Empress of Fashion

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Moreover, in moving to Vogue from Bazaar, Diana moved to a less adventurous magazine. Yet commercially Vogue was also more successful. There were twenty issues of American Vogue a year (it only went monthly in 1973) but even allowing for this, Vogue’s circulation figures consistently outstripped those of Bazaar throughout their joint history. In spite of her grand title, Diana was not in total control of every aspect of the magazine. Like all Vogue’s editors in chief before her (and like Carmel Snow at Hearst) she was answerable to the magazine’s owner, Sam Newhouse; its publisher, Edwin Russell, followed by Si Newhouse in 1964, and the senior executives of Condé Nast, who controlled advertising, sales, and the business side of the magazine. From their point of view, Diana’s task was to provide the content that would deliver readers to advertisers. Vogue’s high command regarded both its North American readers and its advertisers as conventional and conservative. Vogue had always stood for elite luxury; and the elite to which the magazine addressed itself was not particularly young and anything but radical.

  From the time Diana formally became editor in chief, she was also answerable to Alexander Liberman as editorial director of Condé Nast; and while he craved more editorial and visual excitement in the wake of Daves’s reign, he was an obstacle to rapid change in the layout of the magazine. Liberman had created Vogue’s graphic design, building on the work of Dr. Agha. But for all his skill, and his talent in spotting new photographers, he lacked Brodovitch’s brilliance—and David Bailey, for one, thought he knew it. “He could never get over Brodovitch,” said Bailey. “He knew he wasn’t as good.” The effect was a magazine that looked more staid than Bazaar, with far more typeface to each page. Though Liberman was open to change, he continued to appear in the art department to cajole and criticize. The result was that even at its most experimental, the layout of Diana’s Vogue of the 1960s never came close to the remarkable daring of Bazaar in the 1930s. It also did not help Diana that Vogue was much larger and more factionalized than Bazaar, with powerful cliques. “We are talking about a snake pit,” said one of her old colleagues. Some senior editors simply dug in their heels. Vogue’s features editor, Allene Talmey, had a semifiefdom of her own and continued to balance the fashion pages with articles about intellectual figures like Georges Auric, and profiles of major contemporary artists by Liberman himself.

  Beneath this conservative patina, however, Diana wrought huge changes as she attempted to make Vogue her own in the first half of the 1960s. “Editing is four walls of work, walls you have to open to let in the light,” Diana informed her staff, as she set about doing precisely that. “You have to ignite women’s appetites, titillate them so they want something. But the whole thing has to look spontaneous and you mustn’t have too many theories.” Diana did not approve of intellectualizing. (“Those were terrible pictures we published. They were taken by an intellectual,” she said to Cecil Beaton. “It won’t happen again. If we have an intellectual working for Vogue, he’s running the elevator.”) Vogue’s role was to present the reader with a palette of ideas that would delight and inspire her and, of course, loosen her purse strings.

  At Vogue, I was what you might call an enfant terrible. I remember an absurd scene over a picture when I first started working there. The girl’s legs in the picture were superb, but she was quite thick around the middle and her face was ghastly. So I said, “The legs are great but as for the face—forget it! Let’s just use the legs and combine them with this torso and that . . .” I thought they’d fall on the floor. “But don’t you do this all the time?” I said. They thought it was the most immoral thing they’d ever heard of—to take an artist’s work and . . . so I said, “Listen, photographers aren’t artists, for goodness sake!” There’s very little art in the world. What there is is splendid, but let’s not confuse it with fashion . . . . It’s all trompe l’oeil, but we’re talking fashion now, not art. That was my business.

  On Diana’s watch Vogue became a composite of different textures, materials, and ideas; a kaleidoscopic montage of fashion and art, high and low culture, imaginative creativity and rampant materialism—and from the start she actively embraced youthful energy, regardless of age.

