CULTURE WATCH

Diana Vreeland—an icon in the fashion and publishing industries—has been celebrated quite a lot in 2012. A documentary, “Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel,” was released this Fall to a general audience after premiering in 2011 at the Venice Film Festival, as well as book of the same name and an exhibition in Venice at the Palazzo Fortuny in March. But, “Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland,” by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart is the first full-length biography of Diana Vreeland. In this book, 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.

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.

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 editor Carmel 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. 

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.