May 25, 2011 |
FROM THE VOLT (WINTER 2010)
Diana Vreeland and Max Blagg
Our magnificent Max has had some heavenly experiences in his time, but imagine his surprise when the deceased grande dame of the fashion world repeatedly popped out of the ether last month and presented herself to him for a good pinging.
1 SEPTEMBER 2010
MAX BLAGG 04:32 – Good morning, Mrs Vreeland. Not to flatter you, but you do somehow epitomise the beauty and the essential absurdity of fashion, the faux fakery of it all. The first thing about you, apart from that helmet of dyed hair that looks like it could withstand the blow of an axe, is your nose. It’s beyond Roman – so imperial one can imagine you giving the thumbs down to Russell Crowe at the Coliseum. Your schnozz is simply gorgeous, it recalls Dame Edith Sitwell’s, or that Spanish girl in the Almodovar films, Rossy de Palma…
DIANA VREELAND 04:34 – You know, you seem a mite too vulgar to talk to me, young man.
MAX BLAGG 04:35 – But you’re dead, my dear, so I can say whatever I like to you.
DIANA VREELAND 04:37 – Ah yes, that’s true. Well, my mother told me at a very early age that I was ugly and troublesome, while my older sister was beautiful and perfect, and I suppose that might have had some effect, given me a slightly competitive edge, and indeed made me play up my faults as she perceived them – the nose, the voice.
MAX BLAGG 04:39 – I’m always stunned at how cruel parents can be. Do you know that Philip Larkin poem?
DIANA VREELAND 04:42 – Yes, everybody knows that one with the swear word, bit too obvious for me. And besides, I did have kids myself, two wonderful boys, who will doubtless kick your arse if you treat me poorly.
MAX BLAGG 04:43 – Fair enough. So, let’s talk about you… What was the source of your incredible energy?
DIANA VREELAND 04:45 – The most important thing in life is the continual renewal of inspiration. That’s what kept me going, always finding something new and magical, shaking up the bourgeoisie.
MAX BLAGG 04:47 – Society and culture have changed quite a bit since your heyday. Your description, in your book DV, of walking into the restaurant 21 with Clark Gable is quite thrilling. When he says to you, “Don’t look left, don’t look right, just keep walkin’. This place is gonna blow”, and it does – that whole sophisticated crowd is totally swooning at the presence of a real movie star.
DIANA VREELAND 04:49 – Fame is so different now. People are famous simply because they have appeared on television, not for any kind of real talent except a talent for self-promotion. Now get some sleep…
…2 SEPTEMBER 2010
MAX BLAGG 23:39 – So, who would you walk into 21 with today?
DIANA VREELAND 23:40 – I adore Tilda Swinton, a most influential and attractive person, she is highly intelligent, has a lover younger than herself, is a good mother and she has incredible style. I first noticed her in Derek Jarman’s film Edward II, when she appeared in modern dress, with that headscarf and those Persol sunglasses. My God, so regal, I quite believed she was the Queen of England. Discreet but dominant.
MAX BLAGG 23:43 – Yes, she was my fantasy of an English country gentlewoman from the early 1960s… silk headscarf and tweeds and muddy wellingtons… and she still has that aura, in those Ryan McGinley photographs for Pringle. But enough about me. A lot of the material in your memoir is outright fiction, no?”
DIANA VREELAND 23:45 – Well, they are stories – one could call it embellished memoir – and even so, it’s not so fabricated as some of the memoirs appearing these days. Wasn’t there one recently about the girl who said she was black? And that little tranny boy who turned out to be a girl, JT LeRoy – he fooled a lot of people. I would have put him in the magazine, but of course he didn’t really exist.
MAX BLAGG 23:47 – In the 1980s a rather notorious New York drag artist, John Edward Heys, portrayed you onstage, long before this lady Mary Louise Wilson did the off-Broadway version of your book. He had an even larger nose than yours. But you, apparently, did not approve, even though his interpretation has become legendary.
DIANA VREELAND 23:48 – Oh my God, that appalling druggy queer chap with the jug-handle ears, the one who was photographed by Hujar?
MAX BLAGG 23:50 – The same. He lives in Berlin now. Oddly enough, in the movie The Devil Wears Prada, there is a photo, supposedly of you, which is actually Heys, so somebody remembers his work. Did you see that film, by the way?
