Empress of Fashion
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78 Tyrolean beachwear: the last word in whimsy, since the Austrian Tyrol has no beaches. Carolyn Hall, The Thirties in Vogue (London: Octopus Books, 1984), p. 35.
79 Café society was therefore characterized: see Thierry Coudert, Café Society: Socialites, Patrons and Artists, 1920 to 1960 (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), pp. 7–71 passim.
79 Diana’s friendship with Cecil Beaton: Diana Vreeland Tapes, Tape 2A.
80 In her book Romantic Moderns: Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), p. 75.
80 “For all I know the old girl is still a virgin”: Nina Campbell and Caroline Seebohm, Elsie de Wolfe: A Decorative Life (London: Aurum, 1993), p. i.
81 “I adored her because she was so . . . methodical”: Diana Vreeland Tapes, 6A.
81 “I started to get a little education”: Weymouth, “A Question of Style,” p. 42.
81 “Diana has made an enviable niche”: Maury Paul (Cholly Knickerbocker), New York American, undated clipping, HDFA.
82 “I’m mad about her stance”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 19.
82 “He passed me by like so much white trash”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 64. The tradition of presenting aristocratic women at Court in the early summer went back to the reign of George III (and ended only in 1958). Most of the young ladies presented were marriageable debutantes, but socially distinguished married women were eligible too. “Ladies of foreign nationality . . . and British women married to foreign nationals could be presented only through the diplomatic representative of the country concerned.” Anne de Courcy, 1939: The Last Season (London: Phoenix, 1989), p. 25.
83 “The small egocentric group of women”: Ballard, In My Fashion, pp. 78–79.
83 “Les Dames de Vogue”: see Bettina Ballard, ibid., p. 83.
83 “the elegance of the damned”: Vreeland, Allure, p. 93.
83 “None of these were stupid women”: Diana Vreeland Tapes, Tape 15.
84 “I can remember a dress”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 95.
84 “I had a little string-colored dress”: Weymouth, “A Question of Style,” p. 43.
84 Backed by Elsie Mendl: an invoice shows that Diana bought a cape, a belt, and a dress of “crepe de main quadrille” in June 1933, three years after Mainbocher opened his Paris atelier; DVP, Box 1, Folder 1.
85 “It’s one thing I do care so passionately about”: Diana Vreeland Tapes, Tape 15.
85 “She’d come in to see about a skirt”: Weymouth, “A Question of Style,” pp. 42–43.
85 “Everyone thinks of suits when they think of Chanel”: Vreeland, D.V., pp. 95–96.
85 “the most beautiful dress I ever owned”: ibid., p. 96.
86 “First, there was the beautiful rolling staircase”: ibid., p. 127.
86 “Coco was a nut on armholes”: ibid.
86 “Chanel saw the need”: Diana’s entry on Chanel, The 1972 World Book Year Book: the Annual Supplement to the World Book Encylopedia, p. 350.
86 “Smart women went to her shop”: ibid.
87 “The art of living was to Chanel”: ibid.
87 “Chanel was the first couturier”: from Diana’s draft of her entry on Chanel for The 1972 World Book Year Book, DVP, Box 41, Folder 1.
87 “I’d always been slightly shy of her”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 131.
87 A Chanel suit that Diana bought in the late 1930s: see Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog for Chanel exhibition, May 5–August 7, 2005.
88 “Today, an old boot of a face”: quoted in Hall, The Thirties in Vogue, pp. 15–17.
88 When a group of Paris dressmakers drew up a best-dressed list: widely reported but see, for instance, New York Times, November 26, 1935.
88 “What a disappointment that woman is”: PCB, Diary, January 15, 1930, Volume 61, p. 146.
89 “I’d spend days and days in bed reading”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 83.
89 Diana made long lists of writers: see, for example, notebook in DVP, Box 60, Folder 3.
89 “When I think of Natasha in War and Peace”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 82.
89 “When you’ve heard the word”: ibid., p. 81.
89 Beaton was the first to capture the manner: Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton’s New York (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1938), p. 244.
90 she slipped one of Acton’s photographs into her own fashion scrapbook: see DVP, Box 62.
90 “The vision of Diana Vreeland arriving”: Levin, The Wheels of Fashion, p. 102.
