Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Meanwhile a challenge to fashion itself was building on another flank. Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and although this book did not ignite the contemporary women’s movement as sometimes suggested, it hit a nerve. On the one hand, most Americans believed that a normal family consisted of a homemaking mother who looked after the children, and a breadwinning father. On the other, women were going back to work in larger numbers than ever before by the early 1960s; and the young women of the Youthquake were going to college in greater numbers too, frequently becoming involved in protest movements and left-wing debate when they arrived on campus, since it was impossible to ignore. As young, educated women emerged into the job market in the late 1960s, they saw discrimination and sexist attitudes with fresh eyes, and at every turn; and as small groups of women started to raise their own “consciousness” in the late 1960s, they drew the attention of much less extreme women to a panoply of mechanisms designed to keep them in their place, including the all-powerful media, supported by advertising, especially on television and in women’s magazines.

  Possibly because they were unsure how to address the success of The Feminine Mystique, which was excerpted and much discussed in midmarket women’s magazines, Diana and Allene Talmey waited until the March 15 issue of 1966, the year in which Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), before giving her any kind of platform. They also approached her sideways, by commissioning an article about Friedan’s book from Jessica Mitford, who, by dint of being author of The American Way of Death, a well-known radical, and the sister of the writer Nancy Mitford, the Nazi sympathizer Unity Mitford, and the Duchess of Devonshire, had a unique point of view that could not possibly be mistaken for Vogue’s. “Oh Betty Friedan, what hast thou wrought?” wrote Mitford. “An obsession with being Interesting, a new mass movement, a craze for the individuality of women, that’s what. Mrs. Friedan’s thesis . . . is that women whose interests are limited to household responsibilities tend to become bored and neurotic. I must quickly say that I agree with the substance of her argument; but as so often happens, it has been seized upon and pulled out of shape by some of her devotees.” Jessica Mitford, an Englishwoman by birth, noted that America had a long tradition of highly original, individual women with an “inborn buoyancy of spirit that enables them to withstand the slings and arrows of outraged conformists,” and that modern feminists were simply following in their footsteps. Tongue in cheek, she added: “Beware! There are indications of sinister forces at work seeking to undermine your newfound individuality. Somebody up there is watching you, namely the fashion editors. They may force you into a common stereotype yet.”

  By 1969 this had ceased to be a joke. Many different “feminisms” were now emerging; and while early twentieth-century suffragists—including Mrs. Pankhurst—had embraced fashion and beauty as weapons in the female arsenal, groups more radical than Betty Friedan were loudly taking exception to the idea that women should be judged by their appearance, and that a woman’s life should be dedicated to making herself alluring to men. At sixty-seven, Diana did not deal easily with the idea that a woman should want to do anything else. “I believe women are naturally dependent on men,” she told Christopher Hemphill. “The beauty of painting, of literature, of music, of love . . . this is what men have given the world, not women. I think all women are muses—m-u-s-e-s in one way or another. You’re not exactly talking to a feminist mover.”

  Partly because of Reed, Diana could see that male identity was changing, and she thoroughly approved. “The feminine side of SO MANY men has come out that has never come out before. I see this all the time. It’s practically every man.” She was, however, confounded by changing conceptions of the way women lived their lives. Now that they had the Pill, asked Diana, what else did they want? Her view, in line with Jessica Mitford’s article, was that America had a long tradition of doughty female individualists, and once such women had reliable contraception there was nothing to hold them back. “How free can you get? Isadora Duncan was free. How liberated can you get? I remember my grandmother very well. She was an impossible, extraordinary woman. If anyone was liberated, she was.” Later, Diana liked to recall her riposte to a scruffy radical feminist who challenged Vogue’s emphasis on surface decoration and explained that she had no wish to be any man’s plaything: “If that’s the case, my dear,” said Diana, “you haven’t got a worry in the world.”

  However, Vogue was not straightforwardly antifeminist in the late 1960s. One glance at Diana’s 1960s fashion pages reveals that she was on the same side as feminists who believed that women should enjoy their bodies and embrace sensuality. She had always loved fashion that worked with the dynamic, active body, and she continued to venerate it throughout her time at the magazine. At Vogue, Diana’s predilection for body-celebrating fashion showed in spread after spread, from the body-hugging psychedelic catsuit modeled by Mme Jean-Claude Abreu at Giza in 1965, to the stripped-back fashion of the miniskirt and the midriff-baring top, the minidress that required toned upper arms, and eventually designs that bared bosoms too. “Rosemary, don’t forget that transparency has taken a big step in this world. It is very much part of fashion. It is not peekaboo,” she wrote in a memo to Rosemary Blackmon, with a copy to Richard Avedon.

  The body is quite clearly defined whether it is the bust (BIKINI), whether it is the legs, whatever it is. . . . we are dealing with an entire generation who are insane about revealing their bosoms and when I say insane I mean insane with joy and one day soon they hope they will walk down the Champs Elysee [sic] with nothing above the waist.”