  The change began with the magazine’s language. In the summer of 1962, well before Daves’s official departure, the reader’s attention was drawn to clothes in “clay white, creamy white, chamois white, chalk white, smoky white” and a line that was all “dash and zing.” Articles appeared for women with “junior figures,”—not for juniors, but “for women with youthful figures at any age.” The issue of August 1, 1962, constituted Diana’s first real breakthrough. In direct contrast to Daves’s “convinced and beleaguered stand against the current Youth Fixation,” the cover trailed “The Pepper in the Fashion News . . . How to Use It in the Young Way.” A fresh, vibrant Penn image of a model in a scarf tied around her head and under her chin linked to photographs inside of Mrs. John F. Kennedy, Princess Margaret, and several queens wearing theirs in more or less the same way and the issue brought to life a “free-wheeling school of collectors” who were “the vivacious, the enthusiastic, the enfants terrific; the people who know it’s today.”

  This emphasis on peppery younger fashion and a younger fashionista served notice on the changes that would soon pervade the magazine. “Enfants terrific” were dressed for early 1960s action in white parkas, seal-sleek black stretch ski pants, and scarves tied in a cowl in the manner of international royalty. “Their pitch is black and white this season, runaway, contrary, zoomy, diverse,” said Vogue, and to underscore the point, black-and-white photographs emerged from more expansive white spaces, the typeface was reversed out in white against a black background, and the article intersected with blocks of zinging mustard yellow. Cropped photographs started another trend that Diana would soon develop—a greater sense of closeness and intimacy with the model, making her something more than a clotheshorse and blurring the distance between the page and the reader. By October 1962 Diana was applying her composite approach to the fashions too, taking liberties with the work of America’s leading designers in a manner that was new to Vogue. A feature called “What to Wear With Your New Boots,” photographed by Bert Stern, teamed a grasshopper green overcoat by Norman Norell with black suede boots by Charles Jourdan, topped with a black velvet boy’s cap. However contemporary this looks now, and however right it may have been at the time, Norman Norell never forgave Diana for such lèse-majesté and sent his own dressers along to Vogue shoots thereafter.

  From January 1963, when Diana formally became editor in chief, she used the editorial column “Vogue’s Eye View” to explore, describe, and enthuse about new trends and ideas. Priscilla Peck redesigned the layout of the column so that it became bolder and more dramatic, and Diana’s remarks were often accompanied by an image that set the mood for the entire issue, and sometimes the fashion season. It is clear from Diana’s 1918 diary that she had long taken the idea of the New Year, New Year’s resolutions, and a new start seriously; and it is no coincidence that Diana used her very first “Vogue’s Eye View” of January 1, 1963, to give the world the Girl, the idealized version of the self who first appeared in her diary, that being whose divine spark had propelled her forward so triumphantly since her miserable adolescence. The Girl only ever appeared in Vogue obliquely. But, in her first editorial in January 1963, Diana presented her as someone very young, using a photograph by Cecil Beaton of seventeen-year-old Lily Cushing holding a flower to make the point. Lily was a young girl waiting—or listening—in absolute stillness, wrote Diana.

  In this stillness, it is possible to hear things that are lost in the crowded, clamorous rooms; and to feel and know other things that are unheard. . . . Above all, it’s possible to hear the often-disregarded voice of what you yourself think. And if any New Year’s resolve is to be made, it might be to listen oftener to this voice—to be true first of all to this person: yourself.

  To be herself, a woman had to allow herself to dr
eam, as Lily was dreaming, of becoming the heroine of her own life.

  This was a theme to which Diana would return over and over again throughout her time at Vogue; and soon after she took the reins, she extended the idea of becoming a heroine to women who were not born beautiful and did not conform to contemporary ideas of prettiness. By 1964 Diana was actively challenging conventional American ideas of female beauty, asking Vogue’s readers to look instead at women with vital, distinctive, alluring faces. On August 1 that year Diana turned over most of the magazine to two new prototypes, the “Chicerino” and the “Funny Girl.” In many ways, the Chicerino read exactly like a projection of Diana herself. She was “full of the zest of doing things.” She had “the vividly personal quality” of a girl who liked herself, who expected the best of herself and the best of everything, a girl with “star quality.” She was “defiant and unswayable” and thus swayed all, a “mover and maker of fashion—stimulus for the good looks of her era, the measure of chic in her time.” As Diana put it:

  The image she presents is of her own, intensely personal manufacture—a projected vision of herself, nourished by intuition, by ego, and by the single-minded clarity of her thinking. Her presentation is perfect: she comes in a blaze of certainty, engages all interest, sustains it, provokes. Unhesitatingly she chooses what’s good for her—the gesture, the look that exactly conveys her mood, her quality, her special dash. No other fashion counts. . . . The Chicerino is every country’s phenomenon: she is the girl who owns the world, makes it swing . . . the girl who holds onto her personality with both hands and projects it with style.

