Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  The particular focus of Diana’s attention was a brilliant young designer called Claire McCardell. Diana met McCardell while she was working for Hattie Carnegie in 1938. Diana took in some French jersey and asked for it to be made up into a “little two piece Chanel kind of uniform,” but got a one-piece McCardell instead. She liked it so much she asked to meet the designer and became one of her most powerful supporters. Claire McCardell, who would later be considered one of America’s greatest designers ever, was only two years younger than Diana, but arrived in fashion by a very different route. She studied fashion design at the Parsons School for Design in the 1920s. As a student she went to Paris where she was greatly influenced by Chanel and Vionnet, pooling resources with student friends to buy secondhand couture clothes to see how they were made. Back in New York, McCardell was taken on as a designer by Townley Frocks in the early 1930s, and for most of the decade she copied Paris designs in its back rooms, though even there her creativity and inventiveness broke through. Her first real hit (still as an unnamed designer) was the “Monastic” dress, a waistless shift cut on the bias, which appeared in the fall of 1938. Widely copied, it had the unfortunate effect of forcing Townley to close because the firm lost so much money fighting copyright suits until it was restarted in 1940 by Adolph Klein. Klein was a very different character from every other manufacturer on Seventh Avenue. He greatly admired McCardell’s creativity and gave her her head, allowing her to work as a named designer. This gamble resulted in huge success for Townley, thanks in no small part to Diana.

  Diana’s sudden metamorphosis from 1930s woman of style to wartime fashion editor reflected rapidly changing social and economic circumstances in the United States even before Pearl Harbor. This sudden, radical change in American daily life opened Diana’s eyes in the most powerful way to the symbiotic relationship between fashion and changing everyday reality. It was an insight that would stay with her for the rest of her life, and in 1942 she took action. “Please don’t be modest,” wrote McCardell’s biographer Sally Kirkland to Diana later. “I know that without designing for her you nevertheless inspired her to do lots of things like the popover.” The “Popover” was the garment that made McCardell’s name, but it was conceived by Diana. Diana thought of it as a dress made in accordance with L-85 that could be worn for housework, though it evolved into an outfit in which one could step out to the shops, or fling over work clothes at a moment’s notice to look respectable. Diana and Snow approached Claire McCardell with this idea in 1942 as part of an attempt to show how L-85 could stimulate American creativity. The first Popover appeared in Bazaar in September 1942. Manufactured in workmanlike fabrics like denim, McCardell’s version allied the ideas of Madame Vionnet with the simplicity and informality of sportswear design. This was the first time a magazine dedicated to contemporary high fashion proposed a solution to its readers in the form of a sportswear garment, and the impact was instantaneous. The Popover was mass-produced at $6.95, well below the usual price of Claire McCardell’s designs. A runaway success, it was a career-defining piece for McCardell and a bestseller for Townley. It also showed what could be achieved when a businessman with vision joined forces with an outstanding designer.

  Diana’s next attempt to ally the aesthetic values of Bazaar with clothes for the wartime woman was less successful in commercial terms but was even more daring and reflected her longstanding fondness for ballet clothes. In late 1942 the designer Mildred Orrick came to see her with ideas for a “leotard”—not a ballet leotard, but a tabard dress worn over a striped sweater with leggings. Realizing that it might be too avant-garde for Bazaar’s readers, Diana floated the idea with a drawing in the January 1943 issue, describing it as “an old idea based on every ballet dancer’s rehearsal costume.” The idea appeared again in the July 1943 issue, considerably developed. By this time Diana had involved Claire McCardell, believing that Mildred Orrick did not have the expertise or the profile to launch such an idea on her own. The leotard then appeared on the cover of Life magazine on September 13, 1943, earning itself a send-up in The New Yorker along the way. In the end the notion failed because it proved too expensive for college girls, the only people slim enough to wear the leotard to advantage. Meanwhile Diana’s ideas spread in other ways. She circumvented leather shortages by putting models in fabric espadrilles; and fashion editor Babs Simpson credits her with putting women in ballet slippers in wartime, though others maintain this idea came from McCardell and the dance shoe manufacturer Capezio, and was then enthusiastically adopted by Diana in the pages of Bazaar.

