Empress of Fashion (20 page)

Friends and colleagues streamed through the Brewster house in the early part of the war. They were often friends escaping from Europe. The jewelry designer Johnny [Jean] Schlumberger came to recover after Dunkirk. Edwina d'Erlanger was a frequent visitor, as was Kitty Miller. Elsie Mendl appeared with Diana's cousin Pauline Potter, who would later become Pauline de Rothschild. Isabel Kemp, who had been a childhood friend of Diana's and one of her bridesmaids, was another regular guest: she may have reappeared at this point in Diana's life because she had a close relationship with Pauline Potter. Syrie Maugham came to stay. So did the fashion editor Nicolas de Gunzburg and the journalist Janet Flanner; and Virginia Cowles scribbled in the visitors' book that she had decided to move in for good. Colleagues from
Bazaar,
including George Davis, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Frances McFadden, all signed the visitors' book. Elsa Schiaparelli's sense of humor failed her when Emi-Lu, for reasons best known to her twelve-year-old self, referred to her as “the Great French Cleaner” during a parlor game.

Later Emi-Lu wrote to Diana: “I
did
love it so much there—
everything
about it—the flowers—your wonderful bedroom and the divine living room with Timmy and Frecky playing their records. The gorgeous food I never appreciated.” There was, of course, the occasional squall: “Frecky slapping my face for saying you were too swanky—me writing Grandpa—he saying it was dreadful and doing nothing.” And she certainly found tiptoeing around her intimidating aunt's sleep schedule at Brewster a little tiresome. “You—who were very nice—but terrifying—you know the
thing
one always had to be quiet in the morning for.” Looking back Emi-Lu realized she might not have been so very easy herself: “Gosh I thought I was badly treated and how you spoilt me!! Brewster always was divine. In fact I teenaged through it—which always is—Hell but heaven!”

T
he war years were often much closer to hell than heaven for Diana. Like thousands of other mothers, she had to see a son off to war when Tim graduated from Groton in 1943. He was utterly astonished when she burst into tears as she waved him good-bye. He was rather excited about taking such a step into the unknown, and was taken aback by her reaction. Feeling like a grown man, he had no idea how young he looked to his mother. Tim did not reach Europe until the fighting was over, and Freck only joined the merchant marine in 1945, but Diana could not foresee that in 1943. “You don't know what it was for a mother to see her sons off,” she said. “The only thing that made it possible was that you weren't alone. Every person you'd pass on the street was in the same boat.”

But there was another reason why the war years were difficult, in spite of all Diana's professional success. “During the War years, during the soi-disant best years of my life—the soi-disant best years of my life,
not
the best years of my life—I spent them
entirely alone
working,” said Diana to Christopher Hemphill. On her own in New York, she sensed a degree of prejudice. “I knew that I wasn't very important. I wasn't really what they were looking for at that important spot at the table.” Moreover, the men who were left behind were distinctly second rate. “They had no exaltation,” said Diana, “or they wouldn't have been around town.”

But the real reason for her misery was Reed. When he first started running the Moorgate Agency for the d'Erlangers in Montreal in 1939, Reed returned to New York every month, but early in 1940 this pattern changed. His return visits became fewer and fewer, though he was in New York to meet Emi-Lu off the ship from England in 1940, and he reappeared each Christmas.

Work was not the reason for these long absences. Reed was having a very serious affair with an unnamed married woman with children of her own. By all accounts Diana never spoke of this to anyone. (“Are some things better left undiscussed? Can a duck swim?”) Indeed she rarely discussed his absence at all, other than to say he was in Montreal and working for British interests. If the Vreelands were invited somewhere together, she would refuse on his behalf as if his absence were temporary. But she knew at the time that Reed was in love with someone else, and for much of the war the survival of their marriage was in doubt. Later she was a little more forthcoming about the toll this took on her. “He was there for seven years. We were married for 43 years and this is only seven of them but it was a very vivid period in my life. For seven years, I was by myself, by myself.” Even Emi-Lu, who was little more than a child, could sense how much her coiffed and lacquered aunt Diana loved her uncle Reed. Emi-Lu thought it was Diana's saving grace, the one great thing about her. “She really, really knew how to love.” Yet even this was unable to hold Reed. It is perhaps not surprising that as the war progressed, the women dramatized by Diana in collaboration with Louise Dahl-Wolfe metamorphosed from romantic figures staring at themselves in rococo mirrors to industrious women who were always alone, enigmatic, often gazing into the middle distance in some kind of private reverie, probably thinking of an absent man—a mood that captured the feelings of thousands of
Bazaar
's readers in wartime and contributed to its success.

