formidable. Curiously, Tree’s upbringing was almost as unhappy as Diana’s and for much the same reason. Marietta Tree was not a loving mother; and Tree spent most of her childhood in the nursery while her mother had affairs. Marisa Berenson became another of Diana’s favorite models from the late 1960s onward. She was a great beauty who felt herself to be profoundly ugly, but she was talked into confidence about her looks by Di
ana, who refused to allow Berenson to feel undermined by the critical remarks of those closest to her. She earned Berenson’s lifelong gratitude and friendship for this, but it almost destroyed the relationship between Diana and Berenson’s grandmother, Elsa Schiaparelli, who was furious with Diana for encouraging her granddaughter to model. Ironically, this seems to have been because Schiaparelli was a snob who wanted Berenson to marry a prince, and felt that modeling was vulgar and beneath her.

  The model who took the skinny, prepubescent look of the later 1960s further than any other was Twiggy. Diana did not discover English-born Lesley Hornby and never pretended that she had, but she used her constantly throughout 1967, putting Vogue’s seal on her celebrity while Twiggy was still seventeen. The love affair began in the February 15, 1967 issue, with Twiggy modeling prêt-a-porter fashion, and photographed by David Bailey. Diana overrode Irving Penn’s objections to being asked to work with a “scrap” by commissioning Bert Stern to photograph Twiggy at the Paris collections in a seven-page spread that included a famous image of her gazing wistfully at herself in a mirror. Shortly after this, Twiggy made the cover of Vogue for the first time (April 15, 1967), and traveled to New York for a shoot with Avedon at Diana’s invitation, to be greeted by a Beatle-worthy frenzy. In the August 1, 1967 issue, Twiggy and Avedon bounced off each other to create strong, vivid new images, including Twiggy in huge “flying hair” created for her by Ara Gallant, and leading a fashion spread called “Daring Young Romantics.” This featured eighteenth-century styles from a range of American designers including Geoffrey Beene, Harold Levine, and Anne Fogarty. As far as Diana was concerned, Twiggy was not just a successful young model whose figure was “the master pattern for a million teen-agers all over the world”: she was a link between American Vogue and the working-class stars of the London pop scene. As far as Twiggy was concerned, Diana’s interest and her invitation to New York gave her the all-important break in North America. “The call from Vreeland was the match that lit the blue touch paper,” she said.