On a night late last October, Diana Vreeland, for many years the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, for many years the editor of Vogue, now special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, and one of the few women in the world of fashion with interesting syntax, went to an evening party at the house of a friend. She wore black, as she often does, used her hands with a jaunty grace, as she often does, and sat on the bench of a grand piano. Three young men went to get her supper. She smoked a Lucky Strike. A young blond woman of delicate good looks came up to the piano bench and introduced herself. In the course of conversation, this young woman remarked that she had very much enjoyed the two shows (“The World of Balenciaga” and “Inventive Clothes/1909-39”) that Mrs. Vreeland had put on at the Metropolitan, and that she was very much looking forward to a show of Hollywood design that Mrs. Vreeland was preparing. “The only thing I didn’t like,” the young blond woman said, “was the way the mannequins’ heads were wrapped up in stockings, as though they were being smothered.”
“But my dear,” said Mrs. Vreeland, her voice achieving in the small room much of the effect that Sensurround does in movie theatres,“those wrapped heads are my greatest achievement.” This interchange demonstrates, perhaps, the difference between a liberal-arts sensibility and a fashion sensibility.
From “Why Don’t You?,” Diana Vreeland’s column in Harper’s Bazaar, November, 1936:
Why Don’t You—
Look up the new deep mauvish-pink rose which came out in Paris at the time of the devaluation, optimistically called “Better Times.”
Consider for your beauty, the creams made by Brother Carolus of Salzburg, who is an apostle of the Apollonian Creed, which advocates bodily beauty as the first duty to God?
Dress for the theatre, you and your escort—think how much it means to others in the audience.
Use pineapples for decoration?
About three weeks before the opening of the current Metropolitan Museum exhibition “Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design,” I paid a visit to Mrs. Vreeland in her Chinese-red office in the Met’s basem*nt. Mrs. Vreeland is a slight woman but not an inconspicuous one. Her face is long and expressive, her hair is a deep black such as you never saw on anyone else, and she combines in her manner the presence of, say, Beatrice Lillie with the authority of, say, the Dowager Empress of China. Mrs. Vreeland was born British in Paris. In 1924, she married T. Reed Vreeland, an American banker, who died in 1966. She began to contribute her column “Why Don’t You?” to Harper’s Bazaar in the mid-nineteen-thirties, and in 1937 she became Bazaar’s fashion editor. In 1962, Mrs. Vreeland became editor-in-chief of Vogue. She sent Richard Avedon to photograph a white cashmere cape in the mountains of northern Japan, and things like that. In 1971, she left Vogue and signed on at the Met.
On the day of my visit, Mrs. Vreeland was wearing a pink shirt, a little Missoni knit vest, a calf-length black skirt, and ivory jewelry. She moved her hands with a jaunty grace. She sat behind a crowded desk, and she smoked a Lucky Strike. Her concerns on that day, she said, had to do with the condition of the costumes and the suitability of the mannequins. Although many of her most important costumes had not yet been completely renovated, she was confident, she said, that Miss Elizabeth Lawrence, the restorer for the Costume Institute, would do her work perfectly and deliver the costumes on time. Mrs. Vreeland professed to despair, however, over the suitability of the mannequins. “Really,” she said. “I cannot forgive the mannequin-makers. Of course, these mannequins are for selling clothes in shop-windows—we understand that—but does anyone need ears that stick out to sell a dress? And from the hip to the knee—well, it’s no glorification of the American woman, I can tell you that. It’s a very short line. There’s no ecstasy! What to do! What to do! Well, first of all we knock off all the bosoms. All the ba-zooms go. We had a little Japanese carpenter with a tiny little saw—exquisite instrument—and he goes rat-a-tat... boom! Rat-a-tat... boom! I mean, he was doing fifteen ba-zooms a minute. Ba-zooms were falling. The guards were going absolutely dotty. And then we started to get a little bit more line.”
