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The Audacious Mrs. V.

August 15, 2011 / 4 Comments
Jiujiang Diana Vreeland:  Goddess of Style
Diana Vreeland was dazzling.  She was a tremendous talent, with taste, along with an outstanding instinct.  She was also the greatest fashion editor ever.
As time passes, the memory often fades, and some today may be left wondering who was Diana Vreeland, and what made her the authoritative voice of fashion?  Diana (who preferred to have her name pronounced “Dee-Ann”) had a long run career at Harper’s Bazaar magazine back in the 1930s. She started by writing a monthly column of audacious advice for living a more fashionable life entitled “Why Don’t You…?”  (Each week, we feature a different quote from Mrs. Vreeland’s collection of “Why Don’t You”).

Illustration by Kenneth Paul Block

Written during the Great Depression, the column was widely popular, as it provided a fashionable escape by offering advice such as “why don’t you wear black paillette slacks with a hand-pleated white handkerchief linen blouse, black lacquer Chanel bracelets on each wrist and a huge multicolored jeweled pin at the throat?”, to decorating advice “why don’t you have a private staircase from your bedroom to the library with a needlework carpet with notes of music worked on each step – the whole spelling your favorite tune?”, and my personal favorite “why don’t you realize the return of black, and black and white, in decoration?  It is of tremendous importance.  Use it whenever you can”.  She boldly claimed that “They were all very tried and true ideas”.

As an highly individual fashion editor, Diana brought consistency, knowledge, extravagance, imagination and perfection to Harper’s Bazaar.  For those who who knew her, it seems that everything she did or say, somehow came from a cloud.  After the second world war, she was the one who unassailable declared that the bikini was a bombastic element in fashion.  And as time passes, that statement remained true.*
While she was working at Bazaar, and later as editor-in-chief at Vogue, many of Diana’s ideas quickly influenced fashion trends.  Whether it was the thong sandal, animal prints, wigs, artificial flower, black cashmere sweaters worn as a uniform, a snood instead of a hat, and black ballet slippers, Diana’s conceptual ideas became the fashion world’s reality.
In that world, she became an inspiration for fashion heavy weights like Issey Miyake, Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, and Bill Blass.  In the 1960s she advised the First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in matters of style, and connected her to fashion designer, Oleg Cassini.  In the 1980s, and leading up to her death in 1989, Mrs. Vreeland helped launched the careers of many fashion designers, including Oscar de la Renta, Manolo Blahnik, and Diane von Furstenberg.
She was and will remain the grande dame of fashion, and one of the most inspirational one.  At the time of her death, renowned photographer, Richard Avedon claimed that “She was the only genius fashion editor.”  The distinguished English photographer Cecil Beaton once said “Among the women whose vocations involve them with the world of fashion, none is more strikingly individual than Mrs. Vreeland.”  Even today, that statement still holds true.
*  In 1949, French mechanical engineer Louis Reard, designed the bikini and it was first presented at the fashion show in Paris that very same year.  Upon seeing the bikini, Diana dubbed it as the “swoonsuit”, remarking that it “revealed everything about a girl except her mother’s maiden name.”

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