“Les Dames de Vogue” included Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge, famous for her hats and headdresses, for starting a fashion for Cartier blackamoors, and for painting the tips of her nails; and the preternaturally poisonous Daisy Fellowes, daughter of the Duc Decazes, and heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune. Daisy Fellowes epitomized hard thirties chic. She possessed, said Diana in Allure, “the elegance of the damned.” Daisy Fellowes made Elsa Schiaparelli’s fortune by wearing her most surreal fashions. When she appeared bare legged at the Paris collections, all fashionable women removed their stockings. At her bidding women ordered jewelry in pairs; adopted leopard-print pajamas; and sported cotton dresses in the summer. The American fashion pack included Millicent Rogers and Mona Williams, who rejected Daisy Fellowes’s fashionable hard chic in favor of the softer silhouette of Madeleine Vionnet and her paler pastel colors. “Don’t forget,” said Diana later. “None of these were stupid women, these were all very privileged women who very carefully sifted out the luxury, the privilege, the time allotted, the care in the house once [the clothes] were delivered, where and how you would wear them, with what jewels, what gloves, what slippers, what stockings, how your hair would appear. . . . It’s a world that’s so remote from today it’s ludicrous.”
It did not seem so ludicrous to Diana at the time. Fashionable clothes and makeup had long been of vital importance in her quest for the perfect version of herself; and soon after the Vreelands settled in London, she embarked on an apprenticeship as a connoisseur of fashion and an “editrice” in the manner of “Les Dames de Vogue.” She began making regular trips to Paris where she stayed in a cheap hotel and ate lunch in her room so that she had more to spend on dressing. She felt her way with some caution, following “Les Dames de Vogue” in her choice of couturier. Looking back, she remembered her clothes of the 1930s with affection: “I can remember a dress I had of Schiaparelli’s that had fake ba-zooms—these funny little things that stuck out here. When you sat down, they sort of went . . . all I can say is that it was terribly chic. Don’t ask me why, but it was.” She admired Schiaparelli’s adventurous use of new synthetic fabrics, threads, and fasteners, even when this led to a dry-cleaning disaster. “I had a little string-colored dress—it was like cotton but it was also like something out of a garden. . . . I wore it quite a lot, and well, it was time for it to go to the cleaners because nothing stays immaculate forever. It didn’t come back, you see, because there was nothing to send; there was a little, tiny, round piece of . . . glue. . . . This fabric wasn’t totally tested.”
Diana also patronized Madame Vionnet, and Vionnet interpreted by Mainbocher. An American by birth, Main Rousseau Bocher was born in Chicago and eventually became editor of French Vogue by a circuitous route. He set himself up as dressmaker in Paris at 12 avenue George V in 1930 until the outbreak of war forced him to leave. He was unusual for a couturier in several respects. He was an American; he was a fashion editor who became a designer; and he taught himself to cut and sew. Backed by Elsie Mendl, Kitty (Mrs. Gilbert) Miller, and others, he greatly admired the work of Madame Vionnet and deployed her bias-cut technique to great effect, producing exquisite evening dresses and other fashions of deceptive simplicity that were a runaway success with the American patronnes he condescended to dress.
Fittings with these Paris couturiers constituted the basis of Diana’s fashion education. For the rest of her life she never wavered in her conviction that Paris was the wellspring of all great couture. Ferocious concentration was required of the client. Women of fashion fussed until every aspect of the garment was perfect. Customers like Diana became connoisseurs of cut, fabric, and technique. Talking to George Plimpton about this later, Diana had difficulty conveying the effort that went into it. Whether a shoe, a hat, or a dress, it was, in essence, a highly focused collaboration: “It’s one thing I do care so passionately about—this wonderful, privileged world in which I lived where, literally, actually, it was almost a compliment to a man to drive him absolutely crazy every afternoon with fittings. But of course you were expected to give him as many fittings as he needed.” Being fitted for couture clothes in Paris was not cheap, but Diana was able to obtain them as a mannequin du monde—someone who went to the right parties, was seen at the right places, and wore a designer’s creations to advantage.