Mrs. Vreeland called her secretary, Ferle Bramson (“I say, Ferle!”), who came in and gave Mrs. Vreeland a stack of papers relating to the sable for a Greta Garbo “Camille” dress. Ferle knocked over a mannequin head on Mrs. Vreeland’s desk. “My God, Ferle,” said Mrs. Vreeland, employing her Sensurround voice. “That’s Jacqueline de Ribes. I mean, the way you throw these girls around!” Ferle recovered the head of the Countess de Ribes and set it up again on the desk.
Mrs. Vreeland discussed the “Hollywood Design” show. She said that the three most important designers represented were Adrian (“the great costumer”), Travis Banton, who dressed Marlene Dietrich, and Walter Plunkett, who did “Gone with the Wind.” She said that Hollywood design showed great craftsmanship, great “allure,” and great romance. She said that it had been very hard to get costumes for her show. She said that she had got important costumes from David Selznick’s family, from Cecil B. De Mille’s family, from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and from Mary Pickford. She said that she had tried to get clothes from New Orleans, because many of the costumes sold at the M-G-M and Twentieth Century-Fox costume auctions had ended up in New Orleans for use in the Mardi Gras. She said that she had found Mae Murray’s costume from “The Merry Widow” in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. “I’m there with the fossils and the God-knows-what, and this gentleman is showing me Mae Murray’s dress, and he said, ‘Would you like Mary Pickford’s curls? We have Mary Pickford’s curls.’ And I said, ‘Of course, enchanté’—and so we have Mary Pickford’s curls.” Mrs. Vreeland said that some studios had been coöperative and others had not been coöperative but that in either case they had very few costumes to offer. “I told them, ‘You are doing to your industry what Watergate has done to this country,’” Mrs. Vreeland said. “I was scandalized. Simply shocked.” Mrs. Vreeland did not say what others have said—that several important collectors of movie costumes on the West Coast refused to give her any help at all.
A short time later, Mrs. Vreeland walked me through her show. The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan occupies a number of low-ceilinged rooms that were renovated in the late nineteen-sixties, by Edward Durell Stone, in a manner that the Costume Institute has found not completely useful. Mr. Stone’s lighting system is not used; a fountain he put there has been covered up and a livelier, more theatrical effect sought after. For Mrs. Vreeland’s shows, costumes are displayed more dramatically than Mr. Stone’s plans allowed for. To light the costumes, Mrs. Vreeland relies on a talented man named LeMar Terry. Mr. Terry relies on light tracks. “We light the costume, don’t you see,” Mrs. Vreeland said. “Not the head.” In the rooms of the institute that day, costumed mannequins stood about in various stages of incompletion. Some mannequins were in place on platforms; many were not. Extra mannequins and extra arms, legs, heads, and hands were drifting around. A number of young men (all of whom seemed to have cashmere sweaters tied about their necks) worked on the mannequins and suffered the critical looks of Mrs. Vreeland as she passed by.
In a room dominated by the costumes of Adrian, Mrs. Vreeland stretched her arms out toward an enormous velvet dress. It was a costume that Greta Garbo wore in “Romance.”
“Garbo, Garbo!” said Mrs. Vreeland. “She has the en plus of amoureuse, and she has a little gray monkey with a scarlet hat and coat. Oh! How I have worked on that monkey’s little hat. At first, it was a little red fez, which was absurd. Now it is a little red beret. I want it to look as if someone made it with love I do not want it to look like F. A. O. Schwarz.”
Mrs. Vreeland came to rest in front of another heavy-velvet costume by Adrian—done for Garbo in “Camille.” She said, “Perfection! Perfection! Any place that is silk is the purest silk. The velvet is backed with the purest silk. And there is pure silk against the body that has nothing to do with the pure silk that’s against the velvet. Do you know how much these costumes cost? Between four thousand and seven thousand dollars in the nineteen-thirties. I was in Paris in those days, and I was quite a dresser, you know, and you couldn’t spend five hundred dollars in Paris for a dress. Hollywood had the most expensive couture in the world. This is haute, haute couture.” A few long strides brought Mrs. Vreeland to a costume of Carole Lombard’s. “Feel that,” she said. “You could put the whole thing in your pocket. It’s all cut on the bias, you see, and it’s all delicious!” Mrs. Vreeland paused and looked critically at the Carole Lombard mannequin. “I’ve never seen an uglier lady in my life,” she said ruefully.
