Lifestyle // Women's
Seeing Things: The Diana Vreeland Documentary
Diana Vreeland surrounded by red furnishings, 1979.
Valentino: The Last Emperor… The September Issue… Bill Cunningham New York. And now, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel. The latest in a series of must-see fashion documentaries brings to life one of the style world’s most exotic, vibrant, and fabled characters. In a life roughly spanning the twentieth century, Vreeland more than merited her “Empress of Fashion” title: 26 years as fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, editor-in-chief of Vogue through the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, and, at age 70, a post at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which she pushed into the vanguard with fashion exhibitions as imaginative and relevant as any the world had seen.
But those are just the facts. Much more interesting is the fantastical persona Vreeland invented for herself, becoming the star of her own glamorous and adventurous drama. First-time filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland (wife of Vreeland’s grandson Alexander) brings it all vividly to life, weaving photographs, interviews, animation, clips of Vreeland’s television appearances, and voice-overs into a magical 86 minutes. “To say Diana Vreeland has dealt only with fashion trivializes what she has done,” Jackie Onassis once noted. “She has commented on the times in a wise and witty manner. She has lived a life.”