91 the odd one out: Vreeland, D.V., p. 43.
91 “The top of the palace was flat”: ibid., p. 46.
91 “you know, the sort of business”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Folder 1, p. 65.
91 “ ‘Reed,’ I once said, ‘What happens . . .’ ”: Vreeland, D.V., pp. 44–45.
92 “I have no idea if I actually saw the movie”: ibid., pp. 49–50.
93 Astonishingly, spas in Germany: see Hall, Thirties in Vogue, p. 18. Hall points out that as late as August 1939, British Vogue ran an advertisement for “Germany, that land of hospitality.”
93 “weakening, weakening, weakening”: Weymouth, “A Question of Style,” p. 43.
93 “I simply had to . . . sleep”: Diana Vreeland Tapes, Tape 6A.
94 “ ‘Really,’ Reed said to me”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 77.
94 “But Julie was getting more and more upset”: ibid., p. 79.
95 “The curious thing about me”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, pp. 16–17.
95 Neither son remembered: see Vreeland, D.V., p. 84.
96 “Her little girls are enchanted by her”: Harper’s Bazaar, December 1937.
96 “I had made a solemn vow to myself”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 84.
96 “Nothing wrong for them to see”: ibid., p. 84.
96 Mrs. Reed Vreeland was one of “the European highlights of chic”: Vogue, November 1, 1933, p. 27.
97 “How delighted I am”: ibid. (“Paris Fashions: As They Wear It—Seen by ‘Him,’ ” p. 100; illustration, p. 36).
97 “I made great friends among the English”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 37.
98 “Anyone who has been emotionally wounded”: Cyrulnik, Resilience, p. 133.
98 “At times they liked him a bit too much”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 37. Diana may have had Edwina Mountbatten in mind here. She pasted a photograph of Edwina Mountbatten into her fashion scrapbook and advised her on the decoration of her house in 1936, which was not only a compliment to Diana’s taste but a major social coup. Yet Diana rarely mentioned Mountbatten thereafter. Gossip has connected Reed to Edwina Mountbatten, though it should be said that gossip linked her to many men, and Reed does not emerge from biographies as one of her lovers.
98 Diana’s shop: the address of the shop was 15 Hay’s Mews, London W1. DVP, Box 1, Folders 1–2.
99 “I should love to see you among your delicate lines of lingerie”: undated letter from William Acton, private collection.
99 “I was never not on my way to see the mother superior”: Vreeland, D.V., pp. 68–69.
99 Mona Williams, who scrutinized every penny: “Dear Madam,” wrote Mona Williams’s secretary in January 1934. “We are enclosing herewith a cheque for £44/5. The total of your bill as presented was £53/13, but Mrs. Williams directed us to deduct £8/8 for four chemises which were not received, and we found upon checking the bill that it had not been added correctly, as there was a difference of ten shillings in the total which we have deducted.” DVP, Box 1, Folder 2.
99 “I was very thin”: quoted in Dwight, Diana Vreeland, p. 34.
100 led some to suppose that the story must be apocryphal: Diana ran her lingerie shop from September 1933 to the late spring of 1
934. It is known that Wallis Simpson became a favorite of the Prince of Wales in early 1934 while his reigning mistress, Thelma Furness, was away. Charles Higham suggests that although the prince’s relationship with Wallis Simpson was probably not consummated till later in the year it was not platonic in early 1934 either, and that this was well known to close friends like Syrie Maugham and Sibyl Colefax. On this basis Wallis Simpson would have had good reason to order glamorous nightdresses from Diana while she was still running her shop in the spring of 1934. See Charles Higham, Mrs. Simpson: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor (London: Pan, 2005), p. 90. Diana damned Ernest Simpson with somewhat faint praise: “He was nice enough but rather ordinary in the way that one didn’t take notice of him when there were other people in the world.” Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 85.
100 “When Reed and I got to Regent’s Park”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, pp. 48–49.
100 “It was a fait accompli”: Allure Manuscript, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 88.
100 “You’ve never seen anyone in such a condition”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, pp. 88–89.
100 “I am pleased about Reed staying with the Guaranty”: Lesley Benson to DV, DVP, Box 15, Folder 1.
