Empress of Fashion (33 page)

Diana's embrace of the free spirit of the 1960s had an electrifying impact on
Vogue
's fashion spreads. “I was saved by the 60s,” Avedon said. “Because the clothes were so extraordinary.” The models sent to him by Diana were just as remarkable. Diana reinforced her stamp on
Vogue
's imagery by unearthing yet more young women whose quirky, kooky beauty, long limbs, and chemistry with the camera projected the spirit of the hour and played to her latest fantasy of the Girl. “The girl herself is the extravaganza that makes the look of the sixties,” wrote
Vogue
on March 15, 1968. “Every couturier, consciously or not, knows her as the vital ingredient in his designs.” From 1966 onward, as fashion became more eclectic, Diana offered the readers and designers an ever greater range, sending Funny Girls like Barbra Streisand rather than models to Paris to be photographed in clothes from the collections; and conversely, printing the names of favored models and encouraging them to express their individuality.

Unusually, Diana had to impose the model Lauren Hutton on Richard Avedon. The second of Diana's Laurens, Hutton, who was christened Mary, had actually renamed herself after Lauren Bacall, and they both came to epitomize a classic, fresh-faced blond American look. At five feet six, with a slightly asymmetrical face and famously gap toothed, Lauren Hutton was anything but conventional model material at first glance. But when he first met her Avedon rejected her, not because she looked odd but because he thought she was too ordinary, “a broad.” In reality Lauren Hutton was not ordinary. She was brought up in Florida, in an atmosphere of subterranean violence, too much alcohol, and a stepfather who wanted her out of the house as much as possible so that he could have Hutton's mother to himself. By way of outdoor amusement he taught Hutton how to fish and catch a rattlesnake with her bare hands. “There were five things besides my stepfather that lived in our backyard in that swamp that could have killed me: four different kinds of poisonous snakes, 300 pound alligators,” said Hutton. When she met Diana, Hutton had borrowed two hundred dollars from her mother to go traveling in Africa. But the plan went awry and she found herself working as a house model for Dior in New York to keep a roof over her head.

Hutton was spotted at Dior by
Vogue
fashion editor Catherine di Montezemolo and invited to come in and model at one of Diana's run-throughs. Hutton decided during this visit that she was in the fashion equivalent of a dank Florida swamp and retreated into a corner, only to find herself at the end of Diana's celebrated index finger. “You. You have quite a presence,” said Diana. “So do you, ma'am,” said a flustered Hutton. Diana saw in Hutton a quirky, 1960s take on the Lauren Bacall American girl and dispatched her to Avedon who had, by now, dismissed her three times. Not knowing what to do with her, Avedon asked her where she came from. “I said Florida, and he asked, ‘What did you do there?' ” Hutton replied that she played in the woods. “He asked, ‘Woods?' and he looked up from behind his equipment. ‘What did you do in the woods?' I said, ‘Well, there were lots of snakes and turtles, and I would run and jump over them and leap over the logs.' . . . He got up. He uncurled himself, put a little X on the floor, and said, ‘Go over there and run and jump.' ” Although they were seen as a radical innovation in 1966, Avedon's pictures of Hutton running and jumping marked the introduction to 1960s
Vogue
of Munkácsi's active, athletic fresh-faced “farm girls jumping over fences” in
Bazaar
a full thirty years earlier. Hutton would turn out to be a model with an extraordinary range, but in 1966 she had the special magic of a tomboy who became an American beauty.

Penelope Tree, by contrast, came to epitomize
Vogue
's flower-power period and materialized in front of Diana at a party, just a few months after her discovery of Hutton. On November 28, 1966, she went to dinner with Ronald and Marietta Tree before Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, where she encountered their seventeen-year-old daughter. Penelope Tree was wearing a skimpy, see-through dress by Betsey Johnson that appalled her father but thoroughly impressed Diana and became the talk of the night. Diana telephoned Tree the next morning and sent her straight to Avedon. “She was gawky, a little hunched over, with stringy hair, absolutely not a beauty at all,” said Polly Mellen. When Tree came to the studio for a sitting in July 1967, Mellen thought she looked like a gangly little urchin. “I came out and said to Dick, ‘I don't know. She doesn't fit the clothes. Look, the arms are much longer than they should be.' He said, ‘She's ready. Don't touch her. She's perfect.' ” Diana agreed. “I am really fascinated by how beautifully built she is,” she wrote to Avedon. “I suggest that we use some highlighting on her cheekbones and that we are of course very careful with the eye makeup that it will not close the eye but will open it. . . . she takes on a definite authority in clothes as she has a real feeling for clothes and not just a selfish feeling for clothes.”