In Diana’s opinion, however, the greatest designer of all was Coco Chanel. Twenty years older than Diana, Coco Chanel was already famous—and expensive—by 1929, so being fitted by her was a rare treat. Diana started by going to her shop at 31 rue Cambon, where Chanel sold scarves, handbags, and a few prototypes of what would later be called ready-to-wear. “She’d come in to see about a skirt; she’d always pat me on the back and say, ‘It looks very nice on you, I like you wearing that.’ ” In the 1930s Chanel was in a romantic phase. “Everyone thinks of suits when they think of Chanel. That came later. If you could have seen my clothes from Chanel in the thirties—the dégagé gypsy skirts, the divine brocades, the little boleros, the roses in the hair, the pailletted nose veils—day and evening!” One of the best presents of Diana’s life came from a member of the d’Erlanger family who generously offered her anything from Chanel that she wanted. The result, said Diana, was a “huge skirt . . . of silver lamé, quilted in pearls, which gave it a marvelous weight; then the bolero was lace entirely encrusted with pearls and diamanté; then, underneath the bolero was the most beautiful shirt of linen lace. I think it was the most beautiful dress I’ve ever owned.”
A dress of this complexity was made in the couture salon of 31 rue Cambon, which was up several flights of stairs. “First, there was the beautiful rolling staircase up to the salon floor—the famous mirrored staircase—and after that, you were practically on a stepladder for five more flights. It used to kill me.” Once she had landed safely, the fitting with Chanel herself was another strenuous experience. There was not much sense of collaboration, though someone as curious as Diana about the technicalities of couture could learn a very great deal. Chanel was a designer who knew exactly what she wished to achieve, and despised drawings. She cut and pinned the model on her clients and was a driven perfectionist.
Coco was a nut on armholes. She never, ever got an armhole quite, quite perfect, the way she wanted it. She was always snipping and taking out sleeves, driving the tailors absolutely crazy. She’d put pins in me so I’d be contorted, and she’d be talking and talking and giving me all sorts of philosophical observations, such as “Live with rigor and vigor” or “Grow old like a man,” and I’d say, “I think most men grow old like women, myself,” and she’d say, “No, you’re wrong, they’ve got logic, they’ve got a reality to them”—with my arm up in the air the whole time! Then if she really wanted to talk, she’d put pins in under both arms so I simply couldn’t move, much less get a word in!
Diana was in awe of almost everything about Coco Chanel. Chanel, she wrote later, was the Pied Piper of contemporary fashion: “Chanel saw the need for total simplification. Corsets, high heels, skirts dragging in the dust had to go. She anticipated the women of the twentieth century.” She loved the way Chanel responded to the natural, unconstrained female body and designed for women who dashed about; and her “fantastic instinct” for arranging clothes for women who sought luxury at the same time. “Smart women went to her shop for short, wool-jersey dresses, tailored suits, slacks, simple black evening dresses short to the knee, and pullovers much like those worn by English schoolboys,” she wrote. But it was not just Chanel’s designs or inspired costume jewelry that Diana admired. “The art of living was to Chanel as natural as her immaculate white shirts and neat little suits.” Talking to George Plimpton later, Diana described Chanel’s wit, the completeness of her taste, the rooms in her house that glowed with beauty. And there was also, of course, the sense of smell, the perfume, the perfection of Chanel No 5. “Chanel was the first couturier who added scent to the wardrobe of the woman. No designer had ever thought of such a thing.”
