![]() Yet by 1990, the one time legendary monster sacre and her signature shade of lacquered scarlet (on lips, fingernails, ball gowns, carpets and walls) was a shorthand joke for how shallow, powerful fashionistas are supposed to behave, aka Mode magazine gorgon Wilhelmina Slater in TV’s Ugly Betty. ![]() “She was and remains the only genius fashion editor,’’ gushed Richard Avedon, the photographer she transformed into the first superstar snapper. True, the tributes to the flamboyant and relentlessly ‘on’ woman were predictably lavish. Tragic fate! The figurehead who for decades decided what the wealthy and with- it wore, where they ate, the best boltholes to buy and furnish and – absolutely vital – who was ‘in’, was, suddenly, ever so brutally out. actually, a lady never tells her age…let’s mutter Eightysomething and hurry along… Vreeland decayed from a la mode to old hat close to overnight. Surely the most bizarre, but instructive, style lesson inadvertently taught by that eternal arbiter of taste, Diana Vreeland, is just how treacherously fast the presence and influence of the reigning Empress of guilt-free luxury faded from the fused worlds of haute couture and international high society she once ruled.Īlmost from the moment Vreeland (fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar for 27 years and editor in chief at Vogue for nine) was felled by a massive heart attack in New York, 22 August 1989 at the age of…. ![]()
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