Empress of Fashion (23 page)

It would also be wrong to think that every American designer who appeared in
Bazaar
necessarily had Diana's enthusiastic stamp of approval. There had been a trade-off between advertising and editorial since the earliest days of
Bazaar
. As the magazine became more successful, this became even more complex. Diana had no truck at all with the business and advertising side of
Bazaar.
This was left to Carmel Snow, and it was one of Snow's great strengths that she managed it so well for so long. Nonetheless even Snow was forced to make concessions sometimes, and when she did, Diana had to help her to make the best of it. Both Carmel and Diana regarded the designs of Adrian, for example, as “tacky.” They did the minimum necessary to satisfy the advertising department, though photographs of the heiress Millicent Rogers wearing Adrian might have led the innocent reader to imagine otherwise. At the same time, Diana was known to go back to advertisers and ask them to make adjustments to colors and designs so that the clothes were good enough to merit inclusion in the magazine. “She does not indulge in cruelty nor in self-indulgence for pleasure . . .” said Billy Baldwin. “She will not bear to subscribe to an opinion that she doesn't totally believe in.
She is a warrior
.”

At the same time, an endorsement of an American designer by Diana, with Carmel Snow's support, could make all the difference to his or her career. At the very top, custom-made end, Mainbocher continued to occupy a privileged place in the fashion pages of
Bazaar
. He never returned to Paris, but he did refuse to allow his clothes to be manufactured by Seventh Avenue and is unlikely to have survived as he did without Diana's help; she patronized him as the only true New York representative of the Paris prewar couture tradition. Named American designers began to emerge on Seventh Avenue to meet a growing demand for high-quality, expensive ready-to-wear clothes, a trend to which the Paris couture was also responding. Diana supported designers and designer-manufacturers of the quality of Norman Norell, James Galanos, and Ben Zuckerman but was extremely demanding. If the clothes were copies of French designs they had to be just as good. French inspiration had to be combined with an original American twist, and the clothes had to be wearable. Her motivating effect was at its most obvious with sportswear designers. B. H. Wragge, for example, was delighted to have her advice, and admiration was mutual. “My dear,” she would say of Wragge, “no one, but no one, can touch his American look—clothes with youth and energy, if you know what I mean. Clothes with breezes running through their seams.” Diana supported Claire McCardell's most experimental ideas, including beach shirts over romper suits, which were inspired by children's play clothes, complete with smocking; and she was extremely good at discerning trends long before they became popular—her spreads on biker boots and textured stockings still look contemporary now.

Meanwhile Diana introduced successful ideas directly from Europe herself. (“You must always give ideas away,” she liked to say. “Under every idea is a new one waiting to be born.”) The Capri sandal was one innovation of which she was particularly proud. She had first bought sandals attached to the foot by leather straps while staying with Mona Williams on Capri in the mid-1930s. Unable to replace her Capri sandals during the war, she arranged for a shoemaker in New Jersey to make copies. Once the New Jersey shoemaker recovered from Diana's description of the sandals in Pompeii's ruder frescoes, he built a very good business out of them as American women opted to go bare legged in summer. Diana claimed to have done even better by Charles Revson, giving him a prewar formula for red nail polish made by a Mr. Perrera in Paris, who “took care of women's hands just for
love
.” Revson, who did not take care of women's hands just for love, developed the formula and built a global cosmetics empire. Diana tried to find Perrera after the war to give him his due but he had disappeared. She thought that Charles Revson felt guilty about what he had done ever afterward. “I . . . knew that
he
knew that
I
knew that he had made this incredible fortune off of one small bottle of mine with maybe
this
much left in it. Yes, there was always something in his eye. . . .”

