This past weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the Diana Vreeland documentary The Eye Has to Travel with 2 of my most stylish girlfriends! If you don’t know who Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) is, you need to! You will be inspired by her life and spirit. Not only was she a noted columnist and the fashion editor at Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, she also took over the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and made it a huge success because of her wild imagination. She had a way of exaggerating history and subject matter inspired by her own fantasy and personal vision, which still makes her work something I can totally relate to today. If you can find a theater where it is playing, I would highly recommend it or rent it when it’s available. The only theater showing it in LA is The Landmark. If you love fashion and crazy old ladies, I guarantee you will be inspired!
Along the way, the story of Vreeland illustrates the evolution of women into roles of power and prominence throughout the 20th century, and travels through some of the century’s greatest historical and cultural eras, including Paris’ Belle Epoque, New York in the roaring twenties, and London in the swinging sixties. It also spans such historical events as the great wars, the flights of Lindbergh, the romance of Wallis and Windsor, the Kennedy inauguration, and the freewheeling spirit of the 1960′s youthquake, and the advent of countless fashion revolutions from the bikini to the blue jean.
Thanks for the comment. That pretty much sums it up! What an amazing time in fashion history to live through. She was a lucky lady!
As if her whole life had been one long prologue building up to this final climax, everything that Vreeland had ever worshipped converged in her position as special consultant—history, fashion, ritual, pageantry, society, travel. For 1976’s “The Glory of Russian Costume” she visited Russia (which she sometimes grandly pronounced like “rush hour,” with a trilled r), accompanied by Hoving and Fred Hughes. Exhilarated by night orgies of caviar, vodka, and dancing to the balalaika, the Scarlet Empress conquered the “Ivans,” as she called them. Hoving says that on their first morning in Moscow she was scheduled to meet the minister of culture at 11 a.m. Unexpectedly, she sailed into the conference room on the dot of the hour, “all lacquered and Vaselined, a vision of black, white, and red. She couldn’t see a thing—she didn’t want to spoil the effect of her entrance by wearing glasses. ‘What do you think of the Soviet Union?’ the interpreter politely inquired. ‘I’ve been up since dawn walking. And I find your country marvelous, huge, and beautiful, and the skin of your women magnificent.’ From then on it was duck soup,” Hoving says.