MARTIN: How do you think that this prepared her - or do you think it, in a way, led her to fashion? Diana was the difficult one and she always felt that her mother was somehow ashamed of her because of what she looked like and to make matters worse, her mother was somewhat flighty and often not there, certainly having very intense flirtations with people, if not outright affairs, and the person who held the household together was a nanny who just echoed her mother's antipathy towards her and it was always around this question of what Diana looked like and being a plain child. Her mother was a very famous New York society beauty and her younger sister was a very, very beautiful and easy child. STUART: Diana Vreeland was the plain child in a family of beauties. Could you just talk a little bit more about that? MARTIN: You write about, actually, a really heartbreaking story about her upbringing and how she was - she was treated in a way that I think a lot of people would, today, consider abusive. So it was an astonishing career at the time when women from her background very rarely worked at all.
It was a top job, as you say, right through the turbulent '60s, a time of great change, great change in style, a great change in culture, which she tracked and reported and helped, really, to change in a very, very profound way.Īnd then she had an extraordinary third act at the Metropolitan Museum at the Costume Institute, launching a series of groundbreaking costume exhibitions, looking, again, at clothes in a completely different way. Then she went to Vogue, where she became editor-in-chief.
She didn't actually get going until relatively late in life, in her mid-30s, when she joined Harper's Bazaar, which was an extraordinary magazine in 1936, and she stayed there right through till 1962, not as its editor, but as its fashion editor.
Her story is captured in the new book, "Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland." Michel Martin recently sat down with the author, Amanda MacKenzie Stuart.įor our listeners who are not fashionistas, can you just give us - just briefly - an idea of Diana Vreeland's influence in fashion?ĪMANDA MACKENZIE STUART: Her career in fashion spanned many decades. Vreeland later launched groundbreaking costume exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and she accomplished all that after a childhood filled with pain, insecurity and a mother who called her ugly.
She spent more than 20 years at Harper's Bazaar before taking the helm of American Vogue. Coming up, a discussion about why fashion is so important for many African-American men.īut first, a look at a woman who helped shape American fashion, icon Diana Vreeland. Over the next few minutes, we'll focus on the unique history of American fashion. Despite challenging economic times, many of us will dress up for New Year's Eve.
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