DIANA VREELAND 23:51 – Yes we got it from Netflix. Meryl was too sweet for that part, she didn’t have the mean streak that certain real fashion people have, that viciousness they direct toward anyone who doesn’t fit their rarefied view of the world, manicured hands turned upward as they hiss, “Oh she’s such a nightmare!” about some rival, as if they weren’t cut from the very same bolt of cashmere. Fashion people, for the most part, really are so shallow and vicious and utterly vacuous. They do know how to live, though, always the best in clothing and travel and hotel accommodation.
MAX BLAGG 23:55 – Sounds familiar.
DIANA VREELAND 23:56 – Naturally, I was exactly like that myself. Impossible, demanding, demanding the impossible… But the budgets we had! Unlimited funds for anything we wanted to do. Of course, Alex Liberman spent so much of Condé Nast’s money, simply to propitiate the gods of art, because he felt guilty about prostituting himself.
MAX BLAGG 23:58 – Really. The gap between art and commerce back then seems so much more clearly defined than it is today.
DIANA VREELAND 23:59 – Indeed. To think that Vuitton would use a Japanese cartoonist to decorate their bags is so beyond…
3 SEPTEMBER 2010
MAX BLAGG 00:01 – You ruled a wacky kingdom; your courtiers lived in a constant state of fear and worship. You even made all the Voguettes wear bells at one point, like cats. And yet there was a sort of spontaneous poetry in many of your utterances. Were these just insane random ideas triggered by coffee or something stronger?
DIANA VREELAND 00:03 – I just had thoughts and I read books and looked at lots of art and it often gave me outlandish ideas that I was actually able to execute, using the most fabulous talent available. Imagine that.
MAX BLAGG 00:06 – The mind reels at such extravagances. The money you spent on sending Norman Parkinson to Tahiti with 200lb of Dynel hair, with orders to embroider the most beautiful white horse he could find there. And then there were no white horses on the island. But, as Parkinson said, if an idea didn’t work out, there were no post mortems. It must have been heaven to work for you.
DIANA VREELAND 00:07 – And hell, on occasion.
MAX BLAGG 00:08 – And you did your own version of Photoshop, cutting up the models like Hans Bellmer dolls. Using one girl’s legs on another girl’s body and so on. I’m surprised the photographers didn’t complain.
DIANA VREELAND 00:10 – Oh, they never complained. We gave them so much space and paid them so much money.
MAX BLAGG 00:11 – You arrived at Vogue at the beginning of the 1960s, when the ‘youthquake’ was getting underway. Wasn’t that one of your turns of phrase?
DIANA VREELAND 00:12 – Indeed. Yes, the 1960s were wonderful, everyone had a lot of fun, stayed up late. I stopped going to Mrs Astor’s for dinner and went to Halston’s instead.
MAX BLAGG 00:15 – You’re often quoted as saying you wanted to give your readers what they never knew they wanted, and of propagating “the myth of the next reality”. But did that reality ever come to pass?
DIANA VREELAND 00:17 – There was no reality involved, we catered to people’s fantasies. Bread and circuses! It’s the same principle as the spectacular runway shows that designers put on today, at least those who still have money. Nobody actually wears the clothes you see on the runway – the show’s the thing, even if it doesn’t show a thing.
MAX BLAGG 00:19 – Your critics say you refused to allow Vogue to change with the times. While women were entering the workplace in huge numbers, you were still doing 14 pages of Penelope Tree riding elephants in the Himalayas.
DIANA VREELAND 00:20 – Yes, everyday life had no interest for me. Much too common.
MAX BLAGG 00:21 – When you left the magazine, all your acolytes were weeping. Your blood red office was repainted, the leopard-print rug removed. As someone observed, “All of a sudden, the walls were beige, the rug was beige. Vogue was beige.”
DIANA VREELAND 00:22 – Well, I found out it was Liberman as much as the money men who wanted me out. He just didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger. It did give me a rather good quote about Russians, though. Perhaps you’ve heard it?
MAX BLAGG 00:23 – Yes, You said, “I’ve known White Russians, and I’ve drunk black russians, but until now I’ve never known a Yellow Russian.”
DIANA VREELAND 00:24 – Now, that bit about the black russians is new to me… Let’s drink to that.
