Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  By the autumn of 1970 Diana’s failure to sense new moods mattered. The September 1, 1970, issue of Vogue misfired badly with a prominent spread created by Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, who styled some of the new season’s American designs on models dressed up as Native Americans. Instead of striking an imaginative and witty note this looked ridiculous, passé, and insensitive, since Native American poverty was already a live political issue. As usual Mainbocher and Norell were spared such treatment with more conventional spreads, but the veteran American designer Adele Simpson, who was also an advertiser, is said to have hated the styling of her clothes so much that she refused to allow Vogue to photograph them again. There was an air of strain and unease about the issue more generally, and it was forced onto the defensive about furs. But Diana pushed on in her own romantic direction. The silhouette of the Girl of late 1970, she wrote in one memo, “can easily be compared with the moyen age heroines such as Queen Guinevere and Tennyson’s Lady of Shallott [sic].” In early 1971 Diana saw her in the hippy-chic of the beautiful Talitha Getty as she flitted around the world wearing mirrored dresses, fisherwomen’s lace caps, and a wreath of green leaves, before dying of a drug overdose a short time later. Even before this, Vogue’s readers were begging to differ in significant numbers. In the face of recession, an antifashion mood underscored by feminist characterization of high style as the enemy, and a feeling that the clothes in Vogue were simply irrelevant to their lives, they stopped buying the magazine. As readers deserted, advertisers took fright. Vogue was not alone in suffering falling revenues: Bazaar also suffered badly. But Vogue’s losses became catastrophic. In the first three months of 1971, Condé Nast’s flagship publication suffered a 38 percent drop in advertising, and in the rush for cover, the blame was laid firmly at Diana’s door.

  Her supporters fell away. She had already alienated many on Seventh Avenue. “What is the name of that designer who hates me so?” she once asked. “Legion,” Nicky de Gunzburg replied. For every Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, there were many who were up in arms about her approach. Some, like Norman Norrell, had long mistrusted her. Others were alienated by her refusal to attend their openings, and her much-vaunted scorn for Seventh Avenue “cookie cutter” clothes. June Weir, fashion editor of WWD at the time, has cautioned about overstating the extent to which the ire of designers was aimed solely at Diana: “They were always complaining, whatever one did.” Oscar de la Renta sometimes objected to the way his designs were styled in the late 1960s, yet his friendship with Diana remained intact. But Babs Simpson recalled that by 1971 many designers and manufacturers were genuinely furious, so angry that at least one of them only admitted her to his building by a back elevator because she was from Vogue. Carol Phillips thought that, consciously or not, the depth of their anger was caused by Diana’s warm embrace of “do whatever” because such radicalism posed a danger to Seventh Avenue by passing decision-making power to the consumer. Diana was blamed for sensing a much wider trend, one that undermined the cosy complicity between the fashion press, designers, and manufacturers who could no longer rely on turning a profit each season by ganging up and telling women what to wear. “In a funny way, it [led] to the destruction of the fashion industry,” said Phillips.

  Internal support leached away too. Even colleagues who admired Diana began to feel she was losing touch, that “do whatever” was dictatorial in its own way, and that her view of fashion had had its day. Others, like Babs Simpson, had already been ranged against her for longer, believing that Diana had begun brilliantly but was drunk on self-importance, had gotten much too far ahead of the readers, and was “trashing” the magazine. There were some, of course, who had felt the rough end of Diana’s tongue too often and had no urge to defend her. Diana had never been easy to work for even when things were going well. “Vogue was high drama, amateur theater. Everyone was trying to be ‘adventurous’ and ‘amusing’ and ‘Up . . . up . . . up!’ to please Vreeland,” wrote Grace Mirabella, who adored Diana once she came to know her. But this made for a less than pleasant environment as editors jostled for favor. The atmosphere at run-throughs, as Lauren Hutton had noticed, could be horrible. As the pressure grew, Diana became more ferocious, inconsistent, and arbitrary. She fired one otherwise competent young woman for having a clumping, noisy walk. (“She should have taken more care, George,” she told Plimpton.) When staff members started to complain about her behavior, Liberman attempted to hold editorial meetings, but they became a shambles. “She wouldn’t listen or she’d go off on some subject.” She was often fascinating, said Liberman, but that was not the point.