She had an equally keen eye for young talent, like Kenneth Jay Lane, who became one of the world's leading designers of costume jewelry partly thanks to her tutelage. Lane was still designing shoes when Diana first met him in the 1950s. He knew he had found a true friend during their first conversation, when he asked her how to look after some new leather shoes, and she replied, “You know in the whole city of New York you can't find a rhinoceros horn!” Diana was an early enthusiast for Lane's jewelry, and was one of those who changed the direction of his career by making it fashionable. She was particularly fond of his pairs of enameled black and white bracelets, with jewels mounted on the white cuff, and reversed out on the black. Producing pieces for Diana and her fashion spreads was extremely demanding, but Lane would later say that her precision was a perfect education for a young designer, particularly in matters of color. They once had an argument about a shade of turquoise that went on for days, until Lane eventually wondered—by phone—if she was thinking of the color of Turkish donkey beads. “Yes!
Daunkey
,” said Diana, slamming down the receiver.

Indeed, Diana's observations about color became a subset of “Vreelandia”: “There's never been a blue like the blue of the Duke of Windsor's eyes. . . . Red is the great clarifier—bright, cleansing, and revealing. It makes all other colors beautiful. . . . Black is the hardest color in the
world
to get
right
—except for gray. . . . Taxicab yellow is
marvelous
. . . . Actually, pale-pink salmon is the
only
color I cannot
abide
—though naturally I adore pink.” After Diana and Lane became friends, the young women in her office surreptitiously telephoned him for help with translation. “Once, they called and said she was talking about the color of dried blood and they had no idea what she meant. ‘Where was she last night?' one assistant asked. ‘Let's see . . . ,' I said. ‘Oh, I know. Last night we went to the Russian Tea Room and had beet borscht.' ”

As the global fashion industry expanded in the 1950s, the process by which fashion reached the pages of
Bazaar
became more hierarchical. Diana's team scoured Seventh Avenue for pieces that were presented to her at intimidating run-throughs where she would, according to Bettina Ballard, sit with “eyes far off on cloud number twelve . . . while the nervous editors put the clothes of their choice on the mannequins.” Junior editors were struck by her militant self-belief in matters of taste. Once the selection was approved by Snow, the fashion team had showings for the art department to discuss how the clothes should be photographed and appear on the page. These run-throughs were an event. “DVs showings were her own bit of theater,” said A. G. Allen. “This was her stage, and she was always dressed to the nines for it.” The photographer Gleb Derujinsky remembered that Brodovitch would start the conversation by talking about the overall plan for the issue, so that the photographers understood the rhythm of the pages.

With that settled, it became Diana's show. “A model would be there walking around in the clothes, and DV would see it as her role to talk up the clothes, trying to inspire the photographers and art department,” remembered Allen. Exaggeration was one way of doing this, particularly at those moments when she took over from the model, as Derujinsky recalled. “She would stand in front of the mirror and strike the poses that would make the dress work; or she would bend and move and poke the models into taking the right pose, with her team frantically pinning the costumes and Diana accessorizing with scarves, or ribbons, or something for the hair.” It was Diana's turn of phrase that often stayed in the memory. “With pure Dianaism, she describes what effect she wants,” wrote Ballard. “ ‘This, my dear,' pointing to a sequin sheath, ‘must look drowned, completely drowned,' as if the word tasted of salt water. ‘You know what I mean, like a wet, wet mermaid sliding through the water.' ” She did not always seem to be quite of this world. “You got the feeling she was above harsh commercial reality,” said Derujinsky, who would never forget Diana instructing two models to kneel in a pose on the floor, going out to lunch, and finding the terrified models still in position when she returned an hour later.

M
any people contributed to the fashion spreads in
Bazaar
in the 1950s, and assigning credit between photographer, fashion editor, art director, and stylist is difficult, not to say unwise: the point at which influence began and ended shifted with every relationship and every shoot. However, Diana's intense feeling for all kinds of fashion and her insistence on quality and originality was critical to the continued success of
Bazaar
during those years. The freshness of the fashion pages continued up to 1961, a considerable achievement, when even those who were interested in clothes, like Betty Vreeland, thought that fashion was growing dull: “There is at this moment nothing more to say about fashion nothing new to show because nothing is being invented anywhere.” The changes had to be rung through accessories, she noted, and here Diana reigned supreme, with consistently sparkling spreads on shoes, belts, and jewelry. Her style philosophy that first emerged in the “Why Don't You?” column slowly regained the upper hand as well. Diana continued to promote women of taste with style ideas of their own, persuading C. Z. Guest to be photographed wearing panels of Chinese fabric, for example; and by the late 1950s the dictatorial tone of
Bazaar
in the late 1940s was again making way for a more flexible approach based on the individual reader's point of view. “Individualism emerging,” ran one fashion article in March 1961. “See expressed—triumphantly—in this issue of
Harper's
Bazaar
perfect individualism: the great and worthy goal that fashion has been straining as toward leaf to sun throughout this generation.”

