Diana Vreeland: la mujer que ser convirtió en aquello que siempre quiso ser. Sabiendo desde pequeña la importancia de destacar, Vreeland, durante todos los días que vivió, se caracterizó por un allure de innovación y originalidad. Pasión por el color rojo. Volver posible lo pensando como imposible. Why don’t you?  Su amistad con Jackie Onassis. Harper’s Bazaar y VOGUE. Su carrera en el Costume Institute del MET. The Eye Has To Travel.

En esta ocasión, recopilo en SUBRAYADOS fragmentos de “The Divine Mrs. V”, artículo que Eleanor Dwight escribió para New York Magazine.

“I was going through money like one goes through…a bottle of scotch, I suppose, if you’re an alcoholic”.

“Don’t just be your ordinary dull self. Why don’t you be ingenious and make yourself into something else?”

“Parents, you know, can be terrible”. 

““For years I am and always have been looking out for girls to idealize because they are things to look up to, because they are perfect”, she wrote in her diary. But since she had never discovered “that girl or that woman,” she announced, “I shall be that girl”.”

“…to-day only personality counts…I do not believe we should put in [the magazine] so-called society, as it is démodé and practically doesn’t exist…but ravishing personalities are the most riveting things in the world – conversation, people’s interest, the atmospheres that they create round them – there are the things I feel are worth putting in any issue”. 

“It was a very vivid period in my life. For seven years, I was by myself”. 

“Look at you, you are young and beautiful, and you have everything ahead of you. I am getting older and I have only my wonderful husband”. 

“I want this place to look like a garden, but a garden in hell”.

“Red is the great clarifier – bright and revealing. I can’t imagine becoming boring with red – it would be like becoming bored with the person you love”. 

“A limousine would arrive, in the late morning or at lunchtime, and the door would snap open, and she would step out dressed in her usual head-to-foot black – cashmere sweater, black wrap skirt, the pointed shoes, now famous, that were polished on the bottoms. The hands were beautifully manicured, the hair just so. It was a helmet – once when her maid bumped into it by mistake, with a tray, it clinked. And waiting at the curb. There would always be one assistant… We would hear the clicking of feet and her loud voice over her shoulder dictating memos at a mile a minute”.

“Vreeland loved the sixties; her eclectic style fit right in with the times. “The idea of beauty was changing”, she said. “If you had a bump on your nose, it made no difference so long as you had a marvelous body and good carriage. You held your head high, and you were a beauty…you knew how to water-ski, and how to take a jet plane fast in the morning, arrive anywhere, and be anyone when you get off”.

““Mrs. Vreeland was always in the there punching for the impossible and the unattainable. When her ideas succeeded they were triumphant. “If not, there were no post postmortems”.” 

“Diana didn’t discuss her husbands illness with anyone. When he died on August 3, 1966, at the age of 67, she was devastated. She drew a little heart in her date book with an arrow through it”.

“She found an evening dress she liked. The vendeuse said. ‘Do you want it in black?’ ‘Certainly not. In red. I don’t want to remind anyone that I’m in mourning. That’s my business.’ Although she loved black, that winter she did not have anything in black.”

“Don’t look back. Just go ahead. Give ideas away. Under every idea there’s a new idea waiting to be born”.

“The trouble with this country [is that] they want to give the public what it wants. Well, the public wants what it can’t get, and it’s up to the museum to teach them what to want”. 

“Don’t tell the music or I’ll tell my father!” These were her last words.