Empress of Fashion (26 page)

However, there were those like Rosemary Blackmon,
Vogue
's managing editor, who never came to terms with Diana at all. A particular bone of contention was Diana's refusal ever to hold a meeting with more than one person, and her lack of anything that could conceivably be described as a management style. “My mind drifts around a lot,” said Diana. “I could take in 17 situations in an hour.” Unlike Daves, Diana did not feel the need to explain even one of her seventeen trains of thought. She simply expected everyone to keep up. “Whereas the entire chain of editorial decision—view of fashion, choice of cover, choice of content and presentation—used to flow easily from the editor in chief to the fashion editor to the art department to the merchandising department, no one knew what was going on, from one hour to the next, with Vreeland but Vreeland,” wrote Grace Mirabella. “Sometimes she paid attention, sometimes she didn't. I think that's why Rosemary had such a terrible time with her,” said Carol Phillips,
Vogue
's beauty editor. “If you say yes, that's fine. Then two minutes later, she'd say I didn't say it. You had to roll with the punches. I don't think Rosemary could do that. She was quite literal and she was very upset.”

Within months of starting, however, Diana had the sense to realize that she needed someone who could interpret her pronouncements and communicate her vision internally if she was to have any chance at all of succeeding. She eventually found the ideal person in Grace Mirabella, but it took some persuasion. Mirabella was working as a fashion editor at
Vogue
when she heard that Diana was coming to Condé Nast. She was so appalled by what she had heard through the grapevine about Mrs. Vreeland's hallucinatory ways that she resolved to get as far away from her as possible. She even went to the lengths of swapping her job as a fashion editor for one in marketing, but she hated it so much that she eventually returned to the fashion side. Mirabella soon learned that working as a fashion editor for Diana was nothing like any job she had ever done before. “At my first run-through with Vreeland, I selected three racks of dresses and presented them, making a case for a story about how the look of dresses that season was wool jersey.” Diana listened without saying a word as Mirabella plowed on.

At the end I asked her if there was a problem.

“Well,” she said, “I wasn't looking for a market report. I thought you were going to
give
me a little something.”

“Like what?” I asked. I thought I had given a good deal.

“A
little something
.” She said, “A
dream
.”

The trick, said Diana, was not to give women what they already knew. It was to
“give 'em what they never knew they wanted
.
”

Diana sent Mirabella back to the sportswear department, where she had been happiest. This was not a compliment. By the time she arrived at
Vogue,
Diana had tired of all but a handful of American sportswear designers, and was preoccupied and excited by the Paris couture whose collections she was finally being allowed to attend in an official capacity for the first time. “Her tastes were as aristocratic and European as mine were democratic and American,” Mirabella wrote of Diana later. “Ready-to-wear barely qualified as fashion in her book. She called sportswear ‘boiled wool,' said ready-to-wear fabric was ‘like the covering of an old tennis ball.' ” Even when Mirabella was ensconced back in her sportswear niche, she found Diana's criticisms of her sittings insufferable. The editor in chief demanded endless retakes. She only knew something was “duh-vine” when she saw it. “I'm looking for the
suggestion
of something I've never seen,” she kept saying. At the end of one particularly bad day, Mirabella decided to quit and take a well-paid job with Catalina, a swimsuit manufacturer. “It seemed the perfect antidote, like a drying-out period, to the delirium of Vreeland.” But a few days later she saw a much more down-to-earth and kindly side of Diana, who had heard about the job offer, knew that Mirabella had once turned down
Bazaar
out of loyalty to
Vogue
, and urged her to stay. A short time later she offered Mirabella the role of an associate who would help her get the magazine out, a producer to Vreeland as director. After agonizing for a day and a half, Mirabella decided to take the job. “It's going to be a grand adventure,” said Diana.

T
here is a perception, encouraged by Eleanor Dwight and others, that as soon as Diana took charge at
Vogue
, she stormed in, elbowed aside the dull fifties, opened up the magazine to the “swinging sixties,” and led the charge in a full-blown fashion insurrection. “From the moment she came to
Vogue
, she created a revolution,” wrote Alexander Liberman in 1989. “Diana Vreeland shook up years of tradition that needed to be reexamined. She brought iconoclastic daring. She encouraged the breaking of rules and taboos. . . . She was the most talented editor of her period because she was able to stamp an era in the reader's mind.” However, anyone picking up a copy of
Vogue
from 1962 or 1963 hoping for a dazzling display of iconoclasm is destined to be disappointed, for several reasons.

First, the tumult that characterized the decade only began to permeate America from 1964 onward, and though its roots are detectable much earlier, they grew in social and political movements at a metaphysical and geographical distance from
Vogue
's offices. When it came to fashion, the head-to-toe glamour of the 1950s only disappeared gradually too. Fashion ideas still permeated relatively slowly in the early 1960s, and it would be another three years before the idea of appropriate dressing for different times of day entirely evaporated and the staple of
Vogue
's pages ceased to be the little suit inspired by Coco Chanel, topped off with a hat and white gloves. Until the mid-1960s Paris couture took pride of place, and issues devoted to the New York collections invariably featured the grandee American designers Norman Norell and James Galanos, who had risen to prominence in the 1950s, and Mainbocher, who flew an ever-more-lonely flag for the spirit of prewar Paris couture from his New York atelier.

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.

F
rom 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.