A Question of Style

Looking back on a conversation with Diana Vreeland

One can think offhand of only seven or eight truly original women. Most of them are European. In America we've had very few great original women. Emily Dickinson was one. But Mrs. Vreeland, or Madam Vreeland as I will always think of her, is a totally extraordinarily original woman, and she's one of the great Americans. She has contributed more than anyone I can think of to the level of taste of American women in the sense of the way they move, what they wear and how they think. She's a genius but she's the kind of genius that very few people will ever recognize because you have to have genius yourself to recognize it. Otherwise, you just think she's a rather foolish woman.... TRUMAN CAPOTE, June 1977

The longer piece I’ve been working on has become rather unwieldy, so I’m sharing with you today part of a Rolling Stone interview with former Vogue EOC Diana Vreeland from August 1977. Vreeland, at that time, was enshrined at the mount of the Costume Institute. “The Glory of Russian Costume” was coming to end the month of the interview and publication, having been on since the previous December; “Vanity Fair,” Vreeland’s curation of the best items from CI’s vaults, was to open four months later.

Diana Vreeland with a silk and silver wedding dress worn by Catherine the Great, which was shown in “The Glory of Russian Costume.”

The interviewer is Lally Weymouth, daughter of Katherine and Philip Graham of the Washington Post. Weymouth was then best known for her 1973 book, Thomas Jefferson: The Man, His World, His Influence; a year before this interview, she had published the rather delightful America in 1876, The Way We Were, to tie in with the bicentennial. Today, Weymouth continues to be part of her family’s former business, as the associate editor of The Washington Post.

My very beat-up copy of Lally Weymouth’s America in 1876, designed by Milton Glaser. More on Glaser here.

Due to Vreeland and Weymouth’s shared social class, there is an ease to the conversation—these are women who have known each other a long time and have shared many conversations. Spanning seventeen pages and covering all of Vreeland’s life in detail, it is a wonderful entree into Vreeland’s world. As with her later memoir, D.V., Vreeland’s voice is always clear and resolute.

One of the rooms in “Vanity Fair,” 1977.

I pulled two of the sections towards the end of the interview to feature here. The questions, even when just asking about her personal style, seem to all circle back to a philosophy of life—of how one can live with certainty, intuition and beauty. There is so much in this interview—her childhood, the Castles, Diaghilev, the 20s, London in the 30s, Harper’s Bazaar, editing Vogue, the 60s, Cole Porter, and on. Let me know if I should share more.