  As the American economy contracted, Seventh Avenue manufacturers began to lose money and the cost of Diana’s working habits became another bone of contention. Diana’s behavior in Paris during the collections was a particularly sore point. She dismissed the idea of working out of the Vogue offices in the place du Palais Bourbon, and set herself up in a hotel as Carmel Snow had always done. But in Diana’s case it was a matter of converting her suite in the Hôtel de Crillon into an office, complete with furniture and half a dozen special phone lines, with enough space for Susan Train, her assistant, and Diana’s own secretaries. “You never had any peace,” said Carrie Donovan. “But imagine the expense. The expense was wild.” To make matters worse, Diana increasingly went to see only the collections of Paris couturiers she admired, refusing to do otherwise simply to please the business side of Condé Nast.

  Moreover, her inventive fantasies had always been expensive. Motivating the fashion industry did not come cheap. Mirabella wrote: “Inventing a look like . . . ‘Scheherazade’ meant drawing up a Concept, finding fabric swatches, commissioning the clothes, working out the accessories and hair with all the different fashion editors, dress rehearsing the look in the office, sometimes with the actual model, and Polaroiding it, so that every detail would be absolutely perfect on the day of the sitting.” Shoots became more dangerous as Diana’s ideas grew wilder. One involved Babs Simpson, John Cowan, Ara Gallant, and two models, who went by helicopter to photograph evening dresses on top of a mountain peak in the Andes. Cowan was determined to make it look as if the models were floating in the clouds. At five o’clock, when the helicopter pilot told them it was unsafe to stay any longer, Cowan insisted on staying to get what he wanted. The helicopter took off, abandoning the Vogue party on the top of the mountain. The team spent the night on the mountain huddled under Maximilian furs. “The next morning they found the Peruvian army waiting, absolutely furious, and pointing to the ground,” Mirabella recalled. “It was covered with mountain lion tracks.”

  There is no doubt that some of Diana’s character traits worked against her as the pressure grew. Carrie Donovan was one of Diana’s great admirers who felt the turbulence acutely in the fall of 1970. She was so concerned about the way Condé Nast’s executives were attempting to build a case against Diana behind her back that she asked to meet her for lunch. But Diana’s long-standing habit of not listening to what she did not want to hear meant that she cut Donovan short. Insofar as she did react, she batted away Donovan’s concerns by saying that it was all part of the job: “ ‘Oh, I know how to handle those boys. You just get tougher than they are,’ which is what she had been doing for a whole year,” said Donovan.

  When criticism from Condé Nast’s executives became impossible to ignore, there was nothing in Diana’s character that enabled her to deal with it strategically. Instead she reverted to the ways she had evolved in childhood. She exiled herself from the problem, shut her office door, and sat with a trusted colleague like Grace Mirabella, soothing herself with a tale of something beautiful, and moving to her secret inner world, the kind of world she was constantly entreating Vogue’s readers to make for themselves. “Her world,” she observed of a girl in a Sargent painting:

  She has created it for herself, it is real for herself—and therefore real to us . . . as we believe in the world of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes—a world which we know,
in fact, to be no larger than a tiny French village—but a world so fully imagined by its author and so deeply realized that it becomes seductively real, vast and borderless: the world of the romantic. . . . It is for you to discover for yourself, within yourself—within the silent, green-cool groves of an inner world where, alone and free, you may dream the possible dream: that the wondrous is real, because that is how you feel it to be, that is how you wish it to be . . . and how you wish it into being.

  Mirabella, who describes herself as loving Diana with a schoolgirl crush, became increasingly alarmed by Diana’s tendency to retreat into her own “silent, green-cool groves” as the real world grew more hostile. “I used to beg her to go before Alex and Si Newhouse and speak her piece. Because I knew that there was an inner logic to Vreeland’s apparent chaos. I knew that she had clear visions and solid plans. I also knew that Alex Liberman, for all his new talk about money, knew absolutely nothing about the business of running Vogue,” she said. But Diana refused to do it.

