Volume 31, Number 11 · June 28, 1984
Richesse d'embarras
By Jonathan Lieberson
D. V.
by Diana Vreeland, edited by George Plimpton, by Christopher Hemphill
Knopf, 196 pp., $15.95
Diana Vreeland, once the editor of Harper's Bazaar and then of Vogue, and now a curator at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a familiar figure to readers of fashion magazines: a spidery woman with the face of an American Indian chief, usually snapped by a photographer as she is gesticulating theatrically with a long index finger, its nail covered in blood-red polish. In recent years, because of her shrewdly maintained reputation and, more importantly, because of her transformation of the Costume Institute into a highly successful business enterprise through its annual exhibitions, she has been promoted by the press into an all-purpose doyenne of style who has outlived all rivals and who now imperiously renders opinions on contemporary life and manners. She has now written her second book—the first was a commentary on her favorite photographs called Allure. It purports to be her autobiography, but it is rather less than that and more like an oriental pillow book, a series of haiku glimpses into the highly circumscribed world of fashion she has belonged to all her life. Depending on your point of view, it is likely to strike you as an embarras de richesses or vice versa.
Review, 2923 words
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