  Such questions of attribution do not seem to have been of great importance in wartime. What is striking, however, is the extent to which war turned the New York clothing industry into an all-female world. Women had played an important role before the war, though they were disproportionately clustered in its lower ranks in both manufacturing and retail. But even in 1936, when Diana first started at Bazaar, the New York fashion world was providing a wide range of occupations for educated, middle-class young women, particularly those looking to earn a living before they married—and increasingly before and after they had children. These women worked not only as designers but as copywriters, buyers, entrepreneurs like Cora Scovil, who made window mannequins, retailers like Dorothy Shaver, and photographers like Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Toni Frissell. “Probably about the best paid of all women’s jobs are fashion jobs,” said Bazaar in August 1939; and in 1937 the Tobé-Coburn School for Fashion Careers aimed itself squarely at educated young women with the express aim of finding them the right sort of professional work in the field of fashion.

  With so many men away at war, New York fashion became dominated by a small and powerful female group. There was little thaw in relations between Edna Woolman Chase and Snow; but designers like Joset Walker, Clare Potter, and Carolyn Schnurer pooled their ideas to such an extent that even experts have trouble telling their wartime work apart. Diana proved to be a good team player in this wartime all-female world too. Besides her relationship with Snow, she worked closely with one highly progressive fashion buyer, Marjorie Griswold of Lord & Taylor, who was fast gaining a reputation as having an instinct for the best American designers, and was given great leeway by Dorothy Shaver as a result. Griswold’s view of the American woman had an influence on Diana’s thinking. “I rang her 7 times a day,” she said, and later wrote to Griswold that “you were the person I always worked the closest with and I was the most devoted to and respectful of.” Diana was the indirect beneficiary of lectures arranged throughout the war for senior staff like Griswold by Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor on the relationship between fashion and changing socioeconomic conditions; and she often had lunch with Dorothy Shaver to discuss such matters face-to-face.

  Diana’s greatest creative partnership of the war years, however, was with the first woman in the canon of twentieth-century photographers, Louise Dahl-Wolfe. A former art student, Dahl-Wolfe trained and worked as an interior decorator before she took up photography; and she ended up at Bazaar only when she discovered that Dr. Agha of Vogue had described her in an internal Condé Nast memo as “making a great effort to learn photography . . . but on account of her advanced age—about forty-eight—perhaps a little too late.” In developing her craft, Dahl-Wolfe absorbed lessons from the leading male photographers around her: Munkácsi’s images of strong, dynamic women; Huene’s love of form; the glamour and imagination of Beaton’s portrait photographs; and the surrealism of Huene’s successor at Vogue, his lover and protégé Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann, known simply as Horst. “We had the best time—we were all such friends,” she recalled. Dahl-Wolfe’s own contribution to the development of photography was her use of color. She experimented endlessly with the new color film launched by Kodachrome in 1935, achieving the first successful fashion photographs in color in interior natural light, and taking her palette outdoors to create some of the most memorable fashion shoots of the early 1940s.

  “Dahl-Wolfe freed c
olor from convention and timidity, wedding the American ideal of natural wholeness to a European standard of elegance,” writes the American photographic critic and photographer Vicki Goldberg. Dahl-Wolfe achieved this in part because, unlike Huene, she was able to work with others. As Diana said: “One was never selfish with Louise. There was an extraordinary, immediate communication of her seriousness.” For her part Dahl-Wolfe greatly admired Diana. “She was the tops,” Dahl-Wolfe said. “No one knew color or could pull a sitting together like Diana.” The color photographs in each issue were expensive, and were allocated to clothes by advertisers and designers whom Snow and Diana agreed were important. Snow and Brodovitch, meanwhile, deliberated on how the images should be placed in the issue. Once Diana had selected the pieces, and Snow approved, Diana and Dahl-Wolfe agreed between them what the mood of the image should be. Diana, with her theatrical streak, often had a hand in dramatizing the scene, suggesting roughly the pose of the model and the wording for the caption that was later polished by a copywriter. Dahl-Wolfe then developed the idea in her own way, actual garment or swatches on hand, designing and building the set or finding locations. She would often take a day over just one photograph, and at this point in her career Diana was on hand to style the model. They frequently worked in sweltering temperatures with no air-conditioning. “There’d be big rows between Dee-Ann and Louise on some point to do with the pictures. They’d end up, both of them, sending flowers to each other,” said Babs Simpson. But the rage came from passionate commitment to the task at hand, and the relationship was one of great mutual respect.

