Those two stars of modern fashion, Chanel and Diana Vreeland, were comparable, although they didn’t like each other. Both were marvelous potentates, sensing in the other an important rival. Diana, with her sense of drama, flash, and flamboyance, projected more than Chanel. Chanel was the couturiere in her salon, inventing. Diana Vreeland occupied the world stage of fashion. She always loved Russia and the extravagance of the Russian character. Somewhere in her heart she was connected to the Ballets Russes. There was a Bakst, Diaghilev quality to her: the abundance of jewels, the exaggeration, the Russian color, the savagery, the opulence, the lavishness. But like Chanel, she was also very modern. She was very Anglo-Saxon and comfortable with all things English: the titles, the precise tailoring, the uniform, the regimental rigor of English life, the correctness, the meticulousness of note writing. She had an admiration for the thoroughbred, be it an extraordinary beauty or a superb racehorse.
She was a dictator in many respects and could be severe. Yet with all the difficulties and idiosyncrasies of this eccentric human being, one forgave all. I knew she was aiming for the beyond, the extraordinary, the best of everything for Vogue. I respected and admired her for this unending striving to go beyond excellence. I loved her, and we had a wonderful decade at Vogue. She was a great joy in my life.
André Leon Talley, Vogue Creative Director
Diana Vreeland went to work in the thirties and never looked back. She believed in the “get up and go, get cracking” individual. “What I am most proud of is that I’ve always gone to work,” she often said. She was a thoroughly modern woman, happily married for forty-two years, who raised a family and lived to enjoy four great-grandchildren before her death in August. Her career at Vogue, followed by her fifteen years as a consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, was her exhilarating life tonic.
She knew that modern life was as rich on the streets as it was in the most sophisticated salons of Paris. Style had to come from every strata of society. She found the same kind of passion and authority in Tina Turner’s backstep in stilettos as in the writings of Isak Dinesen. She saw romance and spirit in everything from Voltaire to Jack Nicholson. I remember once we had a three-hour conversation about espadrilles. That kind of obsession with the perfect espadrille may seem neurotic to some people, but it stood for a certain sense of perfection that she always believed in. And when we had finished, around four in the morning, she decided we had to explore her apartment. So we went into the kitchen, a place she hadn’t set foot in for years. She always communicated with her cooks via the telephone, with detailed notes scrawled on large yellow legal pads in Chinese green ink, or in person, in her dressing room. We were hungry and needed a snack of peanut butter, one of her favorite foods, which she loved served to her on K’ang Hsi porcelain plates, with spoon. She didn’t have a clue as to where was in her pantry, where the cutlery was kept. It was truly a nightcrawler’s adventure. Her feet were on foreign soil in her own kitchen. Another time she had a craving for English clotted cream. For weeks, she was obsessed with clotted cream from the English countryside. She would ask for anything and, if it were humanly possible, one had to accomplish it. Finally, I asked Manolo Blahnik if he could bring some clotted cream from England for the Red Empress. Blahnik made a special trip to Bath, two hours from London, organized the clotted cream, had it packed in a special container of dry ice, and brought it with him when he came on the Concorde to New York for a working trip. The first thing we did was deliver the clotted cream to Diana Vreeland’s doorstep. And the notes that came from her the next morning were framed by both Blahnik and myself.