101 “It is really too dreadful”: DVP, Box 17, Folder 15.
101 By September 1934: letter from Ben Kittredge, DVP, Box 17, Folder 9. The letter from Elsie Mendl dated December 3, 1934, is in a private collection. “I am longing to come up for two or three days in that wonderful air, and Charles says he thinks he could arrange to come,” she wrote. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful if we could get into the Rolls and spin along to Geneva and then come on to Lausanne?”
101 “Switzerland before World War II”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 7.
102 “I was so happy in Ouchy”: Vreeland, D.V., pp. 83–84.
102 “It’s strange, isn’t it”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 89.
103 “But Mrs. Snow”: Vreeland, D.V., pp. 88–89, passim.
103 in a pink dress by Vionnet in the winter of 1935: Carmel Snow reported her return from Europe thus in Harper’s Bazaar, December 1935.
103 she would receive a commission on any “Syrie” furniture she sold: For Diana’s contract with Syrie see DVP, Box 1, Folder 2. Diana told George Plimpton she had already started working for Town & Country by the time Carmel Snow approached her (Diana Vreeland Tapes, Tape 5).
CHAPTER FOUR: PIZZAZZ
105 “I arrived at Harper’s Bazaar”: this account of Diana’s start at Harper’s Bazaar is excerpted from Allure Manuscript, DVP. Box 35, Folder 2, pp. 95–97.
107 “I decided that I had to let him re-photograph”: Carmel Snow and Mary Louise Aswell, The World of Carmel Snow (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), p. 88.
108 “the first action photograph made for fashion”: ibid., p. 89.
108 before becoming a highly successful graphic designer: the breakthrough in Brodovitch’s career came when he won a poster competition for an artists’ soirée, “Le Bal Banal,” in 1924, with a design in which he played with the idea of masks and identity. This lead to work with Athélia, the design studio of a leading Paris department store. He set up his own studio too, producing posters for Cunard and illustrated books for La Pléiade, a French publishing company, before emigrating to the United States in 1930.
109 “a monthly run-through of popular and high culture”: Calvin Tomkins, “The World of Carmel Snow,” The New Yorker, November 7, 1994, p. 153.
109 first “magazine editor as auteur”: ibid.
110 Harper’s Bazaar “seemed years—decades—younger”: ibid.
110 she introduced her to Bazaar’s readers in January 1936: Munkácsi’s photograph appeared in the January 1936 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, p. 78.
111 “Diane converses naturally”: Snow and Aswell, The World of Carmel Snow, p. 103.
111 “She used to come in once a week to talk”: quoted in Penelope Rowlands, A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters (New York: Atria Books, 2005), p. 195.
111 In a feature called “I’d be Lost Without . . .”: Harper’s Bazaar, January 1936, p. 41.
112 “I didn’t know then what I was going to do”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 1, p. 93.
112 Her first “Why Don’t You?” column: The “Why Don’t Yous?” mentioned in this chapter appeared in the following issues of Harper’s Bazaar: March 1936, July 1936, August 1936, September 1936, November 1936, December 1936, February 1937, March 1937, July 1937, August 1937, November 1937, February 1938, April 1938, and May 1941. The February 1937 column was dedicated to the inspiration of Schiaparelli: “Why Don’t You realize that this wonderfully creative woman is expressing our life and times in her little suits and dresses and in her unique materials . . . and realize that it is up to you to match her genius by adding perfect details to make them part of you?”
112 After that there was no stopping her: the “Why Don’t You?” column appeared in different designs and layouts, but the usual format was that the title “Why Don’t You?” appeared at the top of the page or double page spread, with illustrated ideas below. The question was usually not repeated. I have therefore inserted “Why Don’t You” with capital letters at the beginning of each of Diana’s suggestions for ease of reference.
114 “They were all very tried and true ideas”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 92.
114 In 1936 she kept a notebook: DVP, Box 1, Folder 10.
115 “I never met the old boy”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 92.
115 “It can be seen”: quoted in Rowlands, A Dash of Daring, pp. 204–5. Cecil Beaton made this remark in the American edition of The Glass of Fashion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), p. 363.
117 less sure-footed about fascism: the article about politically minded scarves appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, November 1936, p. 61.