  Here Vogue had some catching up to do. While its staff were canceling navels in 1962, Christina Paolozzi appeared naked from the waist up in Bazaar, photographed by Richard Avedon. But from 1966 on, images tumbled onto Vogue’s pages that no one would have dreamed of suggesting to poor Jessica Daves: a model photographed by Gianni Penati in a Galanos dress, with bare legs and feet, pulling up the skirt of her dress in an erotically suggestive way; Lauren Hutton’s breast (but not her face) emerging glistening from an unbuttoned Van Raalte bodysuit, on a beach in 1969, photographed by Richard Avedon; Irving Penn’s photo of a naked Marisa Berenson, draped only in chain necklaces, that appeared in a beauty bulletin in April 1970. “Pride of body,” proclaimed Vogue in September 1967:

  It shapes the mores, stamps the art, and helps form the special character by which every age is forever identified. . . . In the very best sense, we enjoy our bodies—not in their tape-measured perfection, but in the naturalness with which we’ve become free to use them. . . . It has taken a century, but at long last we’ve emerged from our Victorian past.

  Moreover, Diana’s pleasure in the glory of the human body was not confined to women. In the early 1960s Richard Avedon photographed Rudolf Nureyev dancing naked, with every muscle, every sinew stretched in a backward arch that suggested the outer limits of human endeavor striving for perfection. “Nureyev, here in an agony of action, could have been the source and inspiration for many of Michelangelo’s sublime realizations of the human form,” read the caption. It was an image Diana reserved for the 1967 Christmas issue of Vogue, and later recalled that it had been captured at a memorable shoot. She was a great admirer of Nureyev, and unusually, she made sure she was present when he came to Avedon’s studio. Nureyev, who arrived straight from an overnight flight, warmed up by dancing around the studio, in and out of the waiting crowd of assistants. Then he disappeared behind a screen and removed all his clothes. At this point the assistants were dispatched, leaving only Diana and Avedon in the studio as Nureyev emerged from behind the screen. “You know how it is with men in the mornings,” said Diana to the writer Andrew Solomon when she was in her eighties, startling him with an extraordinary vertical gesture. “And it was like that! And it stayed that way for such a long time! And there was nothing we could do but wait for it to go down! . . . And it was very strange, but it was . . . impossibly beautiful!”
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  Unlike many women of her generation, Diana welcomed the arrival of the Pill and the sexual freedom that came with it, though at the time this was implied in Vogue’s fashion spreads rather than made explicit. It was Jessica Daves who first commissioned an article about the Pill a year after it was licensed for use, in 1961. Diana did not run another major feature on the subject until April 15, 1967, when the number of American women using the Pill was thought by Vogue to have risen from one hundred thousand in 1961 to more than 5 million. (Passionately interested in the relationship between science, health, and beauty, she gave more space, page for page, to the promise held out by hormone replacement therapy.) Looking back later, however, she saw the Pill as one of the great breakthroughs of the twentieth century. “To me, the Pill was the turning point in the whole younger generation, because it created a totally different society. . . . The Pill was true freedom. Girls and boys could do anything; they were protected.” She particularly welcomed the dent made by the Pill in puritanical American attitudes. “We all know people were as stiff as starch before they met their . . . mmmmm. Sex loosens up.”

  Vogue’s reader, as imagined by Diana, was a sensual, sexy, strong, independent, intelligent, and creative woman. Diana had long believed that women animated clothes rather than the other way around, and had been the first to publish the names of her top models and work with the grain of their individual personalities. Diana’s constant emphasis on doing one’s own fashion thing, and her conviction that style was accessible to anyone, accelerated the collapse of restrictive ideals of “proper” womanhood that Vogue had promoted in the 1950s; and there were moments when the magazine explicitly grappled with the whole issue of changing female identity. A feature in January 1967 mused on the way girls and boys were dressing alike, a phenomenon that fascinated Diana. However, as the stripped-back fashion and the undressed women in Vogue became ever more erotic and eroticized through the lens of David Bailey, Richard Avedon, Bert Stern, and Helmut Newton, the magazine came in for sharp criticism, and not just from a shocked older generation.

  By 1969 feminists of different political hues were questioning just who was gaining most from the sexual revolution of the 1960s. This reaction was undoubtedly provoked on the left by boorish male radicals who denied women a voice at protest meetings and expected them to do the typing and make coffee. But there was also wider unease at the extent to which the sexual revolution was taking place on male terms. This was a revolution where young women were expected to be constantly “up for it,” but characterized as sluts if they exercised sexual freedom. Women who saw sexual liberation differently, as a way of achieving true sexual equality with men, with exciting potential for a new balance and harmony between men and women, often ended up being made to feel ashamed of themselves. It was also clear that men were enjoying all the advantages of sexual liberation but walking away from intractably old-fashioned problems like pregnancy.

  Unsurprisingly, feminist groups started to notice a gap between everyday reality and the rhetoric of sexual liberation with which they felt bombarded by advertisers and the media. By 1970 feminist debate, some of it quite extreme, was concerning itself with images of women’s bodies as they appeared in fashion magazines, with voices arguing that fashion itself was mired in false consciousness. Women, went the argument, were being fooled. They were being deluded into thinking they could buy perfection; they were being manipulated into seeing themselves as inadequate; they were even being tricked into thinking that women’s magazines were really for them, when in fact, images of seminaked women in fashion spreads were being created by men designing women for the male gaze. From this perspective, Irving Penn’s photograph of Marisa Berenson clad in nothing but jewelry represented nothing less than male colonization of the female body, an act of aggression that more radical feminist groups sought to reverse.

