Empress of Fashion (32 page)

Chapter Seven

Wilder Shores

D
iana impressed everyone with the way she behaved after Reed died. “She was so brave,” recalled Carol Phillips,
Vogue
's beauty editor, who was astonished at the speed with which Diana replied to letters of condolence, and the trouble she took over them. Reed's business affairs took some disentangling. It transpired that he had not updated his will since 1950; that he was owed money by several of the enterprises in which he had been involved, including Rigaud candles and Emilio Pucci Ltd.; and life insurance policies were swallowed up by his business debts. Diana was just as dependent on her salary from
Vogue
as she had ever been, but it was not in her nature to collapse under the weight of grief or to allow herself to become destabilized by complications with Reed's estate. Far from winding down and starting to think about retirement, she responded to his loss by redoubling the pace.

Within weeks of his death she was busy six nights out of seven, and close friends saw a subtle change. While Reed had been alive, noted Kenneth Jay Lane, Diana had been careful not to reduce him in any way. “She was the wife, the hostess—very much part of a team. She didn't project herself then because she didn't want to overshadow him.” This changed; and, if anything, widowhood made her even more insistent on the romantic view. Cecil Beaton noted with amusement how even the most unattractive tycoons benefited from a sprinkling of Vreeland fairy dust. “Some may see Charles Engelhard, the gold, platinum, uranium tycoon, as a tough, obese business genius with fairly unattractive manners and a terrible physical onslaught,” he wrote in his diary. “To Diane he is ‘le Roi Soleil.' Put a wig on him, then take the nose, he already has the stick, and watch his walk! With one foot forward! Why, he's from all the pictures!”

New friendships went some way toward filling the gap. One of them was with the designer Oscar de la Renta, which began before Reed's death but blossomed afterward. De la Renta, who had been an apprentice to Balenciaga and an assistant to Lanvin, traveled to New York from Paris in 1962, armed with a letter of introduction from the aristocratic Parisian socialite, fashion phenomenon, and putative designer Comtesse Jacqueline de Ribes. He arrived at 550 Park Avenue to be greeted by the sight of Diana and Reed wafting cigarette holders and wearing caftans; but he also encountered Diana at her most practical. She strongly recommended he take a job he had been offered by Elizabeth Arden, arguing that Arden spent so much on advertising that de la Renta would make his name faster there than anywhere else, particularly since he wished to concentrate on ready-to-wear. It was the right advice and marked the start of a friendship that was important to both of them, one that blossomed when De la Renta married Françoise de Langlade, previously editor in chief of French
Vogue
, the year after Reed died. De la Renta proved to be particularly well attuned to Diana's more exuberantly exotic ideas, re-creating them in a most luxurious way for his uptown New York clientele. Diana's personal style took on more vivid, electric hues after Reed's death. One bejewelled caftan De la Renta made for her in 1966 was described by the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum as evoking “the fantasy of foreign lands,” with a color palette recalling a desert sunset: a masterful interpretation of Diana's dictum that “fashion must be the most intoxicating
release
from the banality of the world.”

Jerry Zipkin's name also began to appear regularly in Diana's diary from 1967. Heir to a Manhattan real estate fortune, Zipkin made escorting fashionable women with busy husbands a way of life. Indeed,
WWD
coined the word “walker” to describe him. Though he was a man of considerable charm, it greatly amused him to dish out catty remarks to his closest lady friends and watch them crumple. There is little sign that he made much impact when he tried this on Diana. It was, one observer remarked, a hilarious friendship. Zipkin was neurotically punctual; Diana was invariably late; and they often telephoned their mutual friends to complain bitterly about each other. But lunch at restaurants like La Caravelle or La Grenouille took on new social importance in New York in the 1960s, and one of Zipkin's many advantages was that he brought Diana gossip from the new breed of lunching ladies whom she was too busy to listen to herself.

