Over 80 and almost blind, Diana Vreeland was wheeled around a forthcoming costume exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, issuing instructions all along the way about hats, shoes, lights and mannequins. She seemed, recalled the writer Andrew Solomon,
an impossible old lady who couldn’t let go of her control and who was making everyone’s lives miserable for no good reason. And they did everything she’d said, and it was transformed. Her nearly sightless eyes could pick out things my youthful vision could not; enfeebled, she was still supreme at the discipline of chic.
From childhood, Diana Vreeland had operated with deep faith in the power of self-presentation. She transformed herself from an ugly, unpopular child into the ‘Empress of Fashion’, who had the soles of her shoes polished and who spoke in her own, heavily stressed, poetic idiom. She was an extraordinary creature with prodding red talons, black hair so shiny it was said to have clinked in contact with metal, Vaselined eyelids and the gait of a dromedary, upper body sloping backwards, pelvis thrust forward.
Vreeland had thought she would simply live a stylish life, rather than a professional one, but when she was in her thirties she was recruited by Carmel Snow at Harper’s Bazaar and she happily took to putting her stamp on her readers’ wardrobes, houses, children, pets.
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