From November 17, 2002 New York TImes Sunday Magazine:

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP

Why don’t you . . . give all your ideas away to other people, so that you’ll fill up again with new ones? Diana Vreeland, the great fashion editor, understood that this is how creative minds work. It’s fatal to be a hoarder. When you have an idea, get it out there. Pretend you’re Josephine Baker, tossing fruit into the audience. Hit someone on the head with a pineapple. Circulate the energy. Distribute the wealth. Rinse your child’s hair with dead Champagne.

    This is a gnostic way of thinking. Now relax. It’s Sunday. You won’t mind a bit of Gnosticism with your Styles. Glamour and knowledge both share the same root in gnosis (secret learning), so why shouldn’t Gnosticism be fashion’s true faith?

    The gnostics were a religious order, circa the year 0, but in modern times it makes better sense to view them as a personality type. Vreeland was one of them.

    “If you do not bring bring forth what is within you,” the gnostics believed, “what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” And I suspect Vreeland truly believed that if she had an idea and didn’t get it out there, it would kill her. Killer-diller. If she couldn’t come out with observations like “pink is the navy blue of India,” she would die.

    Thanks in part to those observations, she hasn’t. Or, rather, the point of view defined by Vreeland’s insights remains indispensable. It is the viewpoint of fearlessness, the stance of “Why not?” And if Vreeland’s legend looms larger today than it did during her lifetime, that may be because this particular stance has become harder to sustain.

    Vreeland is the subject of a new biography by Eleanor Dwight, and it is the first to explore the personality behind the histrionic public persona. The book rides a wave of printed material by and about Vreeland that did not begin until years after her retirement from Vogue. “Allure,” a coffee-table book, written with Christopher Hemphill, of black and white photographs punctuated ith Vreeland’s taped recollections of them, was published in 1980 and has been reissued this year.

    The first book was followed in 1984 by the editor’s memoir, “DV.” Two additional volumes of Vreeland’s musings have appeared in the last year: “Why Don’t You?” a collection of her columns for Harper’s Bazaar, and “Vreeland Memos,” an issue of the fashion periodical Visionaire.

       Why don’t you . . . buy Dwight’s biography and read it, so that I don’t
have to try your patience with one of those super-compressed summaries
that nobody reads anyhow? “Elegance is refusal,” Vreeland once pronounced.
I don’t know whether this is a gnostic idea precisely. But it appears to
be an essential antidote to excessive gnostic fecundity. If what you have
to bring forth is tedious, just leave it alone.

    Vogue
in the 1960’s was as much the creature of its time as it was the creation
of an editor. At the beginning of the decade, fashion magazines reflected
a relatively rarefied realm of elegance, style and social poise. Ten years
later, they had become a mass medium. Vreeland’s Vogue occupied the pivotal
place in this transformation. Herself a latter-day Edwardian Woman of Style,
she hit her manic professional stride in the postwar years, when people
were just beginning to grasp the full extent of changes brought about by
mass communications.

    These
circumstances are unrepeatable. That’s why it is pointless to complain
that no magazine quite like Vreeland’s exists today. No world like hers
exists today. When she started out, celebrity was tantamount to notoriety.
Now, the news media are glamorous in their own right. Today, everybody
knows who Diana Vreeland was. In her own time, she communicated to audiences
who never gave much thought to who an editor was.

    I know,
because I was part of it. When I started reading Vogue in my early teenage
years, I had little interest in fashion and knew even less about it. Rather,
like The New Yorker, and Ada Louise Huxtable’s architecture columns, Vogue
represented what I recognized as an urban point of view. I found my suburban
life confining. It was a relief to project myself into the escapist fantasies
offered by those texts. I wouldn’t know of the existence of Diana Vreeland
or William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, until many years later.
Now the situation has changed. We’re all regaled by the antics of editors
without magazines.