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bsp; While Diana thought Coco was entirely fascinating, she did not think she was very nice. She also did not think it mattered. “I’d always been slightly shy of her. And of course she was at times impossible. She had an utterly malicious tongue. Once, apparently, she’d said that I was the most pretentious woman she’d ever met. But that was Coco—she said a lot of things. So many things are said in this world, and in the end it makes no difference. Coco was never a kind woman, she was a monstre sacré. But she was the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
Diana and Coco Chanel had much in common beyond fashion: dysfunctional but mythologized childhoods, a love of horses, dance, coromandel screens, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, and the same blend of artistic vision and pragmatism. More important perhaps, Coco Chanel informed Diana’s thinking about the nature of inspiration itself. Diana admired the way in which Chanel derived ideas from everywhere—from Breton sailors, from the tailoring of her English lovers to the sumptuous jewelry, ropes of pearls above all, of the Russian czars, to which she was introduced by her lover Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the putative murderer of Rasputin. A Chanel suit that Diana bought in the late 1930s was inspired by a Watteau painting; and years later she was certain that the classic boxy Chanel suit of the 1950s was inspired by Russian ethnic clothes during Chanel’s affair with Dmitri. For all that she designed clothes for very rich women, Chanel believed in a democracy of taste, refusing to copyright her designs, and delighting in the idea that she was making duchesses indistinguishable from stenographers. Like Diana, Chanel reveled in trompe l’oeil, the theatrical perspective. “Faking it” was not a question of making cheap copies, but interpreting the original in one’s own inspired way, within the fashion structure of the time.
In the early 1930s it helped Diana greatly that the look of the period played to her strengths. As British Vogue put it rather rudely: “Today, an old boot of a face can win all along the line, since our present standards demand beauty of figure and finish, rather than mere prettiness. . . . If there is any animal today that is the beau idéal for female charm it is probably an otter emerging wet from the stream or a chestnut horse glittering with grooming.” The high fashion of the 1930s required a sleek, slim figure and willingness to devote oneself to the care involved in achieving a gleaming, streamlined surface. Fortunately for Diana it did not call for conventional loveliness. What mattered was one’s style, and that—as Diana had noted in her diary as early as 1918—meant every aspect of one’s image, including the way one stood and walked.
However, “style” went much further than one’s exterior appearance. “Personality” was just as important. When a group of Paris dressmakers drew up a best-dressed list in 1935, they made a point of judging the winners on personality and charm as well as the knack of dressing to best advantage. (One enterprising type went as far as advertising herself throughout the 1930s as a “personality specialist” in the back of Harper’s Bazaar: for a consideration she could modernize the reader’s personality to match the latest fashions.) It was essential to be amusing, and failure to pass the test could lead to a critical reaction. In 1930 Beaton found himself seated next to Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge. He had long admired her from afar but was deeply dismayed by her at close range, dressed in “conventional Chanels” and interested only in gossip. “What a disappointment that woman is,” he wrote in his diary afterward. “She might have been so amusing.”
Aware of the dangers of becoming a gossipy bore, and with time on her hands, Diana embarked on an energetic campaign of self-improvement, catching up on the reading she had neglected at school. “I’d spend days and days in bed reading and think nothing of it. There were so many books. I learned everything in England. I learned English.” This was not reading as understood by an academic student of literature. Diana made long lists of writers including Freud, Spinoza, Nancy Cunard, Isak Dinesen, biographies of Lady Hester Stanhope, and work by Gertrude Stein. Her response was highly visual. She dipped and scanned, and what she took from world literature frequently landed back in the world of fashion: “When I think of Natasha in War and Peace, when she’s just seen a young lady kiss a young man she was obviously having a walkout with . . . I know exactly what she’s wearing. It’s actually known as the ‘Natasha dress.’ ” Reed and Diana would read books together, out loud, which had a further impact on her feeling for language: “When you’ve heard the word, it means so much more than if you’ve only seen it.” Beaton was the first to capture the manner in which Diana spoke in the 1930s, noting her “poetical quality,” her insistence on accentuating the positive, and the way in which she gave color and life to the most quotidian event:
“What a bad film,” one might remark. “Yes, but I always adoare [sic] the noise of rain falling on the screen.” To me, beautiful Mrs. Paley in sequins is beautiful Mrs. Paley in sequins, but to Mrs. Vreeland: “My dear, she is the star in the sky.” A swarthy brunette may seem ordinary to me, but to Mrs. Vreeland she is “exceptional, my dear, she’s wonderful! A wonderful sulky slut.’”
