Empress of Fashion (35 page)

Diana refused to accept this. The freedom to do one's own thing was wonderful, she asserted. “There's no reason why you shouldn't walk out of the house looking like a nun, if that is what you think is splendid. . . . Doing your own thing is the greatest opportunity that has ever come over the horizon.” The best thing about the 1960