The Travelling Eye

Diana Vreeland with Marisa Berenson during her tenure at Vogue from 1963–71It took three attempts for my friend and I to see the Diana Vreeland The Eye Has to Travel documentary film. The first time the session was sold out, the second time the projector broke down ‘because it was too hot’. (No, we didn’t buy that one either.) We were determined to see this film, and third time we struck lucky.

I didn’t know a great deal about Diana Vreeland. I knew she was the editor of Harper’s Bazaar in its heyday in the 1940s; that she started out with her witty and outrageous Why Don’t You column; that she, along with Alexey Brodovitch and some great fashion photographers changed magazine publishing forever. I also knew that the demanding magazine editor in Audrey Hepburn’s film Funny Face was based on her. (Ali MacGraw, one of Vreeland’s junior assistants has some amusing anecdotes on this subject.)

Diana Vreeland in the studio, 1946The story is told through archival footage and hundreds of interviews with people who knew and worked with her, and the film features Vreeland’s voice near the beginning, caught on tape in an interview in the 70s. I loved her opening statement: “Darling, the first thing you must do is arrange to be born in Paris at the beginning of the Belle Époque …” What a fantastical picture this immediately conjured up! I was even more enchanted when I learned she eventually made her way from the Continent to New York, where she spent the entire Roaring Twenties dancing in the jazz clubs of Harlem.

Why Don’t You …In fact, Vreeland was dancing when she caught the eye of Carmel Snow – because she was wearing Coco Chanel you see – who suggested she come work for her at Harper’s Bazaar. She waved away Vreeland’s protests that she had never worked, let alone in journalism. And so she started her climb up the career ladder with the aforementioned column Why Don’t You…? (Her granddaughter charmingly reads out some examples in the film.)  

Diana Vreeland with Richard Avedon, 1955Diana in her office, 1965At Harper’s Bazaar Vreeland quickly rose from columnist to fashion editor – the fashion editor, because there was only one. She discovered Richard Avedon, Lauren Bacall (of whom you could not take a bad picture, ever); she advised Jacqueline Kennedy on matters of style; she worked with all the famous models of the day – Veruschka, Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree. She stayed at the magazine until 1962, when she left for better prospects at Vogue. She was editor-in-chief there until 1971, after which she went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and shook up the Costume Institute.

Her extravagances with photographic budgets were legendary, for she believed that the reader wanted a fantasy, to be taken out of their world into another extraordinary one, and no expense should be spared to achieve it, for: “The eye has to travel.” Indeed. She was, on her own admission, an ordinary-looking woman with a great sense of style, and she lead an extraordinary life. 

Read more about Diana Vreeland at the official website.

Fashion spreads from Vogue featuring Veruschka