Around this time Diana threw off the name Emily had given her, with all its fraught associations, for something more in keeping with her grown-up, 1930s European self. Friends in international society began to pronounce her name differently from the English “Die-anna” to something more frenchified: variously “Dee-anne,” “Dee-anna,” and sometimes “Dee-ahna.” This intensified her air of European sophistication, and had the additional advantage of distinguishing her from Diana Cooper and Diana Mosley, though her first name continued to shift around forever more, and English friends called her “Die-anna” until she died. As well as making adjustments to her name, Diana took steps to capture her new image, commissioning a drawing of her European self by Augustus John; and in 1931 she was painted by the society painter William Acton, who took a series of preparatory photographic studies that capture Diana’s European persona almost better than the portrait itself. At one point she slipped one of Acton’s photographs into her own fashion scrapbook. For a moment in the 1930s, in her own mind at least, Diana stood comparison with the writer Princess Marthe Bibesco, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo.
Above all, Diana observed l’art de vivre as practiced by the international beau monde, leaping on the smallest details of their savoir-faire with delight and carrying them home. This was a world in which the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles kept a houseboat with shiny green shutters on the Seine, and took to the rivers when the cares of the world became too much for them; in which Princess Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge dressed her two little girls in hats with skyrocketing feathers to set off her dead-black dress; and in which Lady Mendl dictated memorandums ordaining that her most successful sandwiches should be photographed for Vogue. Diana developed a taste for great luxury, and she was quick to learn the ways of rich friends. “The vision of Diana Vreeland arriving at a friend’s quattrocento villa in Fiesole with her own sheets and with so much luggage and so many books on the de Medici that she nearly overflowed the guest room, has, if anything, grown more vivid in her hostess’s eyes in the past thirty years,” wrote Phyllis Lee Levin. But at the same time, following the inspiration of Chanel, she adopted cheap and cheerful Breton tops, Neapolitan trousers, espadrilles, and the thonged sandals she saw on the feet of locals when staying with Mona Williams in Capri in 1935. The most important lesson of her time in Europe was that in the end, style had little to do with money. What counted was the divine spark.
In 1931 Diana and Reed were invited to stay with Baron Rodolphe d’Erlanger and his wife at their house Dar Nejma Ezzahra in Tunisia because they were friends of the couple’s son Leo and his wife, Edwina. A composer and eminent musicologist who made the study of Arab music his life’s work, Baron Rodolphe was the odd one out who never went into the d’Erlanger family bank, “which was as queer as if you decided to walk on your hands rather than on your legs.” Dar Nejma Ezzahra was a beguilingly beautiful palace, painted in blue and white, perched on the top of a cliff abov
e the Mediterranean, with terraces of orange, lemon, and oleander all the way up from the sea, where Diana stunned her fellow visitors by swimming in a pink rubber swimsuit. The manservants were dressed in pantaloons with gold and silver brocade and lamé boleros, and little birds flew in and out of marble columns in the hall, where water trickled in a rivulet and gardenias floated. There was a muster of silvery white peacocks. “The top of the palace was flat, and on hot nights we’d go up there after dinner to get the air and look down at the peacocks with their tails spread and their tiny heads against the reflection of the moon shining on the sea.”
Baron Rodolphe did have one disconcerting habit, however. On the first day of the stay, Diana was placed beside him at lunch. As they made light conversation and he paid her compliments (“you know, the sort of business that men say to women by the sea”), Diana noticed that he held a beautiful linen handkerchief. It was “like an absolutely transparent cobweb” that never left his hand and he sniffed constantly. “You’re the night’s morning (sniff) . . . you’re the sun, the moon and the stars (sniff, sniff).” With a growing sense of panic she realized she was sitting next to someone addicted to ether, said to relieve pain and produce intense exhilaration. “ ‘Reed,’ I once said, ‘What happens if I really get a blast of it?’ ‘You won’t,’ he said. ‘Just remember—when he breathes in, you breathe out.’ ” Their fellow guests included Kitty Brownlow, Elsie Mendl, and Baroness Catherine d’Erlanger. They were photographed in a row with Diana in the middle, looking notably chic in a linen dress and white gloves. The photograph appeared in British Vogue in July 1931, and it marked a turning point. Diana had moved from looking in at Vogue to looking out, surrounded by some of international high society’s most fashionable people. The Vreelands had arrived.
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