Mrs. Vreeland swung into a higher gear and moved through the clothes of other famous film stars. “This is from ‘Madame Satan,’” she said, pointing to a remarkable red cape embroidered with silver and gold. “She seduces her own husband at a party on a dirigible. This is from ‘Samson and Delilah’—every peaco*ck feather was picked by Mr. Cecil B. De Mille from his own peaco*cks. And here! This is ‘The Merry Widow.’ From the Natural History Museum. We have Hayworth and Dietrich! And Monroe! The last great fantaisie—Monroe on the pink elephant! That’s the stuff to feed the troops!” Slowing down a bit, Mrs. Vreeland said, “So many ladies. You know, there is only one woman in history I would have cared to be, and that is Elizabeth the First. What a marvellous sense of trees and flowers! And the ponies! She had ponies, and their manes and tails were dyed the same color as her hair! On the day “Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design” was to open—with a black-tie dinner at a hundred and fifty dollars a ticket, to be held in the museum’s main restaurant, around the pool—I walked through the show with Mrs. Vreeland again. She wore a black pants suit with a red wool jersey scarf and wore even more ivory jewelry than she had worn before. All Mrs. Vreeland’s mannequins were in place, and costumed, and all of them had stockings over their heads so they looked as though they were smothering. A few of Mrs. Vreeland’s assistants, including a tall young black man named André Leon Talley, continued to work on the mannequins—rewrapping heads, and such. There was a woman with a Hoover Swingette vacuum cleaner and one with a Jiffy steamer (for removing wrinkles), and these two worked on the costumes as well. This caused some anxiety to Stuart Silver, who is administrator for design at the Metropolitan, and whose workmen wanted the mannequins to be finally in place, so that the lighting could be finally set and the base of each mannequin painted to blend with the platform on which it stood. This meant that as Mrs. Vreeland walked about the exhibit she was confronted with two sets of problems—problems arising from the last-minute troubles of André and her other assistants, and problems arising from the impatience of Mr. Silver to be through with his work. In addition, of course, Mrs. Vreeland discovered one or two problems of her own.
Mrs. Vreeland helped André place a tiara on “Madame Sans-Gêne,” the heroine of a 1925 film starring Gloria Swanson. “Farther back on the brow, André,” Mrs. Vreeland said. “The more imperial you are, the higher on the brow.”
“I didn’t know that,” said André admiringly.
A young man walked by with a truncated mannequin wearing a gold lamé swimsuit. “Is she in or out, Mrs. V.?” the young man asked.
“This is Esther Williams,” Mrs. Vreeland said. “I really would like to have her around. She means so much to so many. She’s in.”
Mr. Silver came up to Mrs. Vreeland. “Those people have to leave,” he said, indicating the young men with the cashmere sweaters and the women with the cleaning equipment.
“Umm,” said Mrs. Vreeland.
“I mean it,” said Mr. Silver.
“Ummm,” said Mrs. Vreeland.
“You have to take my advice sometimes,” said Mr. Silver.
“I will, I will,” said Mrs. Vreeland. She paused for a moment. “You know,” she said, turning again to Madame Sans-Gêne’s tiara, “everything in the nineteenth century was around the neck or around the stomach or on the head. Wrists weren’t as big in the nineteenth century as they are in the twentieth.”
Mrs. Vreeland walked on. She came to two child mannequins wearing costumes from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Mr. Silver was still at her side. “These are such abnormal-looking children,” she said severely. “Why don’t we huddle them together, the way children huddle when they are a little frightened?”
