Empress of Fashion (27 page)

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 dream, 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.

D
iana 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.”

The implication was that while Quant's designs (“at first, more thought-up clothes than designed clothes”) were intriguing, they were not necessarily right for the women of the United States. When it came to innovative youth fashion ideas, Diana was more confident about featuring fashion that came to New York straight from Paris, particularly the work of Emanuelle Khanh, whom she described as the “vanguard and heroine of young French fashion.” A former haute couture model, Emanuelle Khanh particularly endeared herself to Diana with her philosophy, inherited from Chanel, that clothes should follow the line, silhouette, and movement of a woman's body; and Diana was also enchanted by the interpretations of youth fashion emerging from the Paris couture salons of the ever-inventive Balenciaga. Indeed Diana later maintained that she always saw the new ideas of the 1960s at Balenciaga first. “I didn't go much for this street-up business . . . because it seemed to me I'd always seen it at Balenciaga. . . . Balenciaga, for instance, did the first vinyl raincoats, like the gendarmes wear, you know, in the winter in Paris. The cape and the boots and the short skirts and the elaborate stockings . . . Balenciaga was incredible.”

Once she had decided that the popularity of London's new young designers were more than a passing phase, Diana campaigned to devote an entire issue to them in 1964 but eventually elected to spread the material over several issues. The September 1 cover was shot by David Bailey; the September 15 issue featured British tweeds from Mary Quant and Wallis Shops, accessorized with stockings from Mary Quant and Polly Peck; Alan Brien wrote about the pioneering theater director Joan Littlewood; and the novelist Edna O'Brien offered American readers a glimpse of “Four Eligible Bachelors in London.” These issues also included “limber little wool suits” from “the nifty Americans” and a selection from André Courrèges's latest collection from Paris, featuring silver hipster pants that revealed the midriff, pink glitter boots for evening, and skirts that bared the knee accompanied by white kidskin boots.

In the end it was these Courrèges designs that caused an explosion and not the English innovators; and it showed that the conservatism of
Vogue
's readers was not to be underestimated.
“That
was something,” said Diana. “. . . a top, a bare midriff, and a
belly button
showing. The letters came in. ‘This is a house where magazines are put on the coffee table, and now we find it impossible to put
Vogue
there. As the mother of a nineteen-year-old son . . .' ‘My God, lady,' I thought. ‘Let him go! Send him away! One night in Tangiers! Tunis!
Cairo
!' ” Accustomed as she was to the more audacious approach of
Bazaar
, the tizzy of some of
Vogue
's senior editors also surprised Diana. “ ‘Why did you run a picture like that?' the staff wanted to know. ‘Because I'm a reporter,' I said. ‘I know
news
when I see it! What are we talking about, for Christ's sake—pleasing the bourgeoisie of North Dakota? We're talking
fashion
—get with it!' ”