Bill Blass had known the Vreelands since the 1950s. Like others, he had initially found Reed the more affable: “Astonishingly friendly when you consider that the stigma of being a designer was enough to make you feel like an outcast.” After Reed's death Blass drew close to Diana. He was a frequent guest at 550 Park Avenue, and they often went to the movies together. “Those were the evenings I loved most with her,” he remembered, though he learned to avoid escorting her to other people's dinner parties. Diana earned a justified reputation for always being late, to the great irritation of her old friend Kitty Miller, who simply started dinner at eight forty-five without waiting for her. “She never had a sense of time, and I don't think it was that ploy of being important when she arrived,” said Blass. “Time, like age, simply meant nothing to her.” Years later Blass was still laughing at the memory of Kitty Miller threatening, sotto voce, to give Diana a “knuckle sandwich” when she found herself upstaged by Diana's conversational flow at a lunch party. The line was delivered “with startling movie-gangster relish—by a grand dame, about another grand dame.”

Blass sensed, like many others, that there was something artificial about Diana, even in her sixties, but he came closer to a sympathetic understanding than many, even if he took her story about being brought up in Paris at face value while dismissing much of what she said as untrue:

She was an amalgam of stories and half-truths and outright lies that served her ideal, and which sometimes seemed a charade, but in New York, amid kindred souls, was utterly comprehended. And for that reason, despite her Paris birth, her love of French clothes, her polished soles, her frequent evocations of Chanel, Bébé Bérard and Queen Mary—all those things we have come to associate with this vague antique world of Vreelandia—I think Diana was deeply American. She combined Twain's reverence for the reinvented self with Barnum's love of showmanship, and she spent her life perfecting this blend.

Blass thought her surrealist conception of her self saved Diana from disappointment many times; and that her skill as an editor had nothing much to do with some mysterious ability to put her hand on the pulse of the zeitgeist.

Rather, it had to do with something more powerful, more innate, a belief held in common with others who had been born outside New York, and which saved them, too, on many occasions—and that was her perception of herself. Diana saw the world through her own eyes, and that was truth enough for her.

D
iana went back to work very quickly after Reed's death in 1966, and though Alexander Liberman would later attribute her “wildness” in the years that followed to the absence of Reed's calm and restraining hand, it was the 1960s that grew wilder and Diana who caught the mood. In 1965, the year of
Vogue
's Youthquake and the very short miniskirt, race riots erupted after Malcolm X was killed in February, the bombing of North Vietnam intensified sharply, and ground-troop numbers soared. Antiwar feeling among college-educated youth intensified in response. The year of Reed's death was marked by widespread campus riots as U.S. troop numbers in Vietnam rose to four hundred thousand and Timothy Leary encouraged the young to turn on, tune in, and drop out. Betty Friedan, who had published
The Feminine Mystique
in 1963, founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), giving moderate feminists an organizational voice for the first time. Across America the personal was rapidly becoming the political. The Food and Drug Administration had licensed the Pill for use in 1960, finally making sexual freedom for women possible; but in 1966 the equation of premarital sex with personal liberation still felt radical.

Against this background fashion itself exploded. From the midpoint of the decade, ideas came from wholly unexpected directions; the global market for clothes expanded as never before; and new trends came and went faster than they ever had. To complicate matters further, the structure of the fashion industry also changed rapidly in the second part of the 1960s. Much of this was driven by the Youthquake. By 1970 one-third of the American population was under twenty. This huge demographic shift profoundly affected the way clothes were sold. Even the grandest designers introduced prêt-a-porter lines, stimulating a huge expansion in ready-to-wear. By the mid-60s Mary Quant's shop Bazaar (she hated the term “boutique”) had spawned hundreds of imitators, to the extent that designers like Quant and Barbara Hulanicki of Biba in London took over from the couture as the leading experimenters in fashion. The boutique owner-designers produced cutting-edge ideas in brand-new materials and created instant trends. Unencumbered by couture schedules, they reacted instantaneously to fresh ideas from the street and brought new designs to the market in a fraction of the time, which speeded up short-lived fads. The arrival of the jet not only meant more travel for everyone, including the more spiritual young journeying to the East in search of enlightenment. It also meant that boutique design—and thus youth fashion—traveled fast across the Atlantic in both directions, influencing haute couture, ready-to-wear, and the mass market in both the United States and Europe. These changes delighted Diana. She hired Carrie Donovan from the
New York Times
and put her in charge of a boutique column in which fashionable young women like Baby Jane Holzer and Sharon Tate dropped in on small shops in London, Paris, and New York and tried on everything that appealed to them.