In the end it was energy and dreaming and making surfaces beautiful that got Diana through:

One morning, I said “Betty, I'll tell you what I do whenever I'm depressed: I clean my shoes and out of that energy comes a gleam of survival.”

I cleaned my shoes every morning to keep my mind off. . . .

Listen, the great thing was to get out of St. Augustine.

Chapter Five

New Look

I
n spite of their encouragement of American designers in wartime, Carmel Snow and Diana continued to regard French couture as the wellspring of all fashion inspiration, and no amount of American inventiveness could persuade them otherwise. As soon as Paris was liberated in August 1944, Snow made her way to France to discover whether the couture had survived. She discovered that it had, but at a price. The dressmakers of Paris had resorted to every kind of behavior from breathtaking courage to frank collaboration in order to pull through. “I've never taken any side in anything that went on in Paris during the war . . . because I was not there. I didn't have hungry children,” said Diana. But news that the couture had actually thrived by purveying rounder, fuller shapes to rich women went down badly in Allied countries, where fabric and clothes were severely rationed and volunteers were still sending clothing parcels to the poorer parts of France. In New York, American designers objected fiercely to the possible return of Paris influence, maintaining that American taste and technique had so improved during the war that U.S. manufacturers were producing better-quality garments than the French, and for a fraction of the price. For a time, continued L-85 restrictions, distaste for what was seen as collaborationism on the part of French designers, and a feeling that it was unpatriotic to wear extravagant clothes meant that the return of the Paris couture to its former dominant position hung in the balance.

This cut no ice with Snow. “I was no more willing to concede the permanent fall of Paris than was General de Gaulle,” she said. She was helped by a change of mood that gripped America as soon as the war ended. By late 1945 women were yearning for something different from the straight, boxy, L-85 fashions associated with the trauma of war—and so were their menfolk. “Why brilliant fashion-designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history,” writes the British historian Eric Hobsbawm. In this instance, however, the answer was quite straightforward: “Men want women beautiful, romantic . . . birds of paradise instead of hurrying brown hens,” said
Bazaar
in October 1945. As families were reestablished, there was a move toward a celebratory fashion of fecundity, with closer-fitting waists and rounder hips. Rebecca Arnold notes that this response to peace was as prevalent in the United States as it was in Paris. U.S. sportswear designers, led by Claire McCardell, also began to move in the direction of a different, more curvaceous silhouette between 1945 and 1947, developing an idea introduced by Mainbocher just before the outbreak of war.

It was the new French couturier Christian Dior who successfully captured the change of mood. Snow identified Dior as a rising star as early as 1946. A few months later he was backed by the textile magnate Marcel Boussac in a self-consciously patriotic campaign to restore French design to its prewar ascendancy. A nervous Dior was urged to proceed on behalf of France by his friend, the artist-designer Christian Bérard: “There is no other way,” said Bérard. “You must be Joan of Arc.” Excitement about Dior's first collection in February 1947 built up for weeks, much of it stoked by Bérard. It was made known that the designer would be taking fashion in an extraordinary new direction. Tickets for the opening sold on the black market and a huge crowd assembled outside beforehand. Dior left his most dramatic new idea until the end of a highly theatrical show. This was the “Corolle” line, crystallized in “le Bar”: a huge, full, deeply pleated black wool skirt that dropped to midcalf, with a light-colored silk shantung jacket closely fitted to the bust. The jacket was padded below the waist, emphasizing curvaceous hips and a tiny waist, and the outfit was designed to be accessorized with high heels, a broad-brimmed hat, white gloves, and a small clutch purse. Some of the skirts in the Corolle line measured as much as forty yards in circumference, their hemlines just twelve inches off the ground. The craftsmanship was exquisite, the extravagance astounding. The applause started almost as soon as the show began, and grew louder and louder. Dior burst into tears. Carmel Snow remarked, “It's quite a revolution, dear Christian. Your dresses have such a new look,” producing the catchphrase that encapsulated the whole phenomenon.