  One bane of both their lives was the garments that had to be photographed for Bazaar because the manufacturers were regular advertisers. Diana was heard to exclaim, “That’s perfectly ghastly!” before asking the manufacturer to change a piece slightly and make it more appetizing. Particularly hopeless cases were grouped together in a feature called “Pearls of Little Price” at the back of the magazine. “Sometimes you’d get [these clothes], and just not know what to do,” said Louise Dahl-Wolfe. But in these circumstances Diana proved unexpectedly calm and resourceful. “Diane always managed to make it work,” she said. At the other end of the scale, some of the most outstanding work from the Dahl-Wolfe and Vreeland team took place out in the open. As the war progressed, deploying the beauty of the American landscape became a powerful way of reinforcing the identity of the clothes and the all-American talent of designers like Claire McCardell, Carolyn Schnurer, Tina Leser, Bonnie Cashin, and others. Munkácsi had already used New York architecture as a backdrop to American design before the war, but Dahl-Wolfe took this further, using some of America’s most dramatic open spaces and developing her color technique as she did so.

  One of her most remarkable shoots, at which Diana was present and played a central role, took place in Arizona in 1941. At certain moments in the shoot, Dahl-Wolfe exploited the graphic sculptural qualities of the cacti in the Arizona desert. On another day she took Frank Lloyd Wright’s house in Scottsdale, Taliesin West, as a backdrop—a building that itself represented a uniquely American integration of indoors and outdoors. “Dahl-Wolfe’s use of colour and light to create form and texture in a photograph could produce a unifying aesthetic that provided a visual and stylistic link between city and nature,” writes Rebecca Arnold. This happened at Taliesin West; and when the model Wanda Delafield fell ill, Diana stepped in herself to model “cigar-brown” Jay Thorpe slacks, a black fringed shawl, and goggle-shaped sunglasses with white rims, against the background of the house. She also stepped in as model during a shoot on a disused movie set of an old Western town, in a different kind of all-American blurring of appearance and reality.

  Some of their best work together came from photographing the designs of Claire McCardell, who was a close friend of Dahl-Wolfe’s. But in spite of her occasional excursions into emergency modeling, Diana was well aware that American designers projected their ideas onto an idealized version of the modern American woman—who did not look like Diana. Instead, the fashion historian Valerie Steele suggests, she was rather similar to Claire McCardell herself—youthful, long-limbed, and glowing with health—a new American body. During the war Diana became aware for the first time that the face and body of the model were just as important as the clothes in projecting the mood of the times. After Pearl Harbor, American designs in American landscapes were not enough. American fashion needed a new kind of all-American girl to propel it forward; and in 1942 Diana found just the person she was looking for.

