LIFE STORY – DIANA VREELAND

Queen of fashion editorial, of the world of editorials in general, the main curator for the careers of Barbra Streisand, Mick Jagger and so many other. A woman who succeeded with her own desire and idea to accomplish all that she had imagined. She wanted people to love themselves with all their “flaws”, and not have complexes, everyone is special in their own way.

*featured image credits: Rowland Scherman

She wanted people to love themselves with all their “flaws”, and not have complexes, everyone is special in their own way.

Diana Vreeland was an editor in the field of fashion and noted columnist. She worked for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, being editor-in-chief, and a special consultant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1964, she was named to the International Best Dressed list Hall of Fame.

• Diana Vreeland was born in Paris, France, as the eldest daughter of American socialite mother Emily Key Hoffman and British stockbrocker father Frederick Young Dalziel. Hoffman was a descendant of George Washington’s brother as well as a cousin of Francis Scott Key. Vreeland’s family emigrated to the United States at the outbreak of World War I , and moved to 15 East 77th Street in New York, where they became prominent figures in society. She was sent to dancing school and was a pupil of Michel Fokine, the only Imperial Ballet master ever to leave Russia, and later of Louis Harvy Chalif. She performed in Anna Pavlova’s Gavotte at Carnegie Hall.

In January, 1922, Diana Vreeland was featured in her future employer, Vogue, in a roundup of socialites and their cars. Diana passed over for promotion at Harper’s Bazaar in 1957, and she was editor-in-chief at Vogue from 1963 until 1971. After she was fired from Vogue, she became consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971. By 1984, according to Vreeland‘s account, she had organized twelve exhibitions.

On March 1, 1924 she married Thomas Reed Vreeland, a banker and international financier, with whom she would have two sons.

Diana Vreeland “discovered” actress Lauren Bacall, and The Harper’s Bazaar cover for March 1943 shows Lauren Bacall posing near a Red Cross office, based on Vreeland decision.

There is an extraordinary photograph in which Bacall is leaning against the outside door of a Red Cross blood donor room. She wears a chic suit, gloves, a cloche hat with long waves of hair falling from it. – Vreeland

In 1960, when John F. Kennedy became president, Diana Vreeland advised the First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in matters of style. Vreeland occasionally gave Mrs. Kennedy advice about clothing during her husband’s administration, and small advice about what to wear on Inauguration Day in 1961.

During her career in Vogue, she discovered also Edie Sedgwick. 

 In 1984 Vreeland explained how she saw fashion magazines. “What these magazines gave was a point of view. Most people haven’t got a point of view; they need to have it given to them—and what’s more, they expect it from you….It must have been 1966 or ’67. I published this big fashion slogan: This is the year of do it yourself….Every store in the country telephoned to say, ‘Look, you have to tell people. No one wants to do it themselves-they want direction and to follow a leader!”

While Diana Vreeland was Editor-in-Chief at Vogue, her “People are Talking About” section became the absolute authority on what — and who — was relevant. It was in these pages that she featured the first portrait of Mick Jagger ever published in the U.S.A. Photographer David Bailey had shot the 19-year-old, then just an aspiring musician with a mop-top, big lips and a bit of a swagger, and offered the image to British Vogue. The magazine rejected it saying, “No, who is this guy? We don’t know who he is.” Though they were on the charts, The Rolling Stones had not yet made a name for themselves in England, and were even less known in New York.

Diana wanted to have apartment to look lke a garden: “I want this place to look like a garden, but a garden in hell“, and in 1955 the Vreelands moved to a new apartment which was decorated exclusively in red, decorated by Billy Baldwin.

“Going to meet her was like going to meet the Queen. She was over the top, and would go on about how she ‘adored’ me. I know I probably owe most of what happened in New York to her.”- TWIGGY ON MEETING DIANA VREELAND

*featured image credits: Rowland Scherman