  The Chicerino was represented by the actress and model Benedetta Barzini photographed by Penn; the singer Françoise Hardy photographed by David Bailey and wearing designs by Emanuelle Khanh; and the actresses Catherine Spaak and Sarah Miles wearing slip dresses and smocks by young designers.

  Alongside the Chicerino, Diana introduced the Funny Girl, initiating an idea of beauty that read like a retort to the unkindness meted out to her in her youth. Women with odd faces, even ugly women, could be beauties too, Diana suggested. The time had come for the Funny Girl with the idiosyncratic looks of Barbra Streisand, Tammy Grimes, or Carol Channing: “A funny thing has happened: there is now, in the best young beauty, a place for quirkiness. There is a taste for the odd feature, a drive toward knowing eccentricity. . . . Funny Girls would rather look interesting than safely pretty. The look they avoid, in fact, is prettiness in the country-club sense.” Funny Girls too were strangely like Diana. “They consider themselves blessed if they have one frankly crazy feature to work with; they’re mad about eyebrows with some character. One Funny Girl has a large nose—and she makes other people wish they had large noses.”

  As editor in chief Diana felt—and was initially allowed to feel—that she had the freedom to take everything she had ever learned about becoming the Girl, everything of beauty, every fantasy that had ever caught her inner eye, and place it all at the reader’s disposal. As the new editor in chief she ranged backward and forward across half a century of experience. The creative relationship between film actress Audrey Hepburn and the couturier Hubert de Givenchy blazed with the same inspiration that flew between the women of style and their couturiers in the 1930s: “What fires his imagination races hers; the message he cuts into cloth she beams to the world with the special wit and stylishness of a great star in a rôle that suits her to perfection.” An issue that gave twenty-four pages to jersey and pearls looked Janus-like back to Chanel in the 1920s while encouraging the 1960s reader to adapt the look in her own way. “Chanel started it: took jersey, showered it with pearls, and—like that—gave the world its greatest fashion natural. Then, now, forever: the fashion that . . . causes certain pearls to become luminous for her alone—delicious new possibilities in her own allure.”

  “Isn’t that life, darling?” said Diana to Lally Weymouth later. “You pool all the things of your childhood, all your fantasies, all your imagination—everything together, and then you become a woman . . . and you’ve got it all together on your own.” But all the while, she continued, “You’re developing every moment. You develop every moment of your life. Don’t you think that’s how it is?” For all that she brought the past right up to Vogue’s present as editor in chief, Diana was just as avid as she had ever been for what was fresh and new. If the reader was to remain open-minded and develop every moment of her life, she had to be able to catch fascinating new moods on an early breeze—and Vogue was there to help her do it.

  Diana knew very well before she left Bazaar in 1962 that a new mood was blowing through London and London society. At Vogue, she set up a direct line to the tiny handful of people who actually constituted “swinging London” through Nicholas Haslam, who had come from his native England with the photographer David Bailey and the model Jean Shrimpton in 1962, and stayed on. A lesser editor in chief would have left him sitting there, but he charmed Diana and became a friend of both Vreelands and a vital source of firsthand information about who and what was happening in England. Diana quickly came to trust Haslam’s instincts. When he made a friend of the fingers-on-pulse New York socialite Jane Holzer, Diana arranged for her to be photographed by Penn and she appeared in the next issue. It was Haslam’s father who first drew their attention to the Beatles. He read about them in newspapers and sent his son a clipping. “Being from Lancashire himself, he’d been intrigued by them, though he was the least musical of men. I showed this article on the Beatles to Mrs. Vreeland: ‘They’re too adorable, get them photographed immediately.’ ” She sent him to England to arrange it. “In those days the fans threw flowers, rather than bottles and knickers, onto the stage. I gathered these up into posies and passed them to the boys. Holding them, these wild young cannibals sat there looking as innocent as Victorian bridesmaids.” The resulting portrait, taken after a gig in Northampton in 1964, was the first photograph printed of the Beatles in any American magazine.

