Empress of Fashion (29 page)

The team for Japan included Ara Gallant, hair artist or possibly hair sculptor, since even “hairdresser extraordinaire” does not begin to do justice to the colossal explosions of hair fantasy that became his trademark. (Born in the Bronx as Ira Gallantz, Gallant was another who fled his background for “the land of Style” and changed himself into something more exotic.) Gallant gave models vast tresses that spun, whirled, and soared into the air. “He made hair expressive,” writes Holly Brubach. “In Avedon's photos of leaping, skipping models, even their hair [was] energized.” Gallant achieved “flying hair” using Dynel, a synthetic fiber that came in many colors. It was much loved by Diana, who described her Dynel period as one of the happiest of her life. The Japan trip was hard going but marked the beginning of an intense working relationship between Gallant, Mellen, and Avedon. “Some of the conditions were very harsh but this is part of what made the magic. We were all in a team constantly working towards the resolve and result,” said Mellen.

Before they left Diana briefed Mellen in a manner that was oblique even by Vreeland standards. She instructed Mellen to familiarize herself with
The Tale of Genji
, a great classic of Japanese literature written in the eleventh century, maintaining firmly that it was impossible to understand Japanese culture without reading it. Mellen dutifully read through all 845 pages of the world's first novel. “I said to Mrs. Vreeland, ‘Diana, the book is extraordinary. So elegant. The ritual, the poetry, and so erotic! When Genji leaves the Lady of the Bush Clover?' After a pause, Diana said, ‘What are you talking about?' I answered, ‘
The Tales
[sic]
of Genji
. Remember the part where Prince Genji, sated, breaks the Lady of the Bush Clover's heart?' Diana replied, ‘
The Tales of Genji
?
The Tales of Genji
? You've read it? But doesn't it sound just maaarvelous!' ”

O
n October 15, 1966 a hallucinogenic fashion spread appeared in American
Vogue
. It ran to twenty-six pages, was supposed to have cost $1 million and was titled “The Great Fur Caravan. A Fashion Adventure Starring the Girl in the Fabulous Furs Photographed for
Vogue
in the Strange Secret Snow Country of Japan . . .” It opened with cinema credits:

DICK, THE PHOTOGRAPHER . . . RICHARD AVEDON

VERUSHKA [
sic
], THE GIRL COUNTESS . . . VON LEHNDORFF

POLLY, THE FASHION EDITOR . . . MRS. HENRY MELLEN

THE NARRATOR . . . MARY EVANS

There was nothing revolutionary about the cinematic format, which Richard Avedon had used before. But the mysterious mood of the spread was new and a universe away from the haughty beauties in hats and white gloves who had stared from
Vogue
's pages just a few years earlier. The Girl, played by Veruschka, was enigmatic. Wrapped in luxurious and opulent furs, she traipsed across snowy, desolate, Narnia-esque landscapes. One moment she was a Tatar princess on a train, wrapped in pale beige mink, her Japanese
o-bento
box at her side. The next moment she reappeared in a Noh mask as a ghost in the Valley of Hell (a misty, steamy sulfurous hotbed of springs on Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island) metamorphosing into “a Heian beauty too attached to the passions and enchantments of earthly life to leave it altogether.” Later Veruschka turned into a Tatar chief's baby girl in the snow. And then, for no obvious reason, she became involved in a series of exotic and mysterious intrigues with a giant, “a young Japanese of mythological proportions who was a ritual sumo wrestler.”

The dreamlike atmosphere of Avedon's photographs was complemented by the language used to describe the fashions. A self-conscious authorial voice wove together Veruschka's fictional adventures and the problems encountered by
Vogue
's fashion team as it created them. Veruschka—who was referred to as both the Girl and by her name—was carried across Japan in a first-class carriage of the Shin Tokaido, then the world's fastest train. Mary Evans, the narrator of the story, described how cold Veruschka became as she strode through drifts of snow. Veruschka (“For a travelling [
sic
] princess, an enormous shining black ciré headdress over a wrapped white ermine coif. Adolfo headdress made to order at Saks Fifth Avenue”) “could not be without her music, and a portable record player spun in the white landscape, giving out Pergolesi in the pines. Though she never murmured, however white her face became with frost, in between shots we led her back to the hotel, her long legs stiff as stilts with the cold.” It was not so cold, however, that Veruschka could not be photographed topless, an image unthinkable a few years earlier. In a mildly erotic finale Veruschka and a priest appeared to prepare for a mock marriage.