Penelope Tree's first major appearance in
Vogue
took place in October 1967, modeling “new fashion raves” and accompanied by an article called “The Penelope Tree,” by Polly Devlin. “She projects the spirit of the hour,” wrote Devlin, “a walking fantasy, an elongated exaggeratedly-huge-eyed beautiful doodle drawn by a wistful couturier searching for the ideal girl.” Tree was photographed by Avedon in a sequence of four poses in a black bell-bottomed pantsuit, straight hair flying; and in a huge close-up with the enormous Briolette of India diamond in one eye. Diana's campaign to confer fashion authority on Tree continued in January 1968 in a feature called “Fantastree”—fourteen pages of fashion that turned on the idea of romance: organdy pantaloons ruffled over moccasined feet, lace at the wrist, and ruffles up to the chin. It took imagination to wear romantic fashion romantically, said
Vogue
, and Penelope Tree was the girl who knew how to do it, who had the special kind of gesture to make lace cuffs blow about, who woke up in the morning and just knew that she should wear dozens and dozens of tiny Indian silver bells on her fingers. Tree seemed magically to capture the hippy-trippy spirit of the day, but that was the least of it. She was witty and intelligent too. “Penelope Tree is the girl of her dreams,” said
Vogue
. “What she is in her imagination she becomes in reality—Greek boy, maja, Indian chief . . . all mystery and seductiveness one moment; in the next, butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.”

Diana appears to have divined something of herself and her past in all her favorite models of the 1960s. She loved Veruschka's capacity for reinvention and her instinct for self-fashioning. Lauren Hutton was Diana the huntress, a daredevil beauty whose feeling for the wild and for Africa can only have brought to mind Emily Dalziel at her most dashing. Penelope Tree, meanwhile, came from a smart Anglo-American background that was similar to Diana's own. At one point Diana had three generations of the family photographed for
Vogue
: Penelope's mother, Marietta, her grandmother, Mrs. Malcolm E. Peabody, and her half sister Frances FitzGerald. She also commissioned an article about Ronald Tree at his house in Barbados, presenting the whole family as glamorous, intelligent, and formidable. Curiously, Tree's upbringing was almost as unhappy as Diana's and for much the same reason. Marietta Tree was not a loving mother; and Tree spent most of her childhood in the nursery while her mother had affairs. Marisa Berenson became another of Diana's favorite models from the late 1960s onward. She was a great beauty who felt herself to be profoundly ugly, but she was talked into confidence about her looks by Diana, who refused to allow Berenson to feel undermined by the critical remarks of those closest to her. She earned Berenson's lifelong gratitude and friendship for this, but it almost destroyed the relationship between Diana and Berenson's grandmother, Elsa Schiaparelli, who was furious with Diana for encouraging her granddaughter to model. Ironically, this seems to have been because Schiaparelli was a snob who wanted Berenson to marry a prince, and felt that modeling was vulgar and beneath her.

The model who took the skinny, prepubescent look of the later 1960s further than any other was Twiggy. Diana did not discover English-born Lesley Hornby and never pretended that she had, but she used her constantly throughout 1967, putting
Vogue
's seal on her celebrity while Twiggy was still seventeen. The love affair began in the February 15, 1967 issue, with Twiggy modeling prêt-a-porter fashion, and photographed by David Bailey. Diana overrode Irving Penn's objections to being asked to work with a “scrap” by commissioning Bert Stern to photograph Twiggy at the Paris collections in a seven-page spread that included a famous image of her gazing wistfully at herself in a mirror. Shortly after this, Twiggy made the cover of
Vogue
for the first time (April 15, 1967), and traveled to New York for a shoot with Avedon at Diana's invitation, to be greeted by a Beatle-worthy frenzy. In the August 1, 1967 issue, Twiggy and Avedon bounced off each other to create strong, vivid new images, including Twiggy in huge “flying hair” created for her by Ara Gallant, and leading a fashion spread called “Daring Young Romantics.” This featured eighteenth-century styles from a range of American designers including Geoffrey Beene, Harold Levine, and Anne Fogarty. As far as Diana was concerned, Twiggy was not just a successful young model whose figure was “the master pattern for a million teen-agers all over the world”: she was a link between American
Vogue
and the working-class stars of the London pop scene. As far as Twiggy was concerned, Diana's interest and her invitation to New York gave her the all-important break in North America. “The call from Vreeland was the match that lit the blue touch paper,” she said.