  As feminist antifashion pronouncements became more doctrinaire, Vogue’s position on feminism equivocated and then hardened. In June 1970 Vogue ran a profile of several powerful American women titled “People: Liberated, All Liberated,” which reflected Diana’s view that female liberation was really nothing new. On September 1, 1970, Vogue ran an article by Sally Beauman entitled “Who’s So Liberated? Why?” which was at best uncertain in tone and at worst positively sneering. It was all very well being liberated in a seminar, said Beauman, but it was quite another matter at a dinner party, in the office, or in bed. The article included a “Feminism v. Femininity” rating, poking uneasy fun at women like Susan Sontag: “A tomboy who suffers from a bad Electra complex, has mysteriously produced a son, and tends to look upon men as intellectual wrestling opponents. Regrettably, no humor.” The same issue also ran a beauty feature asserting that “the true impact of an unforgettable woman is a heart-stopping face, each feature an enchantment on its own.” Clearly Vogue was never going to appeal to radical feminists. But in dismissing all feminism as so much nonsense, Diana not only ignored the possibility that some feminists might have a point, but overlooked the way in which the insights of more moderate feminism were persuading less extreme women to reconsider their own position, not just at work but at home.

  For her part Diana saw womankind heading in a quite different direction. “In my opinion in the year 2001 so many physical problems will have been surmounted that a woman’s beauty will be a dream that will be completely obtainable,” said Diana to Carol Phillips in 1967. Controlling the figure would no longer be a problem, and all the difficulties caused by “the various feminine rhythms” would have been resolved. So what would a woman do with her time? “It will then amuse and entertain her to paint herself as if she was a heathen idol,” said Diana. “Imitating and creating anew each time she wishes to step into the world into her room or wherever it is that she is amusing herself to be.” Alongside the body painting, Diana predicted a seriously punishing bathing routine. “She will probably bathe three or four times a day as she will be very conscious of keeping herself in a completely exhilarated invigorated state and very much Diane de Poitiers and will probably take three cold baths a day.” Freedom from so many constraints would give women far more time for beauty, as well as time to be busy and productive. The two, thought Diana, went hand in hand. “The future holds a golden world. . . . It will be for beauty it will be for intelligent productiveness.”

  For the first time in her professional life Diana misread a profound cultural and economic shift. Whether she liked it or not, one powerful consequence of the Youthquake was a new generation of young women, educated as never before, who were aiming for professional careers, not four baths a day. These middle- and upper-class young women in their late twenties and early thirties were no longer spending “clothes-dollars” dished out by men, but earning their own and wanting clothes that were suitable for professional lives. Instead of embracing this new trend, however, these powerful young women made Diana uneasy. Implicitly at least, she had always made a distinction between women who were “clever” and educated, and readers of Vogue. Most of Vogue’s readers, she contended to Ann Taylor, did not read a word of it. Fashion was a visual world, and Vogue’s readers were inspired by its images, not its text. “I mean [at Vogue], we’re asked to help, we’re asked to direct by people who are fashion conscious.” Such people were creative, people with an imaginative spark in contrast to the intellectual genius of, say, a distinguished anthropologist like Margaret Mead. She did not need Vogue, Diana maintained to Ann Taylor. “She’s got two washed dresses and is the most brilliant woman in the country.”

  It was the conservatism of the younger generation that Diana disliked more than anything. When educated young women came to work at the magazine she frequently felt that all the pizzazz had been drilled out of them. Her unease about this was reflected in the manner in which Vogue presented Frances FitzGerald to readers alongside her article about the people of Vietnam in May 1967. Frances FitzGerald was “disarmingly pretty” and she was certainly educated: “Magna Cum Laude Radcliffe
’62,” but she was “exacting in her facts and her purposes . . . [and] has caught what the American college woman often only chases after, an independent, creative mind.” In contrast with FitzGerald the young college women who came to work at Vogue were not only dull but astonishingly ignorant: “They’ve been to the best schools, and they have never heard of Anna Karenina; they don’t know whether you’re talking about a brand of toothpaste, or what.”

  Diana found it difficult to connect with a construction of the female self that was not primarily driven by style, seemed unable to understand that young women earning their own money had to be careful about how they spent it, and was baffled by the idea that they regarded making themselves alluring during the working day as the least of their worries. Rather than understand that unadventurous but versatile clothes were essential for women making inroads into new socioeconomic territory, Diana thought the modern woman had retreated back to dismal American conformism. “She never wants to be first. . . . Safe from what! Nobody knows. But safe.” Could she not help such women by telling them how to look good in a sweater and skirt rather than dressed up as a Gypsy? asked Ann Taylor. But Diana had a different solution. Conservative women should express themselves with an überconservative fashion look like that of the 1950s: “They would probably look perfectly delightful as it would suit them and suit their dispositions.”