  In November 1942 a sixteen-year-old called Betty Bacall was trying to break through as an actress in New York when she met an Englishman, Timothy Brooke, who thought she would make a good photographic model. He introduced her to Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, who was working with Diana at Bazaar and who took Bacall to meet her. Bacall thought Diana looked quite extraordinary, remembering that she was covered in bits of jewelry and scarves, was extremely thin, and was clad from head to toe in black. Her manner was very direct. Before Bacall knew what was happening Diana put her hand under her chin and turned her face left and right. When this terrifying inspection was over, Diana told Betty that she wanted Louise Dahl-Wolfe to see her. “I was scared to death. The efficiency and matter-of-factness of the whole magazine operation and particularly of Mrs. Vreeland were intimidating,” said Bacall. The next day Betty presented herself at the photographic studio, where Diana met her and Dahl-Wolfe took a few snaps. After this sitting Diana called back and asked her to come in and pose formally. “Mrs. Wolfe was there—and Mrs. Vreeland. She put a suit on me, told me which make-up to use—but very little. ‘Betty, I don’t want to change your look.’ (Whatever that was.) When all was done she put a scarf round my neck—knew just how to tie it, a little off-center—and I was ready for my first sitting for Harper’s Bazaar.” Diana was there throughout the sitting, making constant adjustments to Bacall’s hair and clothes.

  Shortly afterward Diana asked Bacall to join a two-week shoot of summer clothes with Louise Dahl-Wolfe and her husband in St. Augustine, Florida. The shoot went without a hitch. “I remember going into Diana Vreeland’s room one evening as she was sitting in her one-piece undergarment—not a girdle, it was all easy, like thin knitted cotton or wool. . . . We talked of how the work was going. I talked more of my ambitions, my dreams.” The problems started when the Bazaar team tried to get back to New York. By this time it was pouring with rain and the town was full of young servicemen desperate to get home for Christmas. The staff of a fashion magazine was not a transportation priority. But Diana had promised Betty’s mother she would bring her home safely, and she was also thoroughly fed up. “We were staying in a ninth-rate hotel,” said Diana. “Every day it poured rain . . . but I mean it poured buckets. And every day I walked to the train station in the rain, trying to get us tickets to go home to New York. You couldn’t move, you understand—it was Wartime. I’ve never been on a Pacific Island at war but I’ve been in St. Augustine and it was the most ghastly town.” In the end Diana lied her head off, telling everyone that Betty was her pregnant daughter, that she was liable to miscarry, and so had to return to New York urgently. “Talk of acting—what a character!” said Bacall. “She got the tickets. . . . That’s why she flourished. Talent—her gift of creativity—is not enough—determination, perseverance, resolution, that’s what makes the difference.” All went well until Betty insisted on going to hear the comedy performer Martha Raye entertaining the servicemen in the club car. Filled with trepidation that her lie would be discovered and they would all be put off the train, Diana went, too, finally persuading the “pregnant” one that she had to go to bed at two o’clock in the morning.

  The first St. Augustine picture appeared in January 1943. In March, Betty Bacall appeared on the cover of Bazaar and Hollywood came calling. Alerted by his wife, the director Howard Hawks took note, Betty went for her first screen test and followed advice to change her first name to Lauren. Diana said later: “Betty’s always been what us
ed to be called a ‘good kid.’ It’s rather a period phrase but it’s the way I always think of her. I didn’t think about her—I loved her. She was my special friend. She’s always kept her own thoughts and her own dreams. . . . She literally had nothing to offer but her existence. But I was so interested in her.” After the war, when Bacall was married to Humphrey Bogart, Diana went to see her in Hollywood. She approached unobserved as Bacall gave instructions to a gardener about laying out a flower garden beside a swimming pool: “This is the little girl from 22nd Street and Second Avenue. She was taking dried flowers out of a little envelope and her eyes were filled with stars. I’ve never seen anyone so happy, so adorable, and so in love. It was a dream come true . . . these things are so touching. You see them so rarely, so rarely . . . but they stay with you always.”

  It has been suggested that the Second World War was the greatest period in Diana’s fashion career. “She was in her glory,” Babs Simpson said. “Dee-Ann was a major force then.” It was indisputably a time of great success. Under Snow’s watchful but delighted editorial eye, Diana learned her way around Seventh Avenue, fought to raise standards, created fashion as well as reported it, and pushed back the boundaries of fashion photography with Louise Dahl-Wolfe. She learned about typography and layout from Brodovitch. She understood the power of the model for the first time and discovered Lauren Bacall; and she learned a vital lesson about the extent of fashion’s power to transform itself in the face of social change.