In the New York office of
Harper's
Bazaar
, anticipation mounted. Babs Simpson was a junior fashion editor at
Bazaar
in 1947. “I remember
everybody
being so excited. These telegrams would come in, these cables from Paris . . . the new look . . . changed everything, and she [Carmel Snow] sort of stopped the press kind of thing. It was very exciting.” The office waited breathlessly for Snow's return since no one there had yet seen Dior's New Look at close range. She walked in wearing it. As ever, Diana found the words. “Carmel, it's divine!” she cried. “It makes you look—
drowned
.” The New Look started an international fashion craze. Foreign buyers who had returned home before Dior's show, believing it to be an irrelevance, found they had ordered outdated models. Furious manufacturers were left with unwanted stock. And politicians beyond France fulminated in vain at the extravagant new French fashion in a time of postwar austerity. American designers like Claire McCardell, who had already sensed the change of mood, found themselves in demand. Nonetheless the old Paris magic worked against them. With the New Look, Dior successfully reasserted the supremacy of Paris couture. “Dior saved Paris as Paris was saved in the Battle of the Marne,” said Carmel Snow.

Diana's reaction to Dior's success was more ambivalent. She was thrilled by the survival of Frenchness and delighted that French craftsmanship, romance, drama, and artistry were making a comeback. But while she admired Dior's talent she did not care for the New Look. “I always call it the guinea hen–look,” she said to Lally Weymouth later. Women of real chic looked marvelous in it, she thought, and the clothes by Dior were extravagant and beautiful. But unlike Chanel, who cut her models on live women, Dior designed his collections on stuffed dummies. However slim Diana was, she had a wide diaphragm, and the nipped-in waist did not suit her. Apart from the occasional strapless evening dress, she never wore the New Look herself, objecting to a fashion that required the wearer to don tight corsets, skirts that were heavy to the point of immobilization, and to totter around on very high heels that she thought damaged female posture. “Oh I couldn't stand [the clothes] for myself—because I think all that wiring and what you call trussing. . . . You wore the cinch—you wore the Merry Widow—do you understand?” However, the mood in its favor was so strong that no mere editor could challenge it.

There were other aspects of the reemerging French couture that concerned Diana. As soon as she returned to Paris in 1946 she could see that the couture was changing in order to stay in existence, but not all the change was welcome. The society that had made the prewar couture possible, in which powerful female tastemakers had a close collaborative relationship with the couturier, had virtually disappeared. There was certainly no more
mannequin du monde
. “The first thing I asked after the war was: ‘Does it still exist—as an expression?' I wasn't hinting around. ‘Absolutely not!' I was told, ‘It's as dead as mud.' ” Paris couture was rapidly becoming much more expensive. Designers needed very rich customers who could pay for the privilege, and that meant that most American women could only afford second-rate copies from American manufacturers who paid a license fee to copy the originals. This, in Diana's view, meant inferior clothes. She wrote to Louise Dahl-Wolfe a few years later that it was all “awfully sad”:

Of course I look at all of these clothes of how
[sic]
they look when reproduced on Seventh Avenue as those are the only versions of these clothes we will ever see, and in the long run the only way they really ever count as so few woman
[sic]
in the world will ever be seen in originals that it is rather heartbreaking. It is a crime that Paris prices are so high making it impossible therefore for people to buy from them privately. . . . You may think I am on a minor note but it is something I feel so keenly and I think that the “masses” are being given really such vulgar clothes because any copy of a great thing is bound to look second rate unless it is especially designed to be watered down.

The return of the Paris couture also meant the return of Carmel Snow to fashion's front line. The prewar division of labor at
Bazaar
was firmly reinstated. As editor in chief, Carmel Snow would continue going to the Paris collections. As fashion editor, Diana would focus entirely on the American market. At the same time the emphasis
Bazaar
had placed on the reader's independence of choice, and her freedom to stride around in low heels, faded away. The “thrown-together” reader of
Bazaar
, who had forced manufacturers to adapt as she borrowed her brother's topcoat, rolled up her dungarees, and ran around in moccasins and espadrilles, “the girl who knows what she wants, when she wants it, the dead-set, dead-right American girl” of
Bazaar
in August 1944, simply disappeared. Within three years it was back to command-and-control fashion again. “You Can't Be A Last-Year Girl” a
Bazaar
editorial announced when the New Look appeared in 1947. “There's not much in the old picture that survives. Not the hemline, waistline, nor the shoulderline.” The reader was going to love the new Paris fashion, the high heels and the hips. “Every woman has a waist, and this year she must find it.” If for some unfathomable reason the reader could not locate her waist, she must find a
corsetière
or do the exercises to be found in
Bazaar
. It all meant that for the time being the fashionable women of America—including Mrs. Vreeland—were back in their box.

