You Make Chic Fashion Chic
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She was 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 chic 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 was most influenced by the Edwardian period.
How Your Fashion Period Influences Your Clothing Choices
These fashions prevailed in Paris and England where she spent some of the earliest years of her childhood, before the family moved to New York.| |
"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 handmade 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.
You Can't Update Until You Know Where You Are
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 your view of fashion.
Only then can you decide how to use what you love and update using contemporary touches.
Build a wardrobe to please your sense of beauty and flatter your 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.
That era define chic fashion for me.
Chanel's Influence Continues Even Today
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 about chic fashion -- not only for a woman of a certain age but for one of any age.
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?”
Create Your Style, Create Your Life
Vreeland was not an attractive woman. Yet she hobnobbed with kings, celebrities, and intellectuals.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 to know what chic fashion means and to have a decisive sense of style.
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