Diana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years
If you are looking for a comprehensive biography of this legendary fashion icon’s personality and private thoughts, this is not the book you are seeking. Diana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years is a serious examination of what made this genius tick on a day to day basis when it came to her work, and it focuses on a particular span of time during her tenure at Vogue. And when it comes to her Vogue years, to say that the reader gets a behind the scenes look at the machinations and mechanics of how Mrs. Vreeland steered that ship is an understatement.
“When fashion turns over it brings in little tiny creaks and cracks. That is the fascination and that is where you have to watch every step.”
The Diana Vreeland Memos is clearly a more revelatory reading as the subject is so laser focused on the day to day life for Ms. Vreeland and her editors. Having read quite a few books about La Vreeland, it is safe to say that this volume provides an exceptionally personal and single-minded view that focuses on her incredibly and all-consuming views of fashion and contemporary culture.
“A great fault is the length of the girl’s neck, position of the collar, and more than anything the thickness of the underarm in tailored clothes”
Clearly, The Memos is not a book for those who only have a fleeting interest in fashion or the inner workings of a highly successful fashion magazine. The reader should be heavily steeped in the history of fashion as well as possessing a worshipful level of admiration for Ms. Vreeland.
“Do by all means use real jewels on these clothes. Luxury is a point of view. It is not what you pay for them but what you make of yourself.”
Diana Vreeland is one of those once in a lifetime, larger than life, almost surreal personalities who come along only once in a generation. If you have read any books about this dynamo, you know she spoke in words that reflected a rigid set of personal codes and was very unconventional in her approach. There was absolutely nothing that escaped her eagle eye when she was at Vogue, where she gave her readers her vision of fashion as she saw it and did not bend to any sort of popular notion of beauty and fashion. To paraphrase, Ms. Vreeland gave them what they never knew they wanted or needed.
“To bewitch is to me always slightly artificial as it is always put on—whereas witchery is a form of naturalness that some people can’t help, and the world judges that they don’t create it.”
The Diana Vreeland Memos exposes the reader to Ms. Vreeland’s micromanaging style at Vogue as well as her irreverence, her humor, her visionary ideas, her quirks, her codes, her politesse, and most of all her unique talents.
If you love Diana Vreeland and can’t get enough, this is surely a book for you. If you seek another side of Ms. Vreeland that is only alluded to in most other books dealing with her life, this is a book for you. If you are looking for another life story of the fashion icon, I suggest you move on. Basically, these are her words, her way, her life!
“Any young woman who started to read Vogue during the Vreeland years wanted to digest every issue and find something that titillated her. Every new issue would be a learning process; every new article could enhance her life and give her a sense of fantasy, or it could make her look with fresh eyes at the clothes in her closet.”
—Polly Mellen