Sunday, June 30, 2013

Bit-O-Inspiro 40


As Shakespeare once said, "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players."

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Style Maven: Diana Vreeland and the Met (Part 10)

Diana Vreeland
As I said in Part 1 of this Style Maven series featuring Diana Vreeland, my quest on #IMFblog has been to examine where trends and social behavior originated as it pertains to fashion and style. I aim to find what fashion was, and what we are turning it into day by day going forward. Diana Vreeland having served as Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief at a time when fashion became a powerful tool of expression for women helped her to convey to America a concept of beauty that was aspirational and liberating for all women to follow. Diana Vreeland’s aura is still riddled in the excitement associated with the fashion industry, and the way that we think about fashion is a product of the mind of this visionary figure. That is why this month and next month I choose to delve into her work at the Costume Institute which is another arena of fashion where she brought her inimitable influence setting a standard that we still aim to achieve not just for fashion, but in the field of costume curating. I want to examine what we can learn from DV about style and fashion through her curatorial work. I figure, in light of this year’s exhibition opening, doing so will give us an eye into the difficulty of producing an exhibition, and Vreeland’s thoughts on how to create drama in presentation. In my fashion, one who has style has a recognizable character, and those who understand the character they play in life have the power to produce a life’s story that teaches others what it means to live a fulfilling life. (Photos and text come from the following books: ‘The Empress of Fashion’ by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, ‘Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel’ by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, and ‘Diana Vreeland’ by Eleanor Dwight)

Her real interest was in the woman who wanted to close the gap: the gap between the way she was and the way she was and the was she wanted to be. The question that interested Diana was: how do you do it? The answer according to Diana, did not lie in transforming or reinventing one’s persona in a forced and unnatural way. .Rather, it was about becoming the “best” version of oneself; and to do that one had to become one’s own editor, one’s own curator.

There was a private family funeral followed by a memorial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on November 6, 1989…The obituarists’ memories tended to be short: Diana’s great wartime fashion success, notably the Popover and her support of Claire McCardell, received barely a mention. Neither did her predilection for low heels, flat footwear, bare legs, and her introduction of Capri sandals. Dazzled by her persona, by a view of her as the great 1960s editor of psychedelia and flower power, those summing up her achievements in fashion overlooked her ceaseless, and sometimes unpopular, efforts to bring pizzazz to American fashion from the 1930s onward; her support for the craftsmen and –women of the fashion industry; and her conviction that “the eye must travel.” They also overlooked her steady championing of clothes that reflected the new silhouette, the new line of the twentieth century; clothes that liberated the natural female body, whether they came from Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Claire McCardell, the Ballets Russes, the dance studio, or the office messenger.

Give ‘em what they never knew they wanted,” 
and “The most boring thing on earth
 is to be of the world of what you do.”
More subtle commentators rightly saw Diana as an extraordinary catalyst, as the Diaghilev of fashion…More recently Diana’s exhibitions, and the controversies that came to surround them, have been reevaluated. As John Ross of the Metropolitan Museum of Art remarked when she died, “Mrs. Vreeland was a genius for understanding…that society expressed itself visually, whether it was through fashion, whether it was through photography, whether it was through the way that people lived.” By introducing the idea that society expressed itself visually in a way that cut across dichotomies like young/old, working-class/aristocrat, feminist/non-feminist, and by placing this insight at the heart of costume display, Diana mounted a series of exhibitions that were undoubtedly radical…Her exhibitions always attempted to reflect the woman, the man, the style of life, the dreams behind the clothes. Even though Diana herself might have been uneasy about it, the exhibitions thus staked a claim for fashion as art: the art of the dressed body.

The exhibitions coincided with, and made a contribution to, the emergence in the early 1980s of the idea that the dressed body was a cultural phenomenon in its own right, to be studied by academics and argued over by cultural theorists, a result that would have astonished—and quite possibly appalled—Diana. The work of this new generation of fashion historians and fashion theorists allows us to see Diana in a different way: as a fascinating exemplar of a small group of women who wielded great power in the fashion industry as designers, photographers, journalists, and businesswomen from before the First World War. They were breadwinners, wives, and mothers, too, but they derived their social and economic power from a pre-feminist view of female identity. ..Contemporary theorists are also reexamining the idea that inspired Diana and so many of her contemporaries: of beauty and allure as empowering in themselves. They point out that it is an extremely powerful idea; that it is rooted in sexual attraction; that it has never gone away; and that it continues to jostle for space with more contemporary views of female identity. Moreover, it often jostles along with competing ideas of female identity in the same woman.

Diana was known to say, life had its up-and-down trips. “You must choose one,” she said. “The down trip makes for a bad liver, bad digestion and fewer friends. The up trip is naturally delicious and never ceasing. I believe in people who are on the up trip.”

One reason for this, perhaps, is that Diana’s greatest achievement is barely visible to the naked eye. It lies out of sight, in memory and dreams. “I don’t like to work,” she once said. “I only like to dream and achieve…quite a different matter.” …The rational mind was, she thought, too often prosaic, too often circumscribed by hesitation and fear…To Diana the imagination liberated the possible: with a little imagination something ever more “wonderful” was just around the corner and ever present in the here and now…What she did, indefatigably, and from a position of great influence at Vogue, was to assert the authority of the imagination—and the idea of possibility that galloped along beside it.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Bit-O-Inspiro 39


When innovative academic work on fashion first emerged in the 1980s, the ground was broken by Elizabeth Wilson in a book called Adorned in Dreams. Although Wilson was a committed feminist, she challenged those who rejected fashion as trivial or symptomatic of false consciousness. Fashion, she suggested, has the power to mark out identity in a way that we should embrace rather than distrust. It even has the power to subvert. “Socially determines we may be, yet we consistently search for the crevices in culture that open to us moments of freedom,” she wrote. Fashion, she continued, acts as a vehicle for fantasy. “There will…never be a human world without fantasy, which expresses the unconscious unfulfillable. All art draws on unconscious fantasy; the performance that is fashion is one road from the inner to the outer world.” Immense psychological and material work goes into the production of the social self, and clothes are an indispensable part of that production. This is what makes it so compelling but causes us to react to fashion with ambivalence as well. - Found in 'Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland' by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Style Maven: Diana Vreeland and the Met (Part 9)

Diana Vreeland
As I said in Part 1 of this Style Maven series featuring Diana Vreeland, my quest on #IMFblog has been to examine where trends and social behavior originated as it pertains to fashion and style. I aim to find what fashion was, and what we are turning it into day by day going forward. Diana Vreeland having served as Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief at a time when fashion became a powerful tool of expression for women helped her to convey to America a concept of beauty that was aspirational and liberating for all women to follow. Diana Vreeland’s aura is still riddled in the excitement associated with the fashion industry, and the way that we think about fashion is a product of the mind of this visionary figure. That is why this month and next month I choose to delve into her work at the Costume Institute which is another arena of fashion where she brought her inimitable influence setting a standard that we still aim to achieve not just for fashion, but in the field of costume curating. I want to examine what we can learn from DV about style and fashion through her curatorial work. I figure, in light of this year’s exhibition opening, doing so will give us an eye into the difficulty of producing an exhibition, and Vreeland’s thoughts on how to create drama in presentation. In my fashion, one who has style has a recognizable character, and those who understand the character they play in life have the power to produce a life’s story that teaches others what it means to live a fulfilling life. (Photos and text come from the following books: ‘The Empress of Fashion’ by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, ‘Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel’ by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, and ‘Diana Vreeland’ by Eleanor Dwight)

The 18th Century Women
Exhibition Catalog
The Eighteenth-Century Women Exhibition (1981): The Mannequin head is not only the most visible part of the clothed mannequin, but also gives the curator a chance to style a silhouette, often an important unifying element of the exhibition. Vreeland used this opportunity to great effect. It was not about making the mannequin look like a historical figure (with wigs and painted make-up). It was instead about bringing the historic silhouette into the present—desirable to contemporary eyes. Painting minimalist hairlines in strong and importantly unnatural colors was one way of abstracting the mannequins’ heads—blurring the becomingly behind gauze was another. Wigs were used not used from hair, but instead curled pieces of paper. Once again giving the idea of a style in a modern way or she altered their proportions harnessing the wig as a quasi-prop. As in the case of the famous “Eighteenth Century Wig” created by then intern Harold Koda, recalls Vreeland’s directive. “You know the Eighteen Century is all about proportion. It’s the heel of the show to the ankle. It’s the wrist to the angle of the sleeve. It’s all about proportion. Now I need a wig and want it to be hard as concrete.” 
 
Jeff Daily, Chief Designer, recalls working for Vreeland on a vast Trompe L’oeil Chandelier. “When it was done, it looked like this huge, crystal chandelier was hanging there but there was nothing above it, so it was just something you saw from a distance and you could see the portrait from behind it, and everything else, so it worked.”
 
Left: Harold Koda redid this fantastic headdress (left) for the “Eighteenth-Century Women” exhibit several times until it suited Diana, who looked at the finished version with glee and pronounced, Mmmm, now she’s ready for the guillotine!” Right: If you look closely at the wing in this photo, you can see that it was made of curled pieces of paper rather than a wig.

La Belle Epoque
Exhibition Catalog
La Belle Époque Exhibition (1982): As Koda and Martin wrote later, Diana’s version of history was history of “the grandest memory, a sweep through the elegances of the court of Versailles, a promenade through the grand silhouettes and extravagant textures of the Belle Époque, and the colorful Russia of the Czars.” She like to express the mood of an era through oblique, impressionistic details: a bouquet of violets on a winter sleigh stood for czarist indulgence (a Russian grand duke once paved an avenue in St. Petersburg with violets to welcome his Italian mistress); Alice in Wonderland, holding a flamingo, implied the topsy-turvy world of the Belle Époque. This approach to the past was extremely popular with the public; and Diana’s early exhibitions were so innovative, and their atmospheric lighting, music, perfumes, and backdrops so dazzling, that objections were muted. Both The Eighteenth Century Women (1981-82) and La Belle Époque (1982-83) brought in well over 500,000 people. In the fall of 1982, Diana began to work with George Plimpton on her memoir. She herself came up with the title, DV—the initials that she scrawled in green ink at the bottom of each page of magazine copy in her days as editor at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and later on the bottom of pages of exhibition details at the Costume Institute. D.V. became the version of Diana's life that persisted unchecked until Eleanor Dwight's 2002 biography, though Diana kept telling Plimpton that she was "terrible on facts"and that someone needed to check all the dates and times.

Plimpton later said that he really did not care whether any of it was true: the interesting thing was the way Mrs. Vreeland told it. And when it came the way Mrs. Vreeland told it, boring facts were not the point. "Did I tell you that Lindbergh flew over Brewster? It could have been someone else, but who cares--Fake it!" she said, "..There's only one thing in life, and that's the continual renewal of inspiration."

Cathleen McGuigan of Newsweek put it well when she said, “Don’t think of DV…as a book; it’s more like a lunch. A bit of soufflé, a glass of champagne, some green grapes—light, bubbly and slightly tart—all served up by an eccentric but inventive hostess.”

Yves Saint Laurent
Exhibition Catalog
Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years if Design (1983): Diana’s 1983 exhibition, Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design raised other eyebrows. This was the first time a living designer had been honored by the museum, and many people felt that this was nothing more than an elaborate public relations stunt that gave Saint Laurent an unfair competitive advantage, a feeling underscored by Diana’s rejection of chronology and anything close to a conventional retrospective. What she wanted to show in the exhibition was the inspired work of “the leader in all fashion today,” who had followed Chanel in understanding the new century and its changing way of life, and showed it how to dress. “This is an important point,” she wrote. “Both Chanel and Saint Laurent are equalizers. You and I could wear the same clothes; what we have on, anyone could wear.” To prepare, Diana went to Paris to see the Saint Laurent archives with her assistant Stephen Jamail. She examined the clothes from the different periods of Saint Laurent's career, which confirmed her notion that, in the words of Pierre Berge, M. Saint Laurent was a "genius in the are of fashions."

The Yves Saint Laurent show was unique because it honored a living couturier, one whom Diana had always admired. The brilliant designer from North Africa was first hired by Dior when he was only eighteen. Once he opened his own house in Paris, every collection he created was seen as dazzling.

At the Met she worked in the usual indirect way. She told Katell, "You know darling, Saint Laurent dresses the maids of France."Katell still wondered what she meant by the "maids of France." Finally Diana gave a hint: She's at the Louvre," and Katell guessed, "Joan of Arc! But what's Joan of Arc got to do with Saint Laurent,?" Because Saint Laurent put women in trousers. "Diana could not say, 'I think the woman who dresses as a modern woman in trousers embodies the idea of the free woman like Joan of Arc did.' It's a stretch, but it's an idea, and it's true that Joan of Arc in her trial was accused of being a sorcerer and a heretic because she wore men's attire. But Diana wasn't able to say that. She was able to say 'Go and find me the maid of France.' She was so visual that she could not tell you all her points because the verbal point has dissapeared. Only the image remans."

He was known as the “great adapter,” equally inspired by artists, writers and political movements. He put women into pants and used images from the street to inspire his designs.
The fact that Saint Laurent was alive presented problems for the exhibition designers. It meant that the show had to please him—when he came to New York, he objected to a fountain in the galleries, which was changed—and it had to withstand criticism for being an advertisement for the couture house. For the most part, however, it went off very well, because Saint Laurent realized what a privilege it was to be so honored and that everyone respected his genius.

Despite Diana’s great respect for her friend, it was ultimately her show. Now almost eighty, Diana spent weeks in Paris examining sketches and dresses with Yves and Pierre Berge. Berge remembered how she said, “’Pierre, it’s my exhibition, not yours. I mean, if you or Yves don’t like something, you tell me. If you’re right, I’m going to change it. If not, I will decide myself. It’s my exhibition.” I said, ‘Okay!’ And she was right.”

The exhibition displayed his great achievement. In true Vreeland style the clothes were not exhibited chronologically. The first room, which “vibrated with the same red beauty and intensity as the clothes,” housed his most famous creations. Another room showed his Matisse and Mondrian designs displayed flat on the walls. The third room showed just black clothes in all kinds of fabrics and designs. These was a green room with garden lattices, the “Chesnut Bois,” which showed his “day” clothes; and another room presenting dazzling embroidered and decorated jackets and, in the center, and circle of mannequins wearing clothes inspired by his African themes. There were 243 garments in all.


After 1984, she came to the museum less and less. Although she was still the special “consultant” by title, she depended on her staff to take over her many responsibilities…Several later shows (exhibition catalogs above), “Man and the Horse,” “Costumes of Royal India” and “Dance,” contained her ideas, but were organized when she was not well enough to come to the museum…On the basis of an unfair competitive advantage, many people’s unease towards the prominence given to Ralph Lauren’s sponsorship of the exhibition Man and Horse was comparable to the feelings felt for the Yves St. Laurent show…From 1985 Diana worked more from home and did everything more slowly. She continued to act as the public front of the exhibitions for the press, made contacts and opened doors, but Jamail, Le Bourhis, and Druesedow coordinated much of the installation while Diana animated and directed in the background…The ideas she floated for The Costumes of Royal India included using Andy Warhol’s elephant; talking to the British designer Zandra Rhodes, who had just come back from India; designing one of the backdrops as a page from an Indian miniature; and installing a water garden at the entrance: “Water, flowers, moonlight, to reflect moonlight would be wonderful…and good for the costumes.”…Diana was able to preside over one more exhibition, almost entirely from home. It was called Dance, and its theme was party clothes from the eighteenth century through to the sixties, the Twist, and the Peppermint Lounge...She managed a few more short press interviews, including one with Andre Leon Talley for British Vogue in December 1986: “Great dance dresses have a spirit of their own,” she told him. “They project allure into the wearer and into the evening. To dance is to experience a vitality and a lust for life that exists in each of us.”…Then Diana withdrew. It was a conscious decision. She finally called a halt to the grand performance, an end to being seen by others. Diana Vreeland died on August 2, 1989.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Style Maven: Diana Vreeland and the Met (Part 8)

Diana Vreeland
As I said in Part 1 of this Style Maven series featuring Diana Vreeland, my quest on #IMFblog has been to examine where trends and social behavior originated as it pertains to fashion and style. I aim to find what fashion was, and what we are turning it into day by day going forward. Diana Vreeland having served as Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief at a time when fashion became a powerful tool of expression for women helped her to convey to America a concept of beauty that was aspirational and liberating for all women to follow. Diana Vreeland’s aura is still riddled in the excitement associated with the fashion industry, and the way that we think about fashion is a product of the mind of this visionary figure. That is why this month and next month I choose to delve into her work at the Costume Institute which is another arena of fashion where she brought her inimitable influence setting a standard that we still aim to achieve not just for fashion, but in the field of costume curating. I want to examine what we can learn from DV about style and fashion through her curatorial work. I figure, in light of this year’s exhibition opening, doing so will give us an eye into the difficulty of producing an exhibition, and Vreeland’s thoughts on how to create drama in presentation. In my fashion, one who has style has a recognizable character, and those who understand the character they play in life have the power to produce a life’s story that teaches others what it means to live a fulfilling life. (Photos and text come from the following books: ‘The Empress of Fashion’ by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, ‘Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel’ by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, and ‘Diana Vreeland’ by Eleanor Dwight)

Diaghilev Exhibition Catalog
Diaghilev (1978): As she became more famous, criticism of Diana’s exhibitions became more vocal. As Koda and Martin wrote later, Diana’s version of history was history of “the grandest memory, a sweep through the elegances of the court of Versailles, a promenade through the grand silhouettes and extravagant textures of the Belle Époque, and the colorful Russia of Czars.” She liked to express the mood of an era through oblique, impressionistic details: a bouquet of violets on a winter sleigh stood for czarist indulgence (a Russian grand duke once paved an avenue in St. Petersburg with violets to welcome his Italian mistress); Alice in Wonderland, holding a flamingo, implied the topsy-turvy world of the Belle Époque. This approach to the past was extremely popular with the public; and Diana’s early exhibitions were so innovative, and their atmospheric lighting, music, perfumes, and backdrops so dazzling, that objections were muted. Three of Diana’s first five exhibitions – The World of Balenciaga; The Ten, Twenties, and Thirties; and Vanity Fair—all played directly to her connoisseurship. But after Vanity Fair the chorus of complaints grew louder.

Criticism by Nesta Macdonald in Dance Magazine of the Diaghilev exhibition that followed was typical of much to come. “Diaghilev created theatrical magic—illusion. Vogue created fashion magic—delusion. At the Metropolitan, the exhibits come from one side and the presentation from the other…the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum seemed to me to resemble a battlefield.” Macdonald believed that mixing up the costumes from different ballets and failing to offer any kind of chronology or context made Diaghilev’s impact difficult to understand; and she was infuriated by errors in an accompanying brochure that was too sketchy. Diana Vreeland, she wrote, revolutionized fashion magazines with an instinctive and exhausting perfectionism: “The sad this is that she seems to have thought that the showy nature of Diaghilev costumes could stand up to window-dressing technique.”

The Fashions of the
Hapsburg Era
ExhibitionCatalog
The Fashions of the Hapsburg Era: Austria-Hungry (1979): In the spring of 1979, Vreeland went to Vienna and Budapest for the research on "The Fashions of the Hapsburg Era; Austria-Hungary" exhibition. She wrote to Susan Train, "I am back since a few weeks from a trip to Vienna and Budapest, trying to straighten out clothes from behind the Iron Curtain. Russia was a cinch compared with that poor oppressed country Hungary!"

Some critics found Fashions at the Hapsburg Empire just as obscure. This was perhaps not surprising, since Diana explained to George Trow that what she liked best about the Hapsburgs was the gleaming brass turnout of their horses, a point of view only comprehensible to those who knew her very well indeed. “What Mrs. Vreeland likes is a source of simple energy so powerful that something rather excessive can be elaborated from what rises to the surface,” wrote Trow, manfully doing his best. “ ‘It’s important to get to the point,’ she said. ‘The point it the gleam. It’s what the nineteenth century knew. The gleam, the positiveness, the turnout.’” 

Uniforms of Austrian officers.

One of her many helpers, Bob Lavine, a costume designer for stage and screen who had worked on the Hollywood show, had gone to Vienna before her. His treasure hunt for possible exhibit items was as exciting as any exotic Vreeland photo shoot in past magazine days. He reported: “I have found some marvelous things here.” The kind and enthusiastic museum directors promised him robes of the Hapsburg court, satin and velvet gowns with eight-foot trains covered in gold, silver and jeweled embroidery, court uniforms and livery plus fans, gloves, exquisite shoes and a gold toilet service—“I think they would send the cathedral if we asked.” Other possible items were two magnificent “robes de style” handpainted with “Jugenstril” roses and morning glories by Gustav Klimt, and the museums would be willing to loan the Klimt paintings, which had never been out of Austria.

Left: A Hapsburg headpiece. Right: Austrian cream satin wedding dress for the Hapsburg show.


Research for “The Fashions of the Hapsburg Empire” in 1979-80 began three years earlier in 1976. “It was ,” said Bramson, “a great editing process, a sifting.” Bramson had the greatest respect for Diana’s creativity. “The ideas poured out of her,” she remembered.
“The Fashions of the Hapsburg Era: Austria-Hungary” opened to the public on December 11, 1979. It presented the mix of Western and oriental fashion influences on Austria and Hungary. The exhibit was elegant and opulent, and included military regalia of the time as well as extremely feminine women’s attire.

The Manchu Dragon
Exhibition Catalog
The Manchu Dragon (1980): In 1986 this line of criticism reached a fresh pitch in a book by Febora Silverman called "Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland and the New Aristocracy of Taste in a Reagan’s America". In her book Silverman made the arresting assertion that Diana’s exhibitions from "The Manchu Dragon" onward consciously and deliberately propagated the values of the Regan era. In Silverman’s view, Diana’s show reflected the Reaganite love of conspicuous consumption, rejection of so-called dependency culture, and a devil-take-the-hindmost attitude...In New York, argued Silverman, politics, commerce, and culture had converged on the Metropolitan Museum so that it was dominated by a clique of designer tycoons, retail millionaires, and grandees. The museum had allowed itself to be colonized by their values for its own ends and had become grossly commercial. Silverman objected to the manner in which Bloomingdale’s was allowed to cash in on The Manchu Dragon by producing replicas of Chinese art…

Deborah Silverman greatly overstated Diana’s influence. As the gossip columnist Liz Smith put it in the New York Daily News, “her vision of Diana Vreeland as a kind of evil capitalist dues ex machine presiding over some imaginary link between New York society and the White House occupants [was] absurd.” Jean Druesedow, associate curator at the Costume Institute from 1984, commented that Silverman underestimated the degree of spontaneity and improvisation. Had she consulted anyone at the Costume Institute, she would have discovered that The Manchu Dragon was semi-imported and put together at very short notice when another exhibition collapsed, one reason why its presentation and its relationship with Bloomingdale’s was not as rigorous as it might have been.

Moreover, Silverman made no attempt to look at Diana’s exhibitions in the context of the history of the Costume Institute. She thought it was suspicious that the shows influenced designers, failing to understand that this had always been part of its mandate. Had Silverman spoken to Thomas Hoving, she might have understood that he had hired Diana to deliver crowd-pleasing blockbusters, and she might have realized that many of the “vices” for which she was castigating Diana were more appropriately attributable to him. In spite of its weaknesses, however, Silverman’s book did light on some the problems with Diana’s approach to exhibiting costume. Her exhibitions were best when their themes allowed her to convey a sense of the Girl—and even the Boy—behind the clothes, and the dreams behind the designs. She was much less secure when dealing with other important issues that also affected the wearing of clothes, such as caste, military rank, religious symbolism, and the display of power, a weakness that showed in "The Manchu Dragon".

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Style Maven: Diana Vreeland and the Met (Part 7)

Diana Vreeland
As I said in Part 1 of this Style Maven series featuring Diana Vreeland, my quest on #IMFblog has been to examine where trends and social behavior originated as it pertains to fashion and style. I aim to find what fashion was, and what we are turning it into day by day going forward. Diana Vreeland having served as Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief at a time when fashion became a powerful tool of expression for women helped her to convey to America a concept of beauty that was aspirational and liberating for all women to follow. Diana Vreeland’s aura is still riddled in the excitement associated with the fashion industry, and the way that we think about fashion is a product of the mind of this visionary figure. That is why this month and next month I choose to delve into her work at the Costume Institute which is another arena of fashion where she brought her inimitable influence setting a standard that we still aim to achieve not just for fashion, but in the field of costume curating. I want to examine what we can learn from DV about style and fashion through her curatorial work. I figure, in light of this year’s exhibition opening, doing so will give us an eye into the difficulty of producing an exhibition, and Vreeland’s thoughts on how to create drama in presentation. In my fashion, one who has style has a recognizable character, and those who understand the character they play in life have the power to produce a life’s story that teaches others what it means to live a fulfilling life. (Photos and text come from the following books: ‘The Empress of Fashion’ by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, ‘Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel’ by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, and ‘Diana Vreeland’ by Eleanor Dwight)

Vanity Fair Exhibition Catalog
Vanity Fair Exhibition (1977): After the success of The Glory of Russian Costume, the acting director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, made a suggestion. Diana's flair and taste were generating huge interest. The next exhibition should be nothing less than her personal edit of the thirty thousand pieces in the Costume Institute's closets. Diana called this exhibition Vanity Fair. Its title was derived from the town of Vanity in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, where pilgrims stopped on their way to Rome to indulge in "pleasures, lusts and delights." To Diana, following Thackeray as well as Bunyan, Vanity Fair also meant "society, with it foibles, its weaknesses, its splendeur." It was no coincidence, as Harold Koda and Richard Martin have pointed out, that Diana appropriated the title of a then-defunct Condé Nast magazine. The theme of the exhibition "was what she believed a magazine should be, and it exemplified the profile of her magazines." Montebello warned in the accompanying publication that anyone looking for analysis or conventional costume history would be disappointed. "Why? Because we are not presenting an anthology of the collection but a personal choice, Diana Vreeland's choice." Though capricious, her selection was anything but random: "This is not so much an exhibition of clothes as of what Diana Vreeland can show us about clothes."
     Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis gave Diana all the help she could. She agreed to chair the Party of the Year committee for a second year, and she wrote an appreciation of Diana for the catalog. She also paid the "high priestess" a visit in her "temple" while she was assembling the exhibition. On the morning of this visit Diana had already collected together "follies and fripperies" from all over the world: tiny shoes for bound Chinese feet, bustles, parasols with intricately wrought handles, kimonos, men's waistcoats of rich brocade, towering hair combs fashionable in Buenos Aires for just one decade between 1830 and 1840, exquisitely tailored sporting jackets belonging to the Duke of Windsor, parachute-silk jumpsuits by Norma Komali, and lingerie that would later become the talking point of the show. These objects had not been chosen for their historic interest but to show what the human mind could conjure up in the interest of allure. "These incredibly beautiful things," said Diana. "You know, you have to demand them. You must wish for the most ravishing thing of beauty and quality because it's there to be had, even now. Keep the demand high. If there is no one who demands, then what the craftsman know will disappear." Koda and Martin saw Vanity Fair as "the truest reflection of Vreeland's commitment to the opulent expression of concepts; in it she allowed herself the freedom and flamboyance to select the best and most fantastic, as in fact she had always done." But in Vanity Fair Diana went further.

Diana had by now become so practiced in producing her theatrical exhibits that she could make magic using only the treasures of the Met's own collection, which she did in her own idiosyncratic way.

Mrs. Onassis observed that the objects Diana had selected were for the most part, "from a rarefied world of court and capital whose inhabitant had had the leisure and the money to indulge their fantasies and their vanities." But Diana countered this:

"Do not be too hard on vanity," Mrs. Vreeland cautioned. Vanity has given a discipline. 'Is that all you care about, clothes?' people as me - as if I'd never had children, never had a husband." She smiled. "I happen to think that vanity is a very important sort of thing."
She recalled Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit.
"Do you remember; at the end, those three characters are standing in a room? There is glaring light, no shadow, no place to ever be away." She turned her head and placed her hand to the shade her face.
"This is forever; this is hell. And there is no mirror and you lose your face, you lose your self-image. When that is gone, that is hell. Some may think it vain to look in a mirror, but I consider it an identification of self. 

More than half a million people went to Vanity Fair; which ran from 1977 to 1978. Diana's fame grew; and she was beside herself with delight when media magnate Jocelyn Stevens asked is he could name a racehorse after her. There were other honors, but the one that pleased her most was the Legion d'Honneur, awarded after The Tens, Twenties, and Thirties: Inventive Clothes 1909-1939. "We all have our dreams. We all want one thing. That little red ribbon...but to me, it was France, where I was born and brought up...The night I got it, it was enfin, enfin, enfin - that night could have been the end of my life because it was all I ever wanted."

Bit-O-Inspiro 38


"Versace fashion is sexy fun and always beautiful." - Elton John in 'Rock and Royalty: The ever-changing look of Versace's couture, as seen—and modeled—by the kings, queens, mega-models, and jokers of rock & roll'

Monday, June 17, 2013

Style Maven: Diana Vreeland and the Met (Part 6)

Diana Vreeland
As I said in Part 1 of this Style Maven series featuring Diana Vreeland, my quest on #IMFblog has been to examine where trends and social behavior originated as it pertains to fashion and style. I aim to find what fashion was, and what we are turning it into day by day going forward. Diana Vreeland having served as Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief at a time when fashion became a powerful tool of expression for women helped her to convey to America a concept of beauty that was aspirational and liberating for all women to follow. Diana Vreeland’s aura is still riddled in the excitement associated with the fashion industry, and the way that we think about fashion is a product of the mind of this visionary figure. That is why this month and next month I choose to delve into her work at the Costume Institute which is another arena of fashion where she brought her inimitable influence setting a standard that we still aim to achieve not just for fashion, but in the field of costume curating. I want to examine what we can learn from DV about style and fashion through her curatorial work. I figure, in light of this year’s exhibition opening, doing so will give us an eye into the difficulty of producing an exhibition, and Vreeland’s thoughts on how to create drama in presentation. In my fashion, one who has style has a recognizable character, and those who understand the character they play in life have the power to produce a life’s story that teaches others what it means to live a fulfilling life. (Photos and text come from the following books: ‘The Empress of Fashion’ by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, ‘Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel’ by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, and ‘Diana Vreeland’ by Eleanor Dwight)