The rise of ready-to-wear, boutique, and youth fashion coincided with a further destructuring of clothes themselves that was brilliantly charted by Diana in
Vogue
's pages from 1966 onward. Her composite approach to editing meant that haute couture and more conventional designers and society figures always had their place; but in
Vogue
's most prominent spreads the woman in a little mink throw disappeared altogether, to be replaced by Turquerie, caftans, Lurex stockings, hot pants, miniskirts, and white kid boots. Since neither 1960s fashion nor Diana ever moved forward in a straight line, it is courting danger to assert that there was one issue of American
Vogue
in which she achieved a paradigm shift, a moment when the fashion of the long 1950s crossed over to the mode of today. But it was arguably the April 1, 1966 issue, on page 117, where a “
Vogue's
Eye View” editorial titled “Girl in the Chips” presented the magazine's readers with a photograph of the first black supermodel, Donyale Luna, with her hair cut in a Vidal Sassoon bob, wearing a contemporary, pop-arty “fast little shift” made by Paco Rabanne from acetate poker chips. The dress was almost see-through and the effect of Guy Bourdin's photograph was to draw the eye to Luna's lithe body and her implausibly long limbs.

As 1966 gave way to the “be-ins” of Central Park and the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury in 1967,
Vogue
too moved toward the overlaying of different lines, volumes, and fabrics, layering design upon design, and mixing new pieces with vintage clothing. The feel of the magazine shifted as fashion, people, and aesthetics subtly altered once again. Though Diana did not have much time for real hippies, regarding them as unkempt and generally disgusting, she engaged enthusiastically with the style of hedonistic countercultures of the late 1960s. From 1967 onward there was hippy inspired fashion from Haight-Ashbury, which manifested itself in psychedelic prints, sandals, headbands, and “ethnic” styles; and romantic fashions inspired by Beau Brummell—velvet skirts, silk waistcoats, knickerbockers, and large floppy hats. Alongside this there was “Nifty American” fashion: inventive sportswear aimed at active women who were constantly on the move, “the kind of fashion American women live in, look marvellous in . . . the fashion they made famous all over the world.” Hemlines fell and rose again; but even when the trend was toward a more covered-up look,
Vogue
led the way in emphasizing the need for a healthy diet, serious exercise, and a toned, dancer's body that could cope with the stripped-back look of Donyale Luna in a Paco Rabanne minidress and a leotard as well as a caftan.

In the end it was the fashion eclecticism that emerged during the second part of the 1960s that was arguably more significant than any one style. It was part of a wider process of liberalization that had been going on for two decades but finally reached a point in the mid- to late-1960s where individual autonomy became a defining idea. This profound social change manifested itself in the way both women and men were choosing to dress and style themselves. “On the whole, fashion had become less a matter of designer diktat and more a question of personal choice—in fact it could be asserted that the mini was the last universal fashion,” writes the fashion historian Valerie D. Mendes. A wealth of competing fashion ideas handed power back to the consumer, at the expense of the designer, the fashion magazine, and anyone or anything else deeming themselves an authority in matters of style. In certain households this shift led to fine intergenerational battles about clothes and length of hair; but Diana saw it as liberating for readers of
Vogue
. The reader was finally free—within limits—to become her own editor: “It's your show and you run it your way—you pick, you choose, you take what you want and make the most of it.”

The “do whatever” zeitgeist of the late 1960s was close to Diana's longstanding and passionate belief in inventiveness. It chimed with her conviction that the American woman of the 1960s could style herself as whoever she wanted to be, given just a little imagination. “Do whatever” in
Vogue
appeared to resonate with the youthful, anti-authoritarian, hallucinogenic feeling of the hour; but it was no different from the aesthetic of the “Why Don't You?” column. Indeed,
Vogue
in the late 1960s often read in much the same way: “You take the most discreet black sweater and you hang
fifteen gold necklaces on it
[
sic
]—in fifteen different lengths and fifteen different textures and fifteen different designs; and some are precious and some are bunkum,” said
Vogue
. The idea was to put one idea on top of another. Discretion contrasted with surprise; simplicity contrasted with extravagance. “Invent yourself. Improvise—underplay, overplay, create. . . . Modern fashion isn't a setpiece, it changes every day.”