“She has the concentration of a child playing some totally private, wordless game alone,” Richard Avedon said of Veruschka. “There are times during a sitting when she turns to look at me or at the camera . . . smiles, challenges. It's like the opposite of a Dylan song, ‘I'll let you in my dream if you let me in yours.' That seems to be what most people need. But not Veruschka. She'll let you into her dream but she wouldn't fit in yours.” But when she played in the strange secret snow country of Japan, Veruschka metamorphosed into the creature of Diana's fantasies, as well as her own. On Hokkaido, in the Valley of Hell, she became Diana's favorite creature, the Girl who spun a world from her dreams. “It's without content. . . . It's without any meaning in it,” Avedon said of the spread much later. “It's just this exquisite creature. Diana imagined her walking through the snows of Japan.” But the Girl had meaning for Diana. The Girl was a phantasm who would spellbind
Vogue
's readers with fantasies of perfection, a vision from Diana's vibrant, scintillating imagination, born decades earlier in the circumstances of her childhood. The only time Diana ever rejected Veruschka's pictures was when she played a private game of her own and looked defeated. “You looked like a victim instead of a heroine,” wrote Diana to Verushcka, explaining why
Vogue
had not used a spread. “And as you are a ‘heroine' we would never publish you looking like a victim . . . do you understand what I mean?” The world had to be kept spinning by the enchantment of possibility. “What sells is hope,” said Diana.

I
t was no accident that Diana chose to send Avedon to Japan on his first major assignment for
Vogue
. “Jets were brand new and brother, did we use them. The jet and penicillin—that's really where our world began. We don't have to think about anything else.” The arrival of the jet meant that places and experiences previously only accessible to the very grand, the very rich, and the abnormally intrepid were suddenly within reach of many
Vogue
readers. But as soon as Diana took charge she was insistent that the magazine had to go much further than upscale tourism. She was convinced that fashion itself was enriched by exposure to the new and exotic; and that “the eye has to travel” even when the readers themselves could not. “All over the world, beautiful girls, photographers and kids were flying to Nepal, Afghanistan, Kathmandu. They would see things that other generations only read of as scholars. All of this had an enormous effect on the imagination. Night-blooming jasmine, lotus flowers, sun. Under the equator, the moon is in a different position. Everything was suddenly available.”

Some of this was earthbound. Diana opened up American
Vogue
to new international fashion centers, including Madrid. She and Carmel Snow had already put a new breed of Italian designer on the fashion map while she was at
Bazaar
, leading with a ski outfit designed by the aristocratic Emilio Pucci more or less by accident in 1948. Once she arrived at
Vogue,
Diana encouraged his sportswear in multicolored, kaleidoscopic designs, his use of new lightweight fabrics, and his pioneering development of softer, less structured lingerie—Diana is said to have come up with the idea for Pucci's signature psychedelic underwear, but even if she did not, she certainly fostered it. Once again she had a particular fondness for Italian designers who, like Chanel in France, worked with the natural body, but with a European élan. As Valerie Steele has written: “Flaunting bare feet and legs in sandals and no stockings, and wearing dresses without girdles or underwire brassieres, Italians were pioneering easy, comfortable, body-conscious clothing. Simplicity and comfort were central to mass-produced American sportswear, but Italy provided sportswear with greater sophistication and cultural cachet.” As the global fashion industry went through another convulsive expansion in the 1960s, Italy remained, writes Steele, “an oasis of high style.” Diana appointed Consuelo Crespi as American
Vogue
's editor in Rome to keep up with every twist and turn of its couture. She was also attracted to Italian designers as a private customer in her own right, favoring particularly the knitwear of Missoni and the designs of Federico Forquet, Mila Schön, and Rome's new superstar, Valentino Garavani, who had opened his couture house in 1960.