  Contrary to legend, it was Liberman, not Diana, who gave David Bailey a contract with Condé Nast a few years before she started at Vogue. Indeed, when Bailey heard the news that Diana was coming to Vogue from Bazaar in 1962, he was sure he would be fired because Diana would entice Avedon, Derujinsky, and other Bazaar photographers to follow her. As it turned out, Diana welcomed Bailey and a soaking wet and terrified Jean Shrimpton with great geniality into her Vogue office soon after she arrived, roaring, “Stop! The English have arrived!” at a bemused assistant as they came through the door. They immediately became friends and, intermittently, collaborators. Photographs of Jean Shrimpton by Irving Penn and Bailey began to appear in late 1962, and Diana put Shrimpton on the cover of Vogue in 1963. “No one knew more about fashion than Diana Vreeland, and she could make or break anyone in the fashion world in the States,” said Jean Shrimpton later. “She made us.” For her part Diana agitated that her senior staff were failing to pick up the new London atmosphere. “I think we are frightfully missing, and I am sure you agree, in English lore,” she wrote to Allene Talmey, urging her to do better. Diana repeated her triumph in anticipating the success of the Beatles by publishing a photograph by Bailey of his friend Mick Jagger while he was still unknown to all but his UK fans. Every other editor to whom Bailey offered the photograph in 1964 spurned it, saying that Jagger was ugly. Diana’s reaction was that she would publish it whoever he was. “To women, Jagger looks fascinating, to men, a scare,” wrote Vogue. “The effect is sex . . . that isn’t sex, which is the end of the road.” The Rolling Stones were “quite different from the Beatles, and more terrifying.”

  It was significant that the focus of “English lore” in Vogue was initially on London’s pop and rock stars, for Diana always maintained that it was 1960s music that opened her eyes to the great social and economic change that was under way. Although she was sixty-one in 1964, she had one great advantage over her younger staff because she had danced, partied, and smoked her way through the early 1920s. “I’ve
known two great decades in my life, the 20s and the 60s, and I’m always comparing them because of the music. Music is everything and in those two decades you got something so sharp, so new.” The parallels between 1920s New York, 1920s London, and 1960s London were startling: rebellion by a younger generation against the attitudes of parents who had either fought in or lived through a world war and the privations that followed; reaction against the idea of patriotic duty; fashion that challenged Victorian mores and mature body shapes and that displayed the youthful body, with bare backs and skirts rising up the leg once again; a much less inhibited sexuality, encouraged by the arrival of the Pill after 1960; underground clubs; moral panics; a tendency on the part of the older generation to equate any part of youth culture, even slightly longer hair, with rejection and full-blown moral degeneracy; and all of it expressed in the sounds of raw, even threatening, popular music and new risqué dances.

  Nonetheless Diana had to be careful about how she presented new moods to Vogue’s readers. Fresh ideas from London tended to appear first in the “People Are Talking About” column or feature articles about its leading players. Even so, “caution” was the watchword. Mary Quant, for example, first appeared in Vogue in August 1963, in an article titled “The Adventurous Ones.” Quant had been designing and selling her highly original clothes in London since 1955; the editor of New York’s Seventeen magazine had championed the manufacture of her work in the United States; and Quant’s designs were already available in Lord & Taylor by the time the article was published. Nonetheless in 1963 Vogue positioned her at the cutting edge of fashion experimentation, equating her quite explicitly with Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Quant and her husband, Alexander Plunket Greene, had gone “against everything expected of them” wrote Vogue, discovering “what no one in England knew—there was a whole new ‘want’ among bright young English girls for new, young, skinny clothes that sometimes have the look of fancy dress. Right for them.”