Bazaar
was certainly not radical. It was aimed at the reader “who thinks of herself as a woman every minute,” and counseled her to eschew confusion, aiming for beauty in everything she did. Throughout the 1950s, however, Diana gave
Bazaar
a contemporary and specifically American point of view. The American “girl” in
Bazaar
—whether a model or a society figure, in sportswear or more formal clothes inspired by French couture—was a stylish young woman in her early thirties. Diana's
Bazaar
pages posited American dynamism in contrast to the stasis of European couture. Models of the 1950s like Dovima and Suzy Parker were good at looking aloof. But in
Bazaar
they exuded energy and enjoyed their own physical health. The Girl they stood for was elegant, no longer a debutante, probably a young married woman, but one who was young at heart. She was, in many ways, like Diana in the 1930s. The fashion on
Bazaar
's pages may have been bought by the middle-class and middle-aged, but on the page it was enjoyable, interesting, and for women who moved. It did not become jaded.

Time and again Diana's love of beautiful clothes was reflected in language captured by
Bazaar
's copywriters. Flicking through
Bazaar
the reader might encounter a “lean coat of Stafford silk shantung that shines like wine in the candlelight,” shoes that were a “spiderweb of black patent leather,” “a suit that changes its face, according to accessories,” “a little hold-your-breath jacket,” or “checks at the peak of their long career.” She might be offered “a cobalt blue suede oxford, a spark red suede pump, a meadow green suede pump,” a “dress of charm and self-containment for late afternoon” or “the leopard and fox, the ocelot and lynx—coming in together this year in sharp-tailored, sharp-patterned, chopped-off coats that create a lovely diffusion about the face.” She might be told to prepare “for a very pink spring. Pink is inescapable, all the way from peony through coral to flamingo.” And she might be asked to apply a little imagination too: for the day “not too far off, when the trees will be not quite leafless and there are buckets of purple lilacs on the street corners and you will see someone—maybe yourself, in a suit of white Italian silk with a shirt of Irish lace.”

Such language took the fashion on
Bazaar
's pages to a level much envied at
Vogue
. It also lent itself to yet more parody. This time, however, Carmel Snow decided that her magazine was going to be on the right side of the joke. Stanley Donen's film
Funny Face
, which appeared in 1957, was very loosely based on the story of Richard Avedon's meeting with his first wife. Avedon acted as “visual consultant,” with two of his favorite models, Dovima and Suzy Parker, in walk-on roles.
Bazaar
's staff was roped in to help, and the magazine was credited. The story was set in a fashion magazine called
Quality
. Fred Astaire starred as photographer Dick Avery; Audrey Hepburn played a bookseller turned fashion model; and there was an art director called Dovitch. But the great spoof in this camp romp was Kay Thompson, as
Quality
magazine's editor, Maggie Prescott. Other than her Balenciaga hat, which was a joke at Snow's expense, Maggie Prescott was entirely Diana, from her arrival in the office in the morning to a chorus of “Good mornings” from dazzled underlings to her exhortation to “every designer on Seventh Avenue” to “Think Pink!”
Funny Face
has none of the depth of
Lady in the Dark
. Nonetheless, as its story line develops, Maggie Prescott is revealed to be a surprisingly practical and wise old bird, with several Vreelandesque lines: “It's
movingly
dismal,” she says. There were regular injunctions to give things pizzazz. There were also a few sharp digs. “One doesn't talk to Maggie Prescott,” says Dick Avery at one point. “One listens.” Diana did not see the funny side. “Mrs. Vreeland marched out saying, ‘Never to be discussed,' ” Barbara Slifka recalled. “I'm too real for teasing,” said Diana years later.