DIANA VREELAND: THE EYE HAS TO TRAVEL
"Style is everything. It helps you get up in the morning ... go downstairs. It's a way of life. Without it, you are nobody "
She was born in Paris in the last era of absolute luxury, the Belle Epoque, she had a privileged childhood, she grew up surrounded by art, ballet was always her great passion but she had a very peculiar mother who tormented her for her lack of beauty. Far from undermining her confidence, it became her best asset, pushing her to forge a unique and unrepeatable character. She lived a beautiful love story; She tells that she fell in love at first sight with a handsome and elegant boy, Mr. Vreeland, who made her feel like the most wonderful woman in the world no matter what her mother thought.
They go on to live in London In the delirious 30s, but it was in Paris where she learned all about fashion, a friend of Coco Chanel started a small lingerie business with very special clients like Wallis Simpson.
They left Europe to settle in New York and one night while she was dancing dressed in a wonderful Chanel she got an offer to to start working for Harper's Bazaar as Fashion Editor and the rest was history ...
She begins to write the iconic column WHY DON'T YOU? In which she gave advice and proposed the most eccentric ideas to modern women ... why not paint a map of the world in your children's room so that they do not grow up with a provincial point of view?
Diana stopped writing it when the war broke out and started to invent herself from zero a new profession, filling with creativity and revolutionizing the magazine, inadvertently helping to change the role of women, photographed the first bikini, popularized blue jeans. With her, fashion stopped being boring to become fantasy and dream.
Open-minded and very curious Vreeland was always at the forefront, she managed to connect a fashion magazine with art, music and cinema . This is how she transformed Harpers Bazaar (1936-1962), and later Vogue (1962-1971) to make them what they are today.
She had an exquisite taste for the extraordinary and the extreme, her reports were unique, her expensive productions were famous, she traveled for weeks with the entire team to the most remote places pursuing the impossible, thus managing to add the dream to the photo, telling us a story. story that transports us to another place without having to leave home.
She was baptized as the Emperor of Fashion, loved and feared at the same time for her strong and extravagant character. She endorsed and covered powerful names in the industry such as Missoni, Manolo Blahnik, Richard Avedon, Twiggy, she had the ability to see things in people that they didn't even know they had.
She drove a whole generation of women " unconventionally beautiful "like Bárbara Streisand, Angélica Houston, Cher ... women with unusual features or those far from the canons, who she encouraged to enhance these features instead of hiding them, to make them their hallmark.
“I believe in dreams, we live through them and our imagination.”
After leaving Vogue, she was hired by the New York MET (1973-1989) to mount, organize and publicize its extraordinary costume exhibitions, at 70 she revolutionized the museum, bringing it closer to ordinary people and not only to connoisseurs.
“ There is only an ideal life and that is the life you know you want and the one you create yourself "
I would have loved to meet Diana Vreeland to tell her how much I admire her and to be able to give her a piece from my collection it would undoubtedly be the Rigid Choker with Hoops Pendant .
This jewel represents the most feminine essence and symbolizes the powerful and energetic feminine universe. As it has no beginning or end, neither above nor below, the circle symbolizes equality, eternity, perfection ... Thank you Diana for inspiring me so much, for making me daydream every time I see any of your works, my favorite, it is difficult to choose, is the report in Japan with Veruscka.
You cannot miss the documentary Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel that narrates her life and her legacy, a fascinating journey and inspiring of the woman who changed the history of fashion.
