Dear Rowley,
I’m with Bonnie Tyler. We’re all holding out for a hero and popular culture simply isn’t coming up with the goods. My heart sank when ITV advertised a new fly-on-the-wall doc Cheryl: Access All Areas following Miss Cole on ‘the journey’ towards her next solo stadium tour. Forgive me, but is there an area of Cheryl’s career (or anything else for that matter) that we haven’t had access to? Think what Cheryl’s been through in preparation for her tour: fake tanning, teeth whitening, lip-synching lessons and Zumba classes. I don’t know how she does it…
I’ve just watched a superb documentary about one of my heroes the late, great former US Vogue editor Diana Vreeland who quite simply made fashion history. The Eye Has To Travel is up there with Ultrasuede (the Halston Story) and Unzipped (the Isaac Mizrahi documentary) as one of the most intelligent, entertaining and exuberant windows on the soul of the fashion industry. Mrs Vreeland was a visionary. She understood that fashion had to inform, entertain and – in her own words – ‘give ‘em what they never knew they wanted’. It was she who unleashed Bailey and Shrimpton on America in the 60s and was the first to invite celebrities such as Streisand, Cher and Marisa Berenson to model.
Mrs Vreeland was a sartorial Oracle of Delphi. I remember being on a shoot with legendary model/Bond girl Tania Mallett who was one of Mrs Vreeland’s protegees. She recalled going to the Vogue offices for a casting and Mrs V had posted one of her countless PAs at the door of her office with a pot of rouge. Mrs Vreeland adored rouge and would, like a geisha, rouge her cheekbones and ears. Tania Mallett being an aristocratic London girl refused to be rouged. She walked into Mrs V’s office bold as brass and was greeted with Mrs Vreeland declaring ’that’s the look dear, pale and interesting’.
Mrs Vreeland was portrayed in the film Funny Face by Kay Thompson who sang the immortal Think Pink. YouTube it darling. Both ladies were fearless. I had the privilege to interview Kay Thompson in the winter of her life. Like Vreeland, she had something of China’s Dragon Empress about her. The Eye Has To Travel is inspiring not least for Mrs V’s aphorisms. My favourite line in the entire documentary is not about fashion. Though I adore ‘pink is the navy blue of India’, I couldn’t agree with Mrs V’s conviction that ‘water is nature’s tranquilizer’. She said heaven is surfing between sea and sky and also thought rollerskating was the rage.
I consider Mrs V heroic because she lived in the moment. Her youth was spent in Paris and New York during the jazz age. She found the same frenetic, free-spirited modernism in the 60s and made the pages of Vogue arguably the most creative fashion editorial in 20th century history. We will not see her like again; particularly now editors are under the advertising cosh and fashion brands stifle the creativity of stylists with the honourable exception of US Vogue’s Grace Coddington. I do think present US Vogue editor Anna Wintour is heroic in her strength and resolution to never complain and never explain.
Mrs V was brought down by the bean counters. She rose phoenix-like with the help of New York social lions such as Nan Kempner and Jackie O who proposed and funded her role as artistic director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Watching Mrs V curate in The Eye Has To Travel is inspiring. She knew her history but understood that history has to be cut like a lethal cocktail with showbusiness and exaggeration. When one of her protegees copied a Rococo wig for her 18th century exhibition she was disappointed. When he sculpted the towering wig and topped it with ostrich plumes that touched the ceiling she said ‘NOW she’s ready for the guillotine’.
I was entranced by The Eye Has To Travel. Mrs Vreeland was fearless and crucially had the sense of humour and joie de vivre that I suspect Anna Wintour cannot channel. Mrs V’s passion was fashion not finance. I know how she feels. Tonight is the private view for the Fashion and Textiles Museum’s retrospective of royal couturiers Sir Norman Hartnell and Sir Hardy Amies. Granted it is in Bermondsey but I think it worth shrugging on the mink-collared overcoat and making the effort. I am a huge fan of British couture of the 40s, 50s and 60s and send you two snaps of Norman Hartnell masterpieces from the golden age to prove that anything Dior could do we could do as well if not better.
Seeing Mrs Vreeland working on film at the Metropolitan Museum reminded me of curating The London Cut. There is something magical about dressing and placing mannequins in a suitably glamorous space. What I appreciated about Mrs V was that she made sure her mannequins were posed as if in motion. It is all about the composition and the animation of inanimate objects. I long to curate another exhibition and may have the opportunity to with a Henry Poole & Co retrospective at the Bowes Museum next year.
At the risk of sounding like the Grinch, aren’t you faintly frustrated that all advertising on British television is geared towards Christmas? I don’t even think about all that fol-de-rol until the 1st of December. I suspect the advertisers are banking on recession-hit Britain thinking ‘to hell with it’ and spending money we don’t have on tinsel, turkey and buckets of discount booze. I won’t rule it out but spare us the mawkish sentiment for at least a couple more weeks.
Until next time…