She helped popularize bikinis and blue jeans, discovered Lauren Bacall, launched Twiggy and advised Jackie O.
Diana Vreeland transformed fashion in the 1940s, '50s and '60s when she worked at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue magazines. And she laid the groundwork for much of what shapes the industry today with her embrace of high-low culture, her dedication to bringing fashion to art museums and her witty stream-of-consciousness quips (like proto Tweets), such as "the bikini is the biggest thing since the atom bomb" and "pink is the navy blue of India."
Some of us know Vreeland as a larger-than-life caricature with her hands in the air, her rosy cheeks and her great one-liners. And to be sure, she had a lot of ego and ambition in that slender 5-foot-5-inch frame. But she also had a tender side, which is portrayed along with all the hilarious rest in Lisa Immordino Vreeland's new documentary Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel.
"I always felt she was slightly misunderstood," said the Italian-born director, who has worked in fashion for 25 years and is married to Diana Vreeland's grandson Alexander Vreeland.
"I found the real texture and what got this woman going - the fact that she was generous, supportive and played the mentor role to so many people. And in a funny way, she had this sense of spirituality. She was guiding us."
The film paints a portrait of Vreeland with photos, animation, text, sound and music, as well as in her own passionate voice in interview footage.
For research, Immordino Vreeland scoured the archives of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Chanel and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. She interviewed more than 40 people who appear in the film, including fashion photographers David Bailey and Lillian Bassman, models Veruschka and Penelope Tree, designers Oscar de la Renta and Hubert de Givenchy, director Joel Schumacher and actresses Anjelica Huston and Ali MacGraw, a onetime Vreeland assistant whose memories of her boss storming into the office and barking orders prove that The Devil Wears Prada did not begin with Anna Wintour.
"Everyone was so willing," said Immordino Vreeland, who never met her subject and finds it "daunting" having her name.
"They wanted to talk about somebody who had the freedom to do what she wanted."
At first, Immordino Vreeland planned to do only the book, The Eye Has to Travel, which was published last year by Abrams. But after reviewing transcripts of tapes George Plimpton recorded while helping Vreeland write her memoirs, she saw the opportunity to bring that narration to life.
"Listening to her, I got to know her," said Immordino Vreeland "And she never took herself too seriously."
Vreeland, who was born in Paris in 1903 and died in New York City in 1989, lived through Paris's Belle Epoque, New York's Roaring '20s and London's Swinging '60s. The daughter of wealthy socialite parents, she was fascinated by Russian ballet impresario Diaghilev and the rest of the glitterati who came through their living room, and she had many adventures at a young age, including attending the coronation of George V and riding horses with Buffalo Bill in Wyoming.
But her childhood was also marred by a less-than-satisfying relationship with her mother, who called her "ugly little monster." Vreeland developed a stutter, failed at school and found refuge in ballet.
She was discovered at a party in 1936, when Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow noticed her stylish dress and hired her as fashion editor. Soon, Vreeland began writing her famous "Why Don't You" columns, which dared readers to do such provocative things as "rinse your blond child's hair in dead Champagne to keep it gold," or "have a white monkey fur bed cover mounted on yellow velvet."
"Her time at Bazaar was a time of real fantasy," said Immordino Vreeland. "She had the freedom to create things, to have a rapport with designers and get things made specially for shoots. She was influencing what was coming down the runways."
After 25 years at Bazaar, Vreeland was named editor in chief of Vogue, where she transformed the role from prim society fixture to cultural mover and shaker. She brought the 1960s youth quake to the pages, publishing early photos of Mick Jagger and Edie Sedgwick, alongside stories on rock 'n' roll, modern art and film. And she helped broaden the ideal of beauty by recruiting Cher, Barbra Streisand and Lauren Hutton to model.
"You could have a bump on your nose, it made no difference so long as you had a marvelous body and carriage," Vreeland would say.
"She understood that mixing pop culture and society was something that could work," said Immordino Vreeland.
Unlike today, when an editor's vision is bound by the bottom line and the goal is to move product more than to inspire, she did not bend to advertisers by letting them influence what appeared in the magazine.
And yet, in 1971 Vreeland was abruptly fired, probably due in part to her lavish spending. A year later, at age 70, she started working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, where she created elaborate exhibitions incorporating music, props and even fragrance that drew record crowds to the museum, even as they were criticized by some historians for emphasizing entertainment over historical fact.
But Vreeland had been blending fact and fiction all her life, once even claiming that Charles Lindbergh had flown over her lawn in Brewster, N.Y., on his way to Paris. When asked if the story was fact or fiction, she replied, "Faction!"
"It's like the teacher who talks about the literature and social and political issues of a time period versus the teacher who asks her students to memorize the names of 50 churches," said Immordino Vreeland. "She would take a story in and it would come back out imbued with a fantastical quality. The eye has to travel. The mind has to travel. It's OK to think of a fantasy and try to fulfil it. That's a message we need right now."