  However, the die was only finally cast once Liberman decided that it was no longer in his best interests to protect Diana and that it was time to move against her. Diana had made Liberman uneasy from the outset. Though he hired her from Bazaar, he had never really succumbed to her charm. He later described her as a “disciplined savage” and appreciated her meticulous side, but he never understood her way of motivating Vogue’s readers and her conviction that the best way to persuade women to spend money on clothes was to interest and inspire them. He disliked the “whole sort of court of admirers” who surrounded her. A man of little humor, he thought the atmosphere in her office was downright weird: “Games were played. I remember Cecil Beaton and Capote trying on different hats in Vreeland’s office.” Diana’s close relationship with Vogue’s photographers particularly dismayed him, for she carried on liaising with them closely, just as she had done at Bazaar. “I was not involved in planning. Vreeland would plan sittings in her office. And would tell whatever she would tell to inspire the photographer or say what she really hoped to get. And I think I never participated.” This was not how Liberman had worked with Edna Chase or Jessica Daves; and it made Diana his rival and altered the balance of power.

  The arrival of Avedon, for which Liberman had also campaigned, made matters worse. Used to his own way at Bazaar, Avedon took a tough line at Condé Nast after Liberman prevented him from taking a black model to Japan because he was concerned about Vogue’s advertisers in the south. After this, Avedon tended to deal directly with Diana. But this worried Liberman intensely. “Frankly, they’re both very strong personalities, Avedon and Vreeland. And they sort of became in cahoots.” Carol Philips thought that if Diana and Avedon did appear to be “in cahoots” it was unconscious: “I think it struck her as an efficiency. . . . I don’t think power was on her mind ever. . . . I think she thought about getting through the day. I think she thought about doing something exciting. I think she thought about being turned on.” But Liberman did not see it this way. “She was given too much power; she took too much power,” he said. She was out of control “like a wild horse.” He often found the images in Diana’s Vogue troubling, particularly the work of Avedon. The pages “were stronger than they should be,” with an undercurrent of violence. “I think there were two aggressiveness [sic] at work—Vreeland’s and Avedon’s. . . . It was too daring for its time.” While Vogue was riding high, Liberman kept his reservations to himself, and he was in any case occupied with problems on other Condé Nast magazines. But increasingly Liberman became concerned that Diana was just too avant-garde for Vogue’s readers: “The extremes of her taste that were beginning to be beyond the limits. You know, high fashion, high style, extremes in sophistication as opposed to practicality, availability. All of that was ignored. I kept saying, Diana, this is going too far.”

  As revenues dropped and Vogue sailed into more trouble, Liberman moved to ensure that none of the blame was directed at him. He attempted to exert the control he felt he should have exercised from the beginning. But it was too late: Diana refused to listen. Mistakes that might previously have seemed nugatory now loomed larger. One of the worst, about which Diana was deeply embarrassed, involved Lord Snowdon and an assignment for the 1970 Christmas issue. She arranged for Snowdon to photograph the racehorse Nijinsky, one of the great racehorses of all time and the property of Diana’s old friend Charles Engelhard. But somehow the head of another racehorse, Minsky, was substituted for Nijinsky’s in the final article. Diana was devastated, even though Charles Engelhard wrote a kind letter telling her not to worry. Soon afterward a very expensive shoot in Newfoundland was ruined by Diana’s decision to ask the highly unconventional Italian fashion editor Anna Piaggi to style it. Piaggi covered models wearing American sportswear classics with feather boas. Liberman thought she had made the fashion look ridiculous, the shoot was written off, and the expense of yet another costly failure played right into his hands. In building a case against Diana he also insinuated that she was drunk in the afternoons. He managed to convince Si Newhouse, but this view was not shared by anyone else, even those who had mixed feelings about her. As Carol Phillips remarked: “I tell you the truth, a woman like that, you can’t tell whether she’s drunk or not. How are you going to tell? . . . She didn’t smell of it. . . . She believed in water . . . she believed in health.”

  Intent on the romantic view, Diana failed to understand that she was in serious trouble until the day she was fired. When the moment came, in the spring of 1971, it was Condé Nast’s president, Perry Ruston, who did the deed while Liberman lurked in his office. Diana reacted by asking to hear the news from Si Newhouse himself. By now Newhouse, too, believed that Diana’s philosophy of fashion, however exciting, was relevant to only a small handful of people. He went to her office and sat down. “And we sat there for what I remember as being almost ten minutes,” he recalled. “She was waiting for me to talk and I was waiting for her to say something.” He eventually repeated what Perry Ruston had said. Diana stayed very cool. “She just kind of watched, just kind of watched me deal with her. Perhaps in amusement, perhaps in shock. I don’t know.” There was no argument of any kind. That night, Newhouse had a terrible nightmare about their meeting.

