In 1971, Diana Vreeland was fired from Vogue. She was seventy years old, had been editor-in-chief for nearly a decade, and had turned the magazine into the defining cultural document of the 1960s. She had coined the word youthquake, put Twiggy and Mick Jagger and the Beatles in a fashion magazine, sent photographers to Morocco and Thailand and Japan, and championed blue jeans, the bikini, and thong sandals before the fashion world was ready for any of them. She was replaced by Grace Mirabella, her former assistant for nine years, who represented the opposite of everything Vreeland stood for, and under whom Vogue’s circulation tripled because readers wanted practical and wearable rather than fantasy and exuberance.
Reportedly devastated, Vreeland escaped to Paris for four months. Her husband Reed had died five years earlier, the decade she had defined was over, and the most powerful fashion editor of the twentieth century had no job, no institutional home, and no salary. The question was whether she was finished. She was not.
At seventy-two, she walked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, took over the Costume Institute, and transformed the Met Gala from a fifty-dollar-a-ticket midnight supper into the most watched fashion event on Earth. Over seventeen years she curated fourteen exhibitions, gave fashion permanence by extracting it from the seasonal trend cycle and placing it under museum glass in the company of Rembrandt and Rodin, and died in 1989 having built her greatest monument in her eighties. Diana Dalziel was born in Paris on September 29, 1903, to Emily Key Hoffman, an American socialite descended from George Washington’s brother and a cousin of Francis Scott Key, and Frederick Young Dalziel, a British stockbroker. Her mother was openly cruel, repeatedly calling Diana “my ugly little monster,” a phrase that became a psychological touchstone throughout her career.
Diana was the plain daughter, her younger sister Alexandra the pretty one. Rather than breaking her, the cruelty galvanized something fierce and defiant in the woman who would spend her life transforming the concept of beauty, championing unusual looks, and turning what the world called flaws into assets. The family emigrated to New York in 1914, settling on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Diana was enrolled at the Brearley School and took ballet lessons with Michel Fokine, the only Imperial ballet master ever to leave Russia, and later performed in Anna Pavlova’s Gavotte at Carnegie Hall.
“The first thing to do is to arrange to be born in Paris,” she later said. “After that, everything follows quite naturally. ” The statement captured the philosophy she would carry for the next seventy-five years: the life you wanted was available if you simply declared it to be so, and the declaration itself, made with sufficient conviction, would create the reality it described. In January 1922, she appeared in the pages of Vogue, the magazine she would later transform, in a roundup of socialites.
In 1924, at twenty, she married Thomas Reed Vreeland, a Yale-educated banker, at St. Thomas Church in New York. Reed died in 1966 and she never remarried. By 1929 the couple had moved to London, where Diana befriended Cecil Beaton, danced with the Tiller Girls, and operated a lingerie boutique near Berkeley Square whose clients included Wallis Simpson.
She bought her clothes almost exclusively from Coco Chanel, whom she met in 1926, and was one of fifteen American women presented to King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace in 1933. When Reed’s work brought them back to New York in 1935, Diana had accumulated a sensibility that was not taught but lived: a combination of Parisian aesthetics, London social fluency, and American commercial instinct. In 1936, at the St. Regis Hotel, Carmel Snow, the formidable editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, spotted a woman dancing across a crowded ballroom in a white lace Chanel dress with flowers in her hair, and walked up and offered her a job.
The woman was Diana Vreeland. She began at Harper’s Bazaar as a columnist, launching the legendary “Why Don’t You” column with advice like, “Why don’t you wash your blonde child’s hair in dead champagne as they do in France? ” The column ran for six years and established Vreeland as the most distinctive editorial voice in American magazines. Vreeland rose to become Harper’s Bazaar’s fashion editor, a role she held for over two decades.
As Richard Avedon, her collaborator for nearly forty years, later said, “She invented the fashion editor. Before her, it was society ladies who put hats on other society ladies. ” She shifted the focus of fashion coverage from class to personality, from decorum to imagination, working with Avedon, photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and art director Alexey Brodovitch to produce images of historic quality. She was among the first editors to champion blue jeans, thong sandals, and the bikini.
“The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb,” she declared. She spotted Lauren Bacall before Hollywood did, and served as a style advisor to Jacqueline Kennedy during the 1960 campaign. Despite her enormous contribution, the Hearst Corporation paid her only $18,000 a year from 1936, with a single $1,000 raise in 1959. When Carmel Snow retired in 1958, Vreeland was the obvious candidate to succeed her, having been the defining creative force at the magazine for over two decades.
Instead, Snow’s niece, Nancy White, was installed. Vreeland was devastated. She stayed on for a few more years under White, but the wound did not heal. The lesson she internalized was that talent and loyalty were not sufficient protections against institutional politics, and that the person who built an institution’s identity could be discarded the moment the institution decided that safety was more valuable than brilliance.
She never again invested her identity in an institution’s willingness to reward her. In 1962, Vreeland resigned from Harper’s Bazaar and joined Vogue as associate editor, promoted to editor-in-chief in 1963. At the time, Vogue was not the supreme cultural arbiter it would become under her. She made it into the golden years.