    Vreeland,
I later read in a biography of Alexander Lieberman by Calvin Tomkins and
Dodie Kazanjian, once described Vogue as “the myth of the next reality.”
The myth was accurate in my case. The next reality was relatively exempt
from the pleasures of cold war normalcy.

    People
were onto something when they called Vreeland the high priestess of fashion.
She was a gnostic priestess. In the gnostic system, there was an outer
mystery for the many and an inner mystery for the few. So it was with Vreeland’s
Vogue. Many readers may have regarded it as the leading fashion magazine.
Others, too few to constitute a mass readership, understood that glamour
has only incidentally to do with clothes. It has mainly to do with personality
structure, with the places we choose to dwell or avoid within the architecture
of our subconscious fantasies.

    Now,
the point of Gnosticism is to be reborn to the divine within oneself. If
“the divine” is not acceptable, you can substitute the truth within oneself.
Or, as the psychotherapist D. W. Winnicott called it, the authentic self.
But Vreeland probably would be comfortable with the divine.

    Why don’t
you bring out that divine thing that is within you? If you don’t, that
divine thing will slay you.

    In any
case, you have to kill off the inauthentic, or at least not let it take
over the executive committee of the self. Vreeland was vigilant in this
regard. Of course, she was also a fabulist. She made up or grossly exaggerated
her accounts of her past and the world around her. But if she had stuck
to the facts, she would have falsified her self. She had “the wound” of
the creative artist: an unshakeable disbelief in her potential to be loved,
coupled with an iron determination to conceal this disbelief from herself.
From this stemmed her power as an architect of other people’s desires.

    Ms. Dwight’s
biography is, among many other marvels, a brilliant study in the relationship
between love and work. The book is a treatise of changing mores, too, of
course, but at heart it is a report from the front lines in the struggle
to craft new identities for men and women in the modern world of work.
The evidence suggests that Vreeland was not a feminist. She was, however,
a strong woman and a breadwinner who reformed the decorous world of fashion
magazines within her muscular grip.

    Vreeland’s
is the flip side of the “Lady in the Dark” story. This extraordinary woman
blossomed when circumstances forced her to create a world outside her marriage
to a man of limited emotional and financial resources. Reed Vreeland looked
the part of leisured money. The leisure part was real. He was a Ralph Lauren
ad campaign before a Ralph Lauren was even dreamed of, but evidently possessed
neither the earning power nor the work ethic of an average male model.
A woman who considered herself unattractive might see him as a catch.

    But what
a lot of hard work it must have taken for Vreeland to believe that he was
worthy of her devotion! The fantasies it must have taken to fill up the
vacuum between herself and a human version of the spotted-elk-hide trunks
she advised her readers at Harper’s Bazaar to strap on the backs of their
touring cars! She was herself the driver. And although it is pleasing in
life to travel with attractive luggage, greater rewards await those who
travel light. A higher quality of attention will be paid to the active
partner in the wider world.

    “I know
what they’re going to wear before they wear it, eat before they eat it,
say before they say it, think before they think it, and go before they
go there!” This astonishing outburst, once overheard by Richard Avedon,
could be taken as evidence of a fashion dictator’s disrespect for her readers.
But perhaps the woman was simply reassuring herself that she could trust
her instincts.

    What
else did she have to go on? It’s not as if she was dealing with anything
rational. In “DV,” Vreeland recounts the possibly apocryphal story of assigning
a photographer to shoot a picture against a green background. The photographer
strikes out after three attempts. ” `I asked for billiard table green!’
I am supposed to have said. `But this is a billiard table, Mrs. Vreeland,’
the photographer said. `My dear,’ I apparently said, `I meant the idea
of billiard table green, not a billiard table.’ “

    In other
words it did not pay to follow this dictator literally. Far better to respond
with instincts of one’s own. This, I think, was the core clause in Vreeland’s
contract with her readers. We expected her to know where we were going
before we went there. We were traveling to places deeper within ourselves.