Empress of Fashion (11 page)

A
s the Vreelands made their way into international high society, Diana encountered a new incarnation of the Girl: the 1930s woman of fashion. This woman was a fashion dictator, one of an elite group of women who wielded power outside the home as tastemakers, compelling other women to follow in their footsteps. “It was not an era of gentle friendships or simple living,” wrote Bettina Ballard, who came to know several of these women while she worked for
Vogue
in Paris in the 1930s. “The small egocentric group of women about whom fashion revolved accepted or rejected ideas with ruthless capriciousness, maintaining their leadership by making fashionable what they chose for themselves.” In many ways this tiny circle of very rich women was as important to fashion as the couturiers in the 1930s. These were the people for whom the designers created their greatest pieces, knowing that such clients could make or break their reputations; and they were known as “
Les Dames de
Vogue
”
in contrast to a less elegant group who were known as “
Les Dames de
Femina
,
” an inferior fashion magazine.

“
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.”

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.”

A
ware 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: