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A Life of Diana Vreeland
Harper
December 2012
On Sale: December 4, 2012
432 pages
ISBN: 0061691747
EAN: 9780061691744
Kindle: B008B1BMBG
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
Born into a family of privilege, Diana Dalziel Vreeland
grew up amid the fashionable of New York's Upper East Side.
With a famously alluring mother and a classically beautiful
sister, young Diana often felt isolated and unloved. But she
was saved from her unhappy childhood by her audacious
imagination as well as the grit and determination that would
shape her extraordinary life. Talent-spotted by
legendary editor Carmel Snow in 1936, Diana joined
Harper's Bazaar as a fashion editor, where her
singular point of view and signature style quickly made her
a major creative force in American fashion. Under her
influence, American designers became chic during World War
II, and with her pizzazz she inspired a raft of fashion
talent on both sides of the Atlantic. Passed over as
successor to Snow, Diana did the unthinkable and accepted
the title of editor-in-chief of Bazaar's archrival,
Vogue. In Diana's Vogue, women were not
only offered shockingly short skirts and silver hipster
pants: even more radically, they were encouraged to embrace
the free spirit of the sixties, to resist fashion orders
from on high, and to use their own imaginations in
re-creating themselves. When Women's Wear Daily
asked Diana, "What is the function of a fashion magazine?"
she replied, "To instruct when possible, to delight, to give
pleasure, to bring to the reader what interests her.
Everybody makes an appearance every day." In 1971
Diana was fired from Vogue. She reluctantly
accepted a new position for herself at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art as Special Consultant to the Costume
Institute, only to reveal a new dimension to her brilliance.
Her first show, on the work of designer Cristobal
Balenciaga, drew more than 150,000 people to the museum, and
the show that followed smashed all the record books. The
Metropolitan was stunned, and today's blockbuster exhibition
was born. In this first full-length biography of Diana
Vreeland, Amanda Mackenzie Stuart portrays a visionary: a
fearless innovator who inspired designers, models,
photographers, and artists. Vreeland reinvented the
way we think about style and where we go to find it. As an
editor, curator, and wit, Diana Vreeland made a lasting mark
and remains an icon for generations of fashion lovers.
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