117 “ ‘Fall’ Clothes”: Bett Hooper, The New Yorker, February 20, 1937, p. 64.
117 “The first time I noticed”: S. J. Perelman, “Frou-Frou, or the Future of Vertigo,” The New Yorker, April 16, 1938, p. 17.
118 “Good heavens!”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 93.
118 The point, said Diana: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 3.
119 “I am so happy to tell you”: DVP, Box 1, Folder 6. The Hearst organization was notoriously ungenerous. “Even then it was despicable,” said fashion editor Babs Simpson. Diana’s salary did rise over the years: she remarked later that they paid her eighteen thousand dollars a year for twenty-eight years, which, even allowing for Diana’s way with facts, was very little. Penelope Rowlands notes that in the 1950s, Carmel Snow does not appear to have been paid much more—around twenty thousand dollars. “Brodovitch, no doubt, did better: almost all men at Hearst, as at so many other organizations, did.” Rowlands, A Dash of Daring, p. 255.
121 give it some pizzazz: “pizzazz” was one of Diana’s favorite words, though she did not invent it, as Cecil Beaton and others thought. It is listed in The Oxford Dictionary of Slang as being of American origin and first appearing in 1937. Carmel Snow thought it was coined by the “boys” of the Harvard Lampoon. (Snow and Aswell, The World of Carmel Snow, p. 124.)
121 New York’s garment industry had moved uptown: a move spurred in part by the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in Greenwich Village on March 25, 1911, in which 146 garment workers lost their lives. See David von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).
121 It all led to a convergence: the garment district covered approximately a square mile, between Thirty-Fourth and Forty-Second Streets and Fifth and Ninth Avenues. The fur district was located a little farther south, between Twenty-Seventh and Twenty-Ninth Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues.
121 “Could we take you on a tour”: Harper’s Bazaar, September 1, 1940, p. 43.
121 “merchants with knowledge in their fingers”: ibid.
122 “I was always going up rusty staircases”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 109.
122 “I never wore clothes from Seventh Avenue myself”: ibid.
122 “She began suggesting daring and successful ideas”: Snow and Aswell, The World of Carmel Snow, pp. 124–25.
122 “I couldn’t believe what I saw”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Box 35, Folder 2, p. 110.
123 “You never do anything unless you’re asked”: Allure Manuscript, DVP, Folder 2, pp. 96–97.
123 “I knew so little when I started”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 89.
123 “What do I want with a bloody old handbag”: ibid.
124 ‘You mean you’d leave your wife’: Vreeland, D.V., p. 96.
125 Bettina Ballard remembered: Ballard, In My Fashion, p. 145.
125 “I’ll never forget that afternoon”: Vreeland, D.V., p. 97.
125 In a bold move: see http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/WIB-tour/dorothy_shaver.pdfBiB.
126 “This is the first issue of Harper’s Bazaar,” September 1, 1940, p. 40.
126 “You managed the impossible”: Carmel Snow to DV August 8, 1940, DVP, Box 1, Folder 6.
126 “Skirt lengths are an atom shorter”: Harper’s Bazaar, September 1, 1940, p. 41.
127 The rise of American sportswear: Rebecca Arnold, The American Look: Fashion, Sportswear, and the Image of Women in the 1930s and 1940s (New York, I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 3–92 passim. I am indebted to June Weir for introducing me to this outstanding book.
127 It flattered the uncorseted female body: ibid., p. 17.
127 Diana took in some French jersey: Sally Kirkland on Claire McCardell in American Fashion: The Life and Times of Adrian, Mainbocher, McCardell, Norell, Trigère, ed. Sarah Tomerlin Lee (New York: Quadrangle/ The New York Times Book Co., 1975), p. 232.
128 her creativity and inventiveness broke through: McCardell returned to the United States with noncouture ideas as well, such as the dirndl skirt, big buckles, and leather straps copied from European 1930s skiwear, which she adapted for American coats and jackets, developing a philosophy of “fashion is where you find it” very similar to Diana’s own. She felt passionately that “I belong to a mass-production country where any of us, all of us, deserve the right to good fashion and where fashion should be made available to us all.” Quoted in Kohle Yohannan and Nancy Nolf, Claire McCardell: Redefining Modernism (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), p. 98.