Empresses of Fantasy (Published 2012) (2024)

As the lowly assistant crouched on the floor, arranging purple snakeskin shoes for a photo shoot, the imperious editor swept into the room, flinging her Mainbocher coat at the young woman. Without thinking, the assistant “chucked it right back.” Was the underling fired for insubordination? No. Did she turn her experience into a blockbuster movie? Yes. But not in the way you might suppose, and not when you might suppose. That assistant wasn’t Lauren Weisberger, who parlayed her first job — answering the phones for Anna Wintour, editor of the American edition of Vogue — into the roman à clef, and then film, “The Devil Wears Prada” (a “disgracefully disloyal” thing to do, Vogue’s creative director, the amusingly blunt Grace Coddington, remarks in her understatedly dishy memoir, “Grace”). Far from it: the office dogsbody was the future film star Ali MacGraw, then an assistant to Wintour’s legendary predecessor, Diana Vreeland.

“Empress of Fashion,” a dazzlingly comprehensive, perceptive and many-­sided new book about Vreeland by ­Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, explains that at the time of the Mainbocher ricochet Vreeland was working not for Vogue but for its rival, Harper’s Bazaar, where she had been since the mid-1930s — ever since she was spotted dancing at the St. Regis Hotel and recognized for her “pizazz,” a word Vreeland is thought to have coined. At Bazaar, Vreeland became known for a column called “Why Don’t You?,” a stream-of-­consciousness geyser of instructions meant to coax women to inject their lives with a playful, sophisticated flair. Among her suggestions: dragging home a Baroque porcelain stove from Central Europe (it sets off the parquet in one’s front hall so nicely), clipping chenille earrings onto emerald-green upholstered living room chairs and stowing an elk-hide leather trunk on the back of one’s Bugatti roadster. In 1962, Vreeland took the helm at Vogue. Her first issue came out in January 1963 — 50 years ago next month.

Who or what was this creature? In her diary, Vreeland wrote that she had always “been looking out for girls to idolize because they are things to look up to because they are perfect. Never have I discovered that girl or that woman. I shall be that girl.” If she didn’t succeed in her mission, she added, it would be a “betrayal of my own self.” She never gave up on this task. From her editorial mirador, she urged her audience to believe that “the wondrous is real” because “that is how you wish it to be . . . and how you wish it into being.” But in 1971, as the reverberations of the feminist youthquake shook up popular conceptions of ideal womanhood, Vreeland’s notions began to seem, Stuart writes, “old-fashioned.”

Nearly 70, widowed and fired from her job at Vogue, Vreeland proved as unvanquishable as ever, resurrecting herself as the éminence rose of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The guiding principle of her career, according to her colleague, the journalist Bob Colacello, was not to give people what they wanted but “to give them what they don’t know they want yet.” (After she died of a heart attack in 1989, one of the songs played at her memorial service was the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”)