The Glory of
Russian Costume
 Exhibition Catalog
The Glory of Russian Costume Exhibition (1977): The Glory of Russian Costume, which would break all box-office records , took place against the background of détente with the Soviet Union. It was one of a series of cultural exchanges arranged by Hoving and an “exuberantly corrupt” undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture on the Russian side. The exhibition could never have happened, wrote Hoving, without the involvement of Dian and the recently widowed Jacqueline Onassis, who had taken an editorial job at Viking Press. Diana, Fred Hughes, and Hoving went to Russia to discuss the show early in 1975. Diana told George Plimpton that her reaction to her new surroundings was love at first sight: "When I'd been in Russia for only forty-eight hours, I thought to myself: of all the countries I've known, if it were my country not to be able to come back to this one would be the most terrible." Her enthusiastic reaction paid dividends. A meeting was arranged with Russian officials far too early for Diana, at nin o'clock in the morning the day after they arrived. She told Hoving to talk to them about "museumy" details like shipping and promised to appear at eleven o'clock. Tension mounted as Hoving managed to extend the "museumy" conversation to a full two hours. But Diana did not let them down. "A minute before eleven the door to the conference room opened and in she swept, radiant in crimson and shiny black, her hair pulled back so tightly it looked like a painted surface, neck arched." Hoving knew she could see very little without her glasses, but realized she had taken them off for her grand entrance. "The Russians blinked first. 'Ah, Mrs. Vreeland, what do you think of the Soviet Union?' It was a kind of Last Judgement moment. Diana breathed deeply. 'Ah marvelous! God! marvelous!' she said. "I have been up walking since dawn, ab-so-lute-ly revelling in the vast beauty of this city. God, the women are so beautiful. I mean these complexions! The land is so vast. So...awe-in-spir-ing! So grand. The women are so gorgeous!'" 

She spent hours patiently sifting through hundreds of drawers, and thousands of costumes immaculately folded away in acid-free paper, impressing Hoving once again with her powers of concentration and her capacity for sheer hard work. "She would praise lavishly - and, in time, would criticize, very gently but with needle-like effect..."
While Hoving choked quietly in the corner at the idea of Diana on an early-morning walk, the Russians fell for her completely. After her peroration Diana was given everything she asked for. She was determined to find a peasant costume that she believed had been the inspiration for the Chanel suit during Chanel's affair with Grand Duke Dmitri. "The item was triumphanlty displayed for her. Diana had been right. There was the garnment Chanel had clearly adapted for 'her' classic design," said Hoving."...By the time Diana Vreeland left the Soviet Union, she had become legends there, too."

Vreeland was enraptured by Russia, a reaction that she used to flatter the Russians and expressed repeatedly upon her return home. "Russia is a land of splendor!" she wrote late in an article for Vogue. "It has a high - enormous sky - it has beautiful houses - it is immaculately clean. They are terribly strong - if you want one word that describes the Russian people, it's strength. They can take their winters and they can take their history - and they have survived it all.:.."
The spirit of detente was rather less in eveidence when the costumes finally arrived in New York, however, accompained by several KGB agents and three Russian curators...If Diana "butted heads" with Stella Blum, she locked horns with her Russian counterparts...In the event the nemused Russian curators gave way, though not without great misgivings, shared by Stella Blum.

The red velvet sleigh with the
green velvet gold-embroidered  robe.
Diana was not greatly interested in the vernacular peasant clothes provided by the Russians...Ironically it was the embroidery, the ribbons, the vivid reds, the pearl detail, and the layering of these clothes that had the greatest impact on American designers, influencing the New York collections a short time later. For this exhibition Diana persuaded the house of Chanel to revive an old perfume, Cuir de Russie (Russian Leather), and went to work on a tape of Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky. What the Russians made of Diana's decision to throw furs around to give the idea of savagery not recorded. But once again the exhibition was a blockbuster success, exceeding even the Hollywood show in terms of numbers, And a truce was finally achieved with the Russians curators once the exhibition opened.

The exhibition would display the dress of three classes of Russian society - the peasants; the so-called "rich-peasants," who owned their land and were craftsmen and merchants; and the aristocracy and monarchy during the two centuries before the Revolution. 
The committee for the Party of the Year that accompanied the Russian exhibition was led by Pat (Mrs. William) Buckley and included a shifting cast of social luminaries such as Leonore Annenberg, Lee Radziwill, and Gianni Agnelli. Once Jacqueline Onassis agreed to become president of the committee, the party swelled again in size and social importance: "the biggest one of these things the museum has ever had," according to Warhol, who went with Halston's party in a fleet of limousines. 