“Every time you move them, we have to relight them,” Mr. Silver said.
“We won’t move them, we’ll simply adjust them,” Mrs. Vreeland said. She did adjust them—so slightly that Mr. Silver did not complain. Through the power of suggestion, perhaps, the two child mannequins began to look as though they were huddling together out of fear. I wondered if perhaps huddling might become the vogue. (“Why don’t you... in the first trying moments after dinner, huddle together as children do when they are a little frightened?”) After the adjustment, Mrs. Vreeland abandoned the huddled children and crossed the room to another grouping of mannequins. “I hate those pearls,” she said, pointing to one mannequin of this group. “André, who had the marvellous good taste to afflict that poor girl with those pearls?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Vreeland,” André said. “They weren’t there last night.”
“It is terrifying, the things people do,” Mrs. Vreeland said as André removed the pearls.
A minute or two later, Mrs. Vreeland encountered Henri Langlois, head of the Cinémathèque Française, who, with a small entourage, was strolling through the show early, because he would not be attending the opening. M.Langlois was very admiring of the show, even though no clothes from his own considerable film-costume collection appeared in it. Mrs. Vreeland greeted M.Langlois in her Sensurround voice, and acknowledged his murmured praise of the show. “Oh, M. Langlois, from you it’s such a compliment. You know how anxious I was to get hold of you all summer. By the time I got your letter, we had so much it was too late.” Mrs. Vreeland showed M.Langlois the “Gone with the Wind” dresses and told him about the Selznicks’ generosity. She showed him the De Mille dresses and told him how all the peaco*ck feathers for the “Samson and Delilah” dress came from the De Mille estate. M.Langlois said, in a low voice, that he was impressed by the costumes Mrs. Vreeland had been able to get. “And, oh, it was so difficult,” said Mrs. Vreeland, extending her arms in a gesture of despair. “You have no idea. People don’t answer your calls. People don’t answer your telegrams. People don’t answer your letters. I am a very precise person. I answer every letter in twenty-four hours, but, of course, I can’t expect other people...” Mrs. Vreeland’s eyes wandered off, and her face assumed the troubled expression of a lookout who notices a menacing configuration in the distance. “André, I say, “André” she said. “We need blue paillettes around Marilyn’s eyes. I want paillettes to cover her eyes.”
After M.Langlois’s departure (or retreat), Mrs. Vreeland addressed herself completely to the question of Marilyn Monroe’s paillettes. She herself had brought some paillettes to her office, but they turned out not to be the right shade of blue. She remembered that an associate had had some of the right ones, but after the associate was found, it turned out that these had been samples and had been returned to the person who sent them. André appeared with a container of multicolored paillettes. “Umm,” said Mrs. Vreeland. She suggested that André sit down and pick out all the tiny blue paillettes from the container of multicolored paillettes. André declined. “Very well, André,” said Mrs. Vreeland. But I intend to see Miss Monroe’s paillettes through to the bitter end.”
Mrs. Vreeland went up to Mr. Silver, whose men had, at last, a clear field to work in. “Ahhh, going well?” asked Mrs. Vreeland
“Finally, yes,” said Mr. Silver.
“Stuart works upstairs, in the more refined part of the museum,” said Mrs. Vreeland, patting Mr. Silver on the back as she swept down the room. “But don’t forget, boys, this is where the money is!”