It was 1968 that marked the end of one fashion era and the high point of another. That summer Balenciaga closed his doors, asserting that there was no one left to dress. With very, very few exceptions—and certainly not enough to sustain his atelier—the great
Dames de
Vogue had disappeared. Diana was staying with one of them, Mona Bismarck, on Capri when the news of Balenciaga's retirement came through. It had a dire effect on her hostess: “Mona didn't come out of her room for three days. I mean, she went into a complete . . . I mean, it was the end of a certain part of her
Life
!” But it was certainly not the end of Diana's, for the end of the Balenciaga era coincided with some of the most radical images in
Vogue
's history. During the summer in which Balenciaga retired, Diana dispatched Veruschka, her photographer-boyfriend, Franco Rubartelli, and Giorgio di Sant'Angelo to the Painted Desert in Arizona. Giorgio di Sant'Angelo was Florentine by birth and worked in industrial design before becoming a stylist for
Vogue
and a designer in his own right. Exuberantly original, he liked to ornament the body as well as drape it, and was responsible—among much else—for painting around Twiggy's eyes for the cover of
Vogue
in July 1967 (“Sprig on a Twig,” said
Vogue
); making bikinis out of gold chains; using coffin velvet as a fashion fabric; and putting appliquéd flowers on bare legs.

As if to underscore the annihilation of couture, Diana gave Veruschka, Sant'Angelo, and Rubartelli a completely free hand during the Painted Desert shoot. “We took fabrics, cords, tools, pins, scissors, and ribbons and just created everything on the spot,” said Veruschka. Described by
Vogue
later as “magnificent windups” of cloth coming from the nomadic workshop of Giorgio di Sant'Angelo's imagination, the designer furled, swaddled, and swathed Veruschka in yard upon yard of fabric. In one famous image he gave her a headdress the size of a small moon made from white jersey lined with fur, and wrapped her in moiré-embossed velvet and golden braids in the manner of a desert sheikh in another. Diana helpfully ran a diagram at the back of
Vogue
for those who wanted to construct such fashions at home. From Veruschka's point of view, being tricked out as a jersey-and-wild-honey Orlon parcel tied up with golden brown polyurethane string in the heat of the Arizona desert was anything but comfortable, but there were consolations: “At some point, I fainted. I just tipped over like a tree onto a slab of solid rock. Of course, it didn't hurt at all because of all the padding.”

In the second half of the sixties, as fashion constantly deconstructed and reconstructed,
Vogue
's reader shifted shape in Diana's mind's eye too. Increasingly, Diana blurred all conventional demarcation lines. Having positioned Mary Quant in fashion's outer space in 1963, Diana gave pride of place to the publication of her autobiography in August 1966, in which Quant announced: “There was a time when clothes were a sure sign of a woman's social position and income group. Not now. Snobbery has gone out of fashion, and in our shops you will find duchesses jostling with typists to buy the same dresses.” At the same time, the clothes Quant and others designed for girls who refused to dress like their mothers were rapidly adopted by stylish women of all ages, as youthful notes in fashion sounded the dominant chord. By 1967 the caution that led Diana to put
Vogue
's daughters, rather than their mothers, into miniskirts, disappeared, and what emerged was a reader who was somewhere in between. Diana ran photographs by William Klein of Jacqueline de Ribes, who was in her late thirties, wearing a velvet “
mini-jupe
” at least ten inches above the knee, with a crocheted silvered sleeveless turtleneck sweater and silvered stockings. Conversely, she commissioned photographs by Bert Stern of seventeen-year-old Twiggy modeling clothes by Saint Laurent at the Paris collections that might normally have been bought by older women, not teenagers.