F
or all the joyous reunions at the end of the war, there were those who had a more complex reaction to the Allied victory. An article in
Bazaar
noted that the whole country was in transition; that the return to family life was making some women unhappy; that everyone was coming to terms with the terrible new threat of nuclear annihilation; and that the strained mood was making even the most comradely women snap. In Diana's case the cause of nervous tension was Reed. He did not come home from Canada as soon as the war ended, and she had to put up a real fight to get him back. “You can divorce me, Reed,” she is reported to have said. “But I'll kill myself.” Gossip had it that she took matters into her own hands by going to Montreal, confronting Reed's girlfriend, and forcing her to sit down in front of a mirror. “Look at you, you are young and beautiful, and you have everything ahead of you,” she is rumored to have said. “I am getting older and I have only my wonderful husband.” The woman in Reed's life was married. Continuing the relationship meant breaking up two families. Perhaps it had already run its course. In the end both Reed and his mistress backed away from their wartime romance. Reed's Montreal job came to an end in 1946, and by 1947 he was making entries in the Brewster garden book again. This outcome required considerable compromise on both sides.

On his return to New York, Reed, who did not fulfill his early promise in banking, turned to a range of financial activities with friends, including stints as president of a cement company and as chairman of the board of the International Trust Company of Liberia. His directorships were so closely related to his father's business interests that it is reasonable to suppose they came through the family connection. Though he was always optimistic and convinced that he would make a fortune, his entrepreneurial projects were often mysterious and not as successful as he hoped. “Reed was always about to make a million dollars,” the interior decorator Billy Baldwin recalled. “He had the richest friends, men who made fortunes—Reed just never got around to it.” Reed may not have been very well suited to life in business, and it is quite possible that marriage to Diana came at some personal cost. He longed to be a singer, and with his looks, his connections, and his good tenor voice he might have succeeded at a time when Mario Lanza was having huge popular success. But this was a dream that Diana firmly quashed, perhaps for reasons of snobbishness, perhaps because of financial insecurity, and almost certainly because she was terrified of losing him. She wanted him to continue as a financier. “Showbiz breaks up families,” she said, and that was the end of it.

At the same time Reed greatly appreciated the dream world created for them both by Diana, provided that he was not required to engage with the more problematic aspects of the reality underpinning it. Diana once mentioned that she rarely talked about work at home, saying that Reed hated her bringing back office problems and that when she did, he threatened to leave. He does not seem to have been jealous of her success; but, like Diana, he preferred fantasy and a culture of denial, and never discussed his own business problems either. Though there was little that was fashionable about Seventh Avenue itself during the 1940s, there is no doubt that Diana's job at
Bazaar
not only brought in a much-needed vital income but allowed the Vreelands to live like rich people. In fact
Bazaar
gave Diana herself a degree of fashion influence that was no longer possible for even the very rich. Reed liked the way of life and glamour of Diana's job, and after he returned from Montreal he supported it wholeheartedly.

“Diana Vreeland's home,” wrote Phyllis Lee Levin, “is more original than any ever to appear on a magazine page, her husband is more polished and her friends are precisely the ones whose pictures are used repeatedly, whose menus, luggage, jewelry, furniture, paintings, sofa pillows, and children are avidly recorded by the fashion magazines, month after month, year in and out.” “I always
looked
rich,” Diana once said. “That was something Reed and I always had. . . . I've spent so much money in my life that it's almost taken the place of the real thing.” It was often remarked that Reed and Diana looked marvelous together. Reed, like his wife, dressed as elegantly in his fifties as he had ever done. Billy Baldwin remembered the Vreelands arriving late for lunch at Adelaide Leonard's in Southampton in the 1950s. The hostess was on the point of proposing that the party should start lunch without them when they arrived over the dunes, with the sea behind them, “looking as though they had come out of some other world.” They were “dressed exactly alike in gray flannel knickers, suede waistcoats, and silk cravats. They were wearing the most incredible shoes and carrying golf bags.”