On a more ethereal plane
Vogue
started energizing American fashion by locating it in all kinds of unfamiliar and mysterious worlds as soon as Diana started. Her first issue in January 1963 featured American resort clothes among the camels of Tunisia, photographed by Henry Clarke, whose images of models in floating psychedelic prints against exotic statuary and wild landscapes would come to encapsulate
Vogue
in this period. Helmut Newton photographed American sportswear in the bloodred Australian desert against Ayers Rock, where a new breed of long-limbed, suntanned model in white clothes assumed knowing poses with an undertow of eroticism, the atmosphere lightened by the presence of a kangaroo named Ethel. John Cowan was dispatched to the Arctic Circle to photograph evening wear, accompanied by a fashion editor, an assistant, and two freezing mannequins who were required to model silk taffeta and white silk faille in subzero temperatures in the interest of a new poetics of fashion. Diana's Christmas
Vogue
s were her most personal, the issues for which she held back the ideas, things, and people who particularly enchanted her during the year. The Christmas issue of December 1964 included no fewer than thirty pages of fashion photographed in India by Henry Clarke, featuring models in summer clothes against a background of Hindu gods and goddesses. The text by Rumer Godden and the shoot coincided with the opening up of India to Western visitors in the early 1960s. “India has given a new freedom to her visitors,” wrote Godden. “Become accessible, opened ‘like a champa flower,' making approachable ‘the much vaunted wisdom of the East.' ”

“Vreeland made fashion out of her dreams,” said Grace Mirabella. If the clothes were not available, she had them made up. Designers and manufacturers naturally listened very carefully to what the editor in chief of
Vogue
had to say, while the New York department store Bonwit Teller was happy to cooperate with Vreeland-inspired suggestions and make them to order for the designers in return for a store credit. According to
New York Times
fashion reporter Marilyn Bender,
Vogue
in the 1960s went as far as instigating twice-yearly seminars to stimulate the imaginations of the Seventh Avenue manufacturers. “The impressionable manufacturers are wooed by
Vogue
editors (they are there to be inspired not only about design, but about advertising in the magazine as well), served culinary triumphs on white china and Georgian silver, and instructed by being shown sketches that represent looks the fashion editors believe in,” wrote Bender in 1967. Sometimes it was even more specific. “In the spring of 1966, Diana Vreeland felt in her bones that the suit and the coat with the martingale belt would be right for the fall.” Sketches were commissioned for the seminar but failed to ignite the manufacturers. “When Seventh Avenue failed to fall into a martingale mood, an editor was dispatched to Mrs. Vreeland's apartment, where she plucked a Paris couturier's coat with a martingale out of the closet and gave it to a manufacturer, who whipped up such a coat for
Vogue
's August issue.”

From time to time Diana's dreams produced not just experiments by eager-to-please manufacturers and designers but whole new trends. Anticipating a more widespread interest in the East and Eastern mysticism by about three years, Diana demanded that her colleagues keep up as her gaze swiveled in late 1964 around Turkey, Persia, and Arabia and the work of Lesley Blanch, whose book about romantic women travelers in Arabia,
The Wilder Shores of Love,
had been a huge success when it had first appeared in the mid-1950s. It comes as no surprise that Diana loved this book, for Blanch chose subjects who sought escape from the drab industrialization of the nineteenth-century West and found fulfillment in Oriental exoticism. When it first appeared Elizabeth Bowen found it unsettling that these women were actually reacting against progress and emancipation in favor of romantic fantasies. “The East drew them, the East they sought. . . . In each case, the dominating daydream became reality,” she wrote. But in the 1950s this idea resonated with thousands of readers. “
Wilder Shores
opened up far horizons, bestowing on the Middle East and the Islamic world an aura of fascination, and planting in her younger readers a seed of curiosity that often bloomed years later,” writes Blanch's biographer.

Diana was one such reader. Boring geographical borders and dull historical facts were not the point when it came to the wilder shores of the East. What Diana wanted on the pages of
Vogue
was the Orient of her inner eye, an Orientalist fantasy that can be traced back as far as 1910, peopled with images of Ida Rubinstein dancing Scheherazade in Diaghilev's production before the First World War, and the paintings of Liotard she had first spotted in Geneva in 1934. Jean-Étienne Liotard was a peripatetic Swiss-French artist who traveled to Constantinople in the mid-eighteenth century, became fascinated by Turkish life, and became known as the “Turkish painter” after he adopted local dress. Diana had first come across Liotard when the Vreelands lived in Ouchy; and she loved his work so much that she instructed Betty Vreeland to look for his paintings when she moved with Freck to Geneva. “At last I have visited your Liotards,” wrote Betty in 1956, somewhat puzzled. “They are more Genevois than Eastern.” This commendably truthful observation cut no ice with her mother-in-law. Liotard was, wrote Diana, “my complete inspiration to this whole compact of Eastern allure.” This crystallized in twelve pages of Scheherazaderie in the April 15, 1965 issue, photographed in Liotard-inspired color by Penn, translated into an American palette of candy pinks and greens, and designed by Diana and her editors “to put over the exotic and erotic” in the hope that this might be “an inspiration for all kinds of clothes.”