  Once the news sank in, Diana was furiously angry with Liberman, both for firing her and for his cowardice in not giving her the bad news in person. “I’ve met a Red Russian, a White Russian but I’ve never met a Yellow Russian,” was one of her more polite remarks (“a yellow rat” was how she described him to Leo Lerman some years later). According to David Bailey, she added: “Alex, I’ve been staring at your profile for ten years. Look me in the eye for once.” For his part Liberman continued to insist that he had warned Diana but that she refused to hear what he had to say. In appointing Grace Mirabella as her successor, Liberman clearly thought he would be working with someone more amenable to his point of view. But because Diana was deaf to his pleas it is also unclear what else he could have done, for in the end there was no arguing with the sales figures.

  Under the leadership of Grace Mirabella, who represented precisely the younger professional woman whom Diana ignored, Vogue took off again in the 1970s. Mirabella championed elegant, functional clothes for busy, dynamic women, the “real” women whom Diana had disregarded. The clothes Mirabella favored were often in new fabrics from American sportswear designers. Ironically, they were descended directly from the clothes Diana herself had championed during her “glory days” in the Second World War but later found wanting in imagination. While the business decision to go from twenty issues a year to twelve in 1973 contributed hugely to Vogue’s return to profitability, Mirabella’s formula worked outstandingly well for a decade until she too found herself out of step, this time with the ostentatious spirit of the early 1980s.

  So why did Diana’s “myth of the next reality” stall as it did? She had no sympathy for doctrinaire feminists. Like many powerful women who had succeeded before female success was comm
onplace, she had difficulty understanding what the problem was, particularly since, in a perfect world, she would have enjoyed a life of leisure. She thought that professional young women of the 1970s were conformist and conservative. But she had lived through duller style periods before in the 1950s and produced brilliant pages. Liberman thought that with the benefit of hindsight, Diana should have been made fashion director, leaving analysis of the market to others. But this was not a view with which his boss, Si Newhouse, concurred: “My recollection of Dianne [sic] is that she . . . was quite prepared to deal with the realities of magazine publishing. And I don’t remember her in any way as being a kind of arrogantly destructive force who said, the only thing we’re going to put in the magazine is Giorgio Sant Angelo [sic] . . . she was quite realistic about the fact that the magazine lived in a commercial world.” Other colleagues thought that in the end, the problem was her age. As well as believing that Diana became carried away by her own importance, Babs Simpson thought that at sixty-eight, she was, like Carmel Snow, simply too old for the job. A fashion editor should be “much, much younger,” she argued. Grace Mirabella concurred. “She herself was becoming older—approaching seventy—and the fantasy of youth and exuberance seemed to blind her.” Mirabella’s view was that ultimately it was Diana’s compulsive need to maintain the mystery of the “Vreeland legend” that undermined her: “She could not allow the world to see her intelligence, the method behind her madness. She preferred to remain true to her image, to sink with it, than to compromise it by defending her vision.”

  Perhaps, however, it was not the “Vreeland legend” that Diana was determined to defend, but something else to which she could not possibly give Newhouse or Liberman access. In the end she refused to articulate, let alone abandon, her vision of the world of the Girl, that alluring being who had allowed her to survive her mother, who had carried her through life with such success, who had brought her a handsome and adored husband, and who had been the basis of her extraordinary career. Liberman said that Diana was an amateur from a previous generation whom Vogue could no longer afford. Diana would have agreed. She always preferred to think of herself as a woman of leisure who wandered into the world of work by mistake, propelled by a vision that allowed her to frame a playful, imaginative view of fashion where transformation and reinvention was possible for any creative woman prepared to dream, and which reached its apotheosis in the 1960s. But in the end the Girl who brought her such triumphant success undermined her too. As feminism took hold, and Vogue’s readers began to think differently about identity, Diana’s attachment to her romantic ideal of female power made her inflexible. In 1971 it suddenly felt old-fashioned, the thinking of an elderly woman, a hangover from a previous generation. A view of fashion as a means of self-expression, as ludic, creative, and empowering, would, of course, eventually resurface strongly alongside other late twentieth-century ideas about female identity, but that time was some way off. For the time being, Diana and the Girl were in Vogue’s way; and a short time later they were both gone.