In 1965 she coined the term youthquake in the January issue to describe the seismic impact of youth culture on fashion, a word that entered the Oxford English Dictionary. Under her direction, Vogue discovered the decade’s defining faces: Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Penelope Tree, Veruschka, and Edie Sedgwick. She put Mick Jagger and the Beatles in a fashion magazine, merging pop culture and couture, and sent photographers to Morocco, Thailand, Japan, and Egypt for fashion spreads at a time when most editorial shoots happened in studios. The 1960s were the decade Vreeland was born to edit.
“The pill released the whole association between girls and boys,” she said. “It created an entirely different society. ” The sexual revolution and the fashion revolution were the same revolution, and the editor who understood one understood both. Her office was lined with scarlet walls and leopard print carpet, with a collage featuring the head of Marlon Brando and the foot of Rudolf Nureyev.
She began mornings in her bathroom, where she had a specially installed phone, a wicker armchair, and a steady supply of cigarettes, dictating memos that became legendary. Then, in 1971, Condé Nast fired her, telling her she was too expensive. Metropolitan Museum director Tom Hoving recognized that the Costume Institute was an underperforming, undervalued corner of his institution, and invited Vreeland to become its special consultant in 1972. She accepted at seventy, freshly fired and supposedly finished, walking into the museum the way she had walked into Harper’s Bazaar thirty-six years earlier, without a formal plan but with the absolute conviction that the institution she was entering would be transformed by her presence.
Her appointment was not universally welcomed. Academic curators bristled at her unorthodox approach because she was uninterested in chronology or the construction of garments, caring only about mood, atmosphere, and sensation. Her curatorial staff often went behind her to correct anachronisms. She did not care.
“Never fear being vulgar,” she often said, “only boring. ”
Between 1973 and 1989, she curated fourteen landmark exhibitions that transformed the museum and transformed the idea of what a costume exhibition could be, bringing the same theatrical sensibility she had brought to magazine spreads, deploying lights, props, music, and stage sets to create immersive experiences. Her first exhibition, The World of Balenciaga in 1973, was a memorial tribute funded by the Spanish government, Iberia Airlines, and five Spanish banks. The show was controversial because Spain was still under Franco’s dictatorship, but was deemed a triumph and established the template for everything that followed.
The exhibitions that followed were dazzling in scope: Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design in 1974, American Women of Style in 1975, The Glory of Russian Costume in 1976, Vanity Fair in 1977, La Belle Époque in 1982 sponsored by Pierre Cardin, and Man and the Horse in 1984 sponsored by Ralph Lauren. The 1983 Yves Saint Laurent exhibition was the most controversial. Honoring a living designer, underwritten by Saint Laurent’s partner Pierre Bergé, it prompted criticism that the museum was being used as a publicity platform, and critic John Heilpern groused that one day the god of the Temple of Dendur will cry, “I am not on earth to share a museum with a bunch of fashion freaks. ” Vreeland pressed on, and the show was a sensation.
She pioneered the use of corporate sponsorships to finance exhibitions, a controversial but defining practice the Met Gala still operates by. The fourteen exhibitions over seventeen years did something no magazine editor had ever done: they gave fashion permanence, extracting it from the ephemerality of the seasonal trend cycle and placing it under museum glass. Before her death, she had successfully campaigned for the acceptance of fashion as high art. Vreeland also transformed the Met Gala.
Before her, the Costume Institute benefit, founded in 1948 by publicist Eleanor Lambert as a midnight supper for fifty dollars a ticket, was a low-key affair. Vreeland took over in 1973 and understood what no one before her had: the event needed to become news, not just charity. She selected spectacular, sometimes deliberately controversial themes that would generate press attention beyond the fashion industry. She opened the doors to reporters and photographers, and invited the jet set, Andy Warhol, Bianca and Mick Jagger, Halston and his Halstonettes, David Bowie, Cher, Diana Ross, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson, transforming the gala from a society dinner into a pop culture phenomenon.
It was not until Anna Wintour took over co-chairmanship in 1995 that the gala recovered its Vreeland-era energy, and Wintour has explicitly acknowledged building on the model Vreeland created. Today, the Met Gala is the most watched fashion event on Earth, raising $28 million in a single night as recently as 2023. Diana Vreeland died on August 22, 1989, of a heart attack at Lenox Hill Hospital at the age of eighty-five. She was fired, passed over, underpaid, and dismissed, and she responded each time not with bitterness, but with invention.
When Harper’s Bazaar passed her over, she moved to Vogue and made it into the defining cultural document of the 1960s. When Vogue fired her, she moved to the Met and invented the modern fashion exhibition. By curating fourteen exhibitions at the Costume Institute, she did what no magazine editor had done: she gave fashion permanence. The profession of fashion editor was invented by her, and every editor since has operated within a framework she first imagined.
Designers from Saint Laurent to Blahnik to Herrera credited her as a formative influence. She popularized youthquake, pizzazz, and the beautiful people. She was a woman told she was ugly who became the global arbiter of beauty, a woman paid a pittance who shaped the aesthetics of an era, a woman fired at seventy who built her greatest monument in her eighties. “There is only one very good life,” she said, “and that is the life you know you want, and you make it yourself.
” No one made it more completely or more beautifully than she did.