By Diana Vreeland with Christopher Hemphill, 1980
The front cover of Allure, first published by Doubleday & Company in 1980. Underneath the book’s dust jacket, the book boasts red linen cloth boards embossed with Diana Vreeland’s initials. The book is 11” x 15” and 208 pages.
“A good photograph was never what I was looking for. I like to have a point.” –Diana Vreeland
Allure is the book that explains why Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) was a style-icon for most of the twentieth century. While working as a fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar, where she started in 1936, and then as Editor-in-Chief of Vogue from 1963-1971 Vreeland set about reinventing the job of publishing fashion photography. Before her, as the legendary taste-maker explained, “the fashion editor was a society lady putting hats on other society ladies.”
In other words, before Vreeland, fashion layouts were more like catalogue pages where conventional beauties wore the latest styles. But Vreeland, an original (to whom designers offered their clothing and accessories in exchange for only her visibility in them) knew elegance has nothing to do with being well dressed. As she stated, elegance is innate and “Elegance is refusal.”
So instead of filling her magazines’ pages with what she described as “démodé so-called society,” Vreeland made her mark by demonstrating the allure of ravishing personalities and the indescribable essence of what makes someone chic. For Vreeland allure was a quality that exists and holds us… “Whether it’s a gaze or a glance in the street or a face in a crowd or someone sitting opposite you at lunch…,” she explained. “Like a perfume or…a memory…it pervades…you are held.”
In Vreeland’s hands, the fashion layout became all about popularizing an attitude. She created a two-page spread of a nude female lying face down in the sand, her behind covered by a large black straw hat. Its caption read, “Spend the summer under a big black sailor.” As the photographer Richard Avedon explains it, Vreeland’s approach to fashion started, “a totally new profession.”
To create captivating fashion images, the most spectacular of which are featured in Allure, Vreeland hired the century’s greatest photographers–among them Horst, Adolf de Meyer, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Edward Steichen. Their pictures of such celebrated personalities as Greta Garbo, Rudolf Nureyev, Marilyn Monroe, Maria Callas, the Duchess of Windsor, and Josephine Baker define Vreeland’s concept of the glamorous and elusive quality of allure and reveal how one woman revolutionized fashion.
For more on Vreeland, see “The Devine Mrs V” by Eleanor Dwight, published October 28, 2002 in New York Magazine
For an interview with Vreeland from 1980 go here
Diana Vreeland
Spread from Allure
Spread from Allure
Allure
By Diana Vreeland with Christopher Hemphill, 1980
The front cover of Allure, first published by Doubleday & Company in 1980. Underneath the book’s dust jacket, the book boasts red linen cloth boards embossed with Diana Vreeland’s initials. The book is 11” x 15” and 208 pages.
“A good photograph was never what I was looking for. I like to have a point.” –Diana Vreeland
Allure is the book that explains why Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) was a style-icon for most of the twentieth century. While working as a fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar, where she started in 1936, and then as Editor-in-Chief of Vogue from 1963-1971 Vreeland set about reinventing the job of publishing fashion photography. Before her, as the legendary taste-maker explained, “the fashion editor was a society lady putting hats on other society ladies.”
In other words, before Vreeland, fashion layouts were more like catalogue pages where conventional beauties wore the latest styles. But Vreeland, an original (to whom designers offered their clothing and accessories in exchange for only her visibility in them) knew elegance has nothing to do with being well dressed. As she stated, elegance is innate and “Elegance is refusal.”
So instead of filling her magazines’ pages with what she described as “démodé so-called society,” Vreeland made her mark by demonstrating the allure of ravishing personalities and the indescribable essence of what makes someone chic. For Vreeland allure was a quality that exists and holds us… “Whether it’s a gaze or a glance in the street or a face in a crowd or someone sitting opposite you at lunch…,” she explained. “Like a perfume or…a memory…it pervades…you are held.”
In Vreeland’s hands, the fashion layout became all about popularizing an attitude. She created a two-page spread of a nude female lying face down in the sand, her behind covered by a large black straw hat. Its caption read, “Spend the summer under a big black sailor.” As the photographer Richard Avedon explains it, Vreeland’s approach to fashion started, “a totally new profession.”
To create captivating fashion images, the most spectacular of which are featured in Allure, Vreeland hired the century’s greatest photographers–among them Horst, Adolf de Meyer, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Edward Steichen. Their pictures of such celebrated personalities as Greta Garbo, Rudolf Nureyev, Marilyn Monroe, Maria Callas, the Duchess of Windsor, and Josephine Baker define Vreeland’s concept of the glamorous and elusive quality of allure and reveal how one woman revolutionized fashion.
For more on Vreeland, see “The Devine Mrs V” by Eleanor Dwight, published October 28, 2002 in New York Magazine
For an interview with Vreeland from 1980 go here
Diana Vreeland
Spread from Allure
Spread from Allure