Friday, June 14, 2013

Style Watch: Punk: Chaos to Couture

As I study Diana Vreeland, and her contributions to the Metropolitian Museum of Art's Costume Institute, I am constantly consumed with the thought of what it would have been like to have experienced the spectacles she created when in the context of what came before, there were no other exhibitions quite as grandiose as hers. In my fashion, studying history in general is like reading a play. Each era, each decade, each social movement has a story, with men and women as the players (some more dramatic than others), and fashion is what distinguishes on story from the next. Even though historical events are based on factual occurrences in time, our imagination of what it would have been like to have been around then, inspires how we will live today. Fashion IS theater because everyday you are living on this planet is your chance to create your own historical story for future generations to take inspiration from. Would you be part of a story that is worthy of a Met Gala presentation? I think its fascinating to think that we are creating history as we are living, and clothes speak volumes about your role in the play of life. 


With that being said, Vogue has taken a look into the Mets' most recent exhibition, 'Punk: Chaos to Couture', and what is the concept behind the presentation the exhibition. Their debut video series, Voguepedia, looked in depth at how the exhibition and gala was constructed.   Andrew Bolton, Curator of the exhibition, explains above the four manifestations of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) aesthetic explored in the exhibition, and how designers have incorporated the punk aesthetic in their designs throughout the years: 

There is the use of hardware (use of studs, safety pins, zippers) as a symbol of cruelty, anarchy, and chaos. Bricolage, which is how punks would co-op everyday objects, and incorporate them into their clothes as a critique of consumer society, showing how designers today continue to recycle everyday objects and give them new meaning. The use of graffiti is explored and how punks would use it as a vehicle for propaganda to critique on economic stagnation and poverty, using words and statements on clothes to explore political positions. The last manifestation is the concept of destroy, where deconstructionism, ripping and tearing of clothes, was an aesthetic of poverty, and how it has been elevated through the years into high fashion designs.  


Here, highly acclaimed make-up artist, Pat McGrath explains how punk essentially means rebellion and that make-up was used as a sort of war paint. Pat McGrath is the most influential make-up artist in fashion, and was in charge of creating 50 unique punk looks for the ushers if the Met Gala. She describes how she "slipped" into the industry, and what were inspirations for the looks of the evening. 


Guido Palau is one of the most renowned hair stylist in the world and was responsible for creating head treatments for the exhibition. Guido describes punks in the 70s as "the noble dandies of another era". For him moving from Barmouth, England to London, and buying his first pair of bondage trousers, was a time when he realized that the Punks in the city really represented everything that fashion tries to convey to people. He realizes how every international designer has taken a punk aesthetic and used it. 

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Style Maven: Diana Vreeland and the Met (Part 5)

As I said in Part 1 of this Style Maven series featuring Diana Vreeland, my quest on #IMFblog has been to examine where trends and social behavior originated as it pertains to fashion and style. I aim to find what fashion was, and what we are turning it into day by day going forward. Diana Vreeland having served as Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief at a time when fashion became a powerful tool of expression for women helped her to convey to America a concept of beauty that was aspirational and liberating for all women to follow. Diana Vreeland’s aura is still riddled in the excitement associated with the fashion industry, and the way that we think about fashion is a product of the mind of this visionary figure. That is why this month and next month I choose to delve into her work at the Costume Institute which is another arena of fashion where she brought her inimitable influence setting a standard that we still aim to achieve not just for fashion, but in the field of costume curating. I want to examine what we can learn from DV about style and fashion through her curatorial work. I figure, in light of this year’s exhibition opening, doing so will give us an eye into the difficulty of producing an exhibition, and Vreeland’s thoughts on how to create drama in presentation. In my fashion, one who has style has a recognizable character, and those who understand the character they play in life have the power to produce a life’s story that teaches others what it means to live a fulfilling life. (Photos and text come from the following books: ‘The Empress of Fashion’ by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, ‘Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel’ by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, and ‘Diana Vreeland’ by Eleanor Dwight)

American Women of Style Exhibition (1976): After the Hollywood exhibition Diana returned to another subject close to her heart. American Women of Style, which coincided with the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976, was an exhibition of the great stylists who had animated and created fashion before the Second World War. André Leon Talley thought that it was her masterwork, “a true expression of her own personal tastes.” He particularly liked the fact that she included Josephine Baker in the show. “This was an important moment; no African-American woman had ever, until then, been placed in the same stylistic league as say, Isodora Duncan.” As well as Duncan and Baker, the women in the exhibition included Rita Lydig, Elsie de Wolfe, Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, and Millicent Rogers. 

Andre Leon Talley helped to get backing from Ebony Magazine to help finance the borrowing of Josephine Baker's costumes, the grandiose Folies-Bergere costumes with their butterfly wings studded with brilliants and trimmed with white plumes, headdresses of ostrich feathers, and outfits in vibrant pink, coral, turquoise, purple and orange. 

They all “created themselves,” said Diana. In one way or another, all the women included had inspired her. They met, said Stella Blum, “on the common ground of excellence,” and all of them “had an inordinate aesthetic sensitivity—a strong creative drive that looked for a perfect expression for their highly charged motivations.” American Women of Style was another box-office success, attracting numbers comparable to The Tens, Twenties, and Thirties.

Vreeland's ten women were not all show; they were also models of strength. Almost all were involved in women's suffrage movements, and although Diana Vreeland resembled some more than others, she undoubtedly saw a bit of herself in each one - the performer, trendsetter, the aristocrat, the carefree socialite, the art patron, and finally the foremost pillar of style.