“One-fifty. Brother. One-fifty apiece to come here tonight,” Mrs. Vreeland said to me, back in her office. “And your friends are selling tickets all over town. It has to be the most terrifying thing. But do you know that four hundred thousand people came to see the last show? Just under four hundred thousand? In the basem*nt of the Metropolitan Museum? You’ve got to say it’s quite something, what? Do you know it turns out that quality is irresistible? The thing that is lacking, as we all know, is the avant-garde. I think the avant-garde could have to do with quality. Anyway, you have to encourage people. I put Cher as a white Indian in the show. It’s a showstopper. People say, ‘But that’s television!’ I say look at the title of the show. It’s Hollywood design—not just Hollywood film design. You have to encourage people. The grand tradition never really dies. It’s like money. If you don’t have it, someone else does.” Mrs. Vreeland began to review the costumes of Lillian Gish that were to appear in the show. She called Ferle. “I say, Ferle! Now what d’we have? We’ve got Lillian Gish in ‘Romola.’ What besides ‘Romola’? It’s not ‘Broken Blossoms.’”
“‘Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall’?” Ferle ventured.
“Listen, Ferle. You’re fired. Dismissed. That’s Mary Pickford. Ferle, you’re out. Go to Hollywood. You’d be big in Hollywood. That’s the way they talk in Hollywood. They don’t know a bloody thing.”
Mrs. Vreeland is the only woman in New York who would have a secretary named Ferle and an assistant named André. (These employees might more properly be called “I-Say-Ferle” and “I-Say-André,” since this is how they are regularly addressed.) She is a master of the art of mock dismissal and other aspects of boss-lady psychodrama. Mrs. Vreeland has authority: not the simple authority of genius but a more eclectic sort, pieced together out of random bits (social, artistic, theatrical) that have fallen to her over a long career. She understands how the social mechanism works as it applies to fashion, and, more important, she can nearly always lay her hands on the fuel to make it go. In an era when fashionable people have pretended not to care about fashion, she stands out. Since the late sixties, fashionable people have walked around parties (even their own) like ghosts. People have given “simple” parties “for friends,” and have pretended to ignore the complicated social machinery chugging away in their rooms. Mrs. Vreeland is, as she says, a very precise person, and she ignores nothing. If a bit of social machinery isn’t working right, or if a hem is drooping, she fixes it. With Mrs. Vreeland to look after the machinery, other people have a good time. Mrs. Vreeland’s parties at the Metropolitan are successful—more successful than any other large public entertainments in New York. She gets them to turn out. She gets them to pay for it (there are almost no complimentary tickets to Mrs. Vreeland’s benefits), and she gets them to like it. They liked the party this year, again. And they liked the show.
On the night of the opening, I walked through the show with André. He took me to see Lana Turner’s costume from “The Prodigal.” It was largely metal. “I had to do this with pliers,” André said. “You know about Mary Pickford’s curls? Mrs. V. had a fit because they weren’t put on right. She is the only one I want to work for. From now on, I work only for Mrs. V. Have you seen the Judy Garland? Mrs. V. told me, ‘André, put a trunk in front of Judy Garland and put the initials J.G. on it.’ That is typical of Mrs. V. We wanted to put a topknot on Greer Garson, and she said no—it would be more elegant with French braids. And it is more elegant with French braids. I finally got the paillettes for Marilyn Monroe. I had to go to Elizabeth Arden. I must say, it is a very deft effect.”
And through the show one last time, this time with the public. The show is a hit. All kinds of people go to see it. They recognize the names, and they like to see luxury so brashly presented. Occasionally, one can spot an exposed mannequin joint, and the program is a little ratty, but otherwise the show does fine justice to the fantasy it echoes. People exclaim over the velvet and the sequins, and they have fun. The best Hollywood people knew how to make audiences like what they were seeing—even when they were seeing situations, in Atlanta or ancien-régime France, in which they themselves would not have been at all at home. Mrs. Vreeland has the same gift. The message of her shows at the Metropolitan (which, it seems to me, have had more influence on the attitude of New Yorkers toward fashion than the last thirty-six issues of any fashion maazine) appears to be “It’s Good! It’s Better! It’s Best! It’s a million miles away! But it’s all yours! Come and get it!” On my way around the show, I encountered a young girl who was telling a young man with her what she liked best. She stopped in front of a mannequin wearing a black velvet dress by Adrian. “I like this one because she’s rich and she shows it,” the girl said.♦
