Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

I recently toddled over to the Angelika Theater on Houston Street to see Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, the wonderful documentary made about the style icon by her granddaughter-in-law Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who published a book by the same name last year and is married to Vreeland's grand son Alexander. This movie is a terrifically entertaining closeup look at one of the great fashion figures of the twentieth century.

Readers of this blog surely know about Diana Vreeland who was the legendary fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar, then the editor-in-chief at Vogue during the Sixties, and when she was fired from Vogue, created at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the Costume Institute as we know it today with her blockbuster exhibits.

What stands out in the documentary is her great drive and work ethic coupled with her imagination and creativity. Growing up, her mother told her she was ugly. In New York City, she lasted at the Brearley School for three months. She was not a great beauty nor was she formerly educated, but she created great beauty and educated herself and thus encouraged her readers and viewers to dream and live more beautiful lives.
She met her handsome husband Reed Vreeland in 1929. Here they are pictured at a cocktail party with the always chic Slim Keith on the left.

Vreeland's great curiosity made her passionate for a wide range of subjects – from the French eighteenth century, Russia, and horses to Diaghilev, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. Angelica Huston in the movie notes that before Vreeland, women's magazines were focused on "how to fit in with your husband and how to make a pie. But who cares about pies...when you have Russia!"

The editor began her job at the Met when she was 70 ("What was I going to do? Retire?") As a boy visiting New York City from upstate I remember a couple of her Costume Exhibit shows, including the Hollywood one, which were astounding displays of fantasy and beauty. Vreeland was a storyteller, this movie says, and she was presenting her version of the way the world could be. "I believe in the dream," she says. "There is only one really good life and that is the life you know you want and you make it yourself." At the end she states, "I shall die very young. Whether I am 70 or 80 or 90, I shall die very young."

What a great inspiration she is. See this movie if you can. Here is the trailer:

The Ballets Russes

I was having a swanky lunch recently on the seventh floor at Bergdorf Goodman with a friend from college, and afterwards I discovered in the cozy book department there a big, new, glossy book out about the Ballets Russes.
We love the Ballets Russes.
I first learned about the Ballets Russes (that's French for the Russian Ballets) from Diana Vreeland because when you read about her, she talks a lot about the dance company, and in fact mounted a show about it in 1978 when she was the consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. Boy, I would love to have seen that.
The Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev formed the Ballets Russes, which performed mainly in Paris from 1909 until his premature death in 1929. Many of the company's dancers came from the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg, and arrived in Paris as exiles from the Russian Revolution.
Here is a portrait of Diaghilev with his nanny by Leon Bakst from 1906 (all images courtesy The Monacelli Press).


But, the Ballets Russes was a radical departure from classical dance. Diaghilev invited all kinds of artists to contribute, and incorporated into the company all aspects of art, costume design, set design, music and dance. It was really an artistic revolution which announced the dawn of the modern age. Sets were created by Picasso, Braque, Miro and de Chirico. Costumes were designed by Chanel and Matisse.
This robe, based on a design by Henri Matisse for the ballet Le Chant du Rossignol, 1920, is made of silk satin painted with flowers and edged with velvet.


Robe based on a design by Leon Bakst for the ballet Le Dieu Bleu, 1912, of wool with gilt metal, satin appliques and gilt buttons.



The aesthetics, the music and dance were all part of the final creation. Igor Stravinsky, the premier composer of the earlier twentieth century, was hired by Diaghilev when he was a young man, and went on to create for the company his great works The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring. Diaghilev promoted to ballet master the young George Ballanchine who went on to co-found the New York City Ballet and create modern ballet in the twentieth century. Diaghilev moved male dancers who had previously been overshadowed by prima ballerinas to the forefront. Here is Mikhail Fokin in the ballet Le Spectre de la Rose from 1914.


Diaghilev's greatest star (and lover) was Nijinsky, the dancer and choreographer who created ballets which reached far beyond tradition and experimented with the new, futuristic direction of modern dance. Some of his work in fact caused riots and scandal.
Costume design by Leon Bakst for Nijinsky as the Faun in L'Apres Midi d'un Faun.


Diana Vreeland said, in 1978 to the Palm Beach Daily News, that when the Ballets Russes opened, "it was a turning point for all the arts. The brilliant colors and bold rhythms put an end to the paleness and primness of the early part of the century. Nothing has ever been the same since." What a fantastic time to live in Paris, at the dawn of modern art. This deluxe book from The Monacelli Press is beautifully illustrated and includes a number of varied essays which offer a thorough and lively exploration of the many accomplishments of this extraordinary dance company.
A few years ago, TD and I went on New Year's Eve to see the documentary Ballets Russes (2005). There was practically no one else in the small, darkened theater. After Diaghilev died, the company continued on in various forms, and some of the dancers were still alive to talk about it. Many of the old dance clips are of course in black and white, and my memory of that movie is that it simply sparkled in the dark with radiance and delight.

Chanel Resort 2010

Style.com reports that the new Chanel Resort collection was shown last week in Venice. Three hundred guests sat in wooden deck chairs on the Lido as waves lapped the shore. Karl Lagerfeld's collection was inspired by Venice in the earlier part of the last century. Style.com says that beginning in 1919, Coco Chanel visited Venice for almost ten years and there met Diaghilev, the creator of the brilliant Ballet Russe dance company. The clothes in the collection are a poetic rendering of the period but are modern too. I love clothes that don't really have a specific era -- that go back in time and can be worn in any period, and that's what Lagerfeld accomplished beautifully here. Navy blue and white has always been a favorite; once I had a great navy blue striped long-sleeved French sailor's shirt with a boat neck that I bought on Nantucket. I don't see them any more; back in the day you could get them at L.L. Bean and Army/Navy stores.
The Chanel collection started with a group portraying the mother and children in Death in Venice by novelist Thomas Mann, and then went on to a procession of timeless outfits creating a romantic Venetian dream that evokes Henry James and John Singer Sargent.