Vreeland Defined Chic Fashion;
Create Your Distinctive Style
Diana Vreeland defined chic fashion for nearly half century as fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and later, more famously, editor-in-chief of Vogue. She was the Tim Gunn of the last half of the 20th century. Her fashion esthetic celebrated finely crafted details and drama. We can learn a lot about to create a unique fashion style by studying fashion icons such as Vreeland.One of the smartest things that Vreeland says in her autobiography, D.V., (1984, with George Plimpton and Christopher Hemphill, Knopf) is that her view of style is most influenced by the Edwardian period – the fashions that prevailed in Paris and England where she spent some of the earliest years of her childhood, before the family moved to New York.
When Is Your Fashion Period?
Vreeland explained, “The Edwardian influence in England last long after Edward’s death . . . Each period casts a long, long shadow. . . . You might think it was my mother’s period, but it’s mine. One’s period is when one is very young” (p. 20). This was a period when women and men of Vreeland’s class wore elegant clothes that were made by hand for them. She emphasizes that even nightgowns required three fittings. They were made of elegant silk and satin -- slippery fabrics. The elegant beading, edge rolling, and other details requires a lot of time and skill. Today, most shoppers do not know anything about the simplest details of fashion construction, such as matching plaids. It’s important to know what influences one’s view of fashion. Only then can we decide how to use what we love and update using contemporary touches that please our sense of beauty and flatter our physical features. I am never going to find Doc Maartens, tattoos, and multiple piercings stylish, because I grew up in an era of Jackie Kennedy in simple frocks and the leopard-skin pillbox hat.
Fashion Freedom
Vreeland regards the postwar suit of Coco Chanel as so admirably styled that they are always the right thing to wear – even decades later. The skirt, Vreeland raves, is “never too short, never making a fool of a woman when she sits down” (p. 130). This is good advice for a woman not only of a certain age but of any age.
“Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of our world,” she declares (p. 194).Vreeland biographer Eleanor Dwight translates Vreeland’s esthetic this way, “The theme repeated over and over in Vreeland's column was a personal credo: Don't just be your ordinary dull self. Why don't you be ingenious and make yourself into something else?” Vreeland was not an attractive woman, by the standards of her own or our times. Yet she dined with kings, the literati and glitterati. Late in life, s she put together exhibits for the Metropolitan Museum of New York. She was famous for her pursuit for the “perfect red.” The energy – the passion – the decisiveness with which she lived is stamped in these stories as much as the fashion era she shaped. She also tells a great story, part of the lost skills of conversation from an era when people dressed for dinner every night -- in gowns and men in white dinner jackets. This biography has a few years on it, but it is a useful touchstone for anyone who would like a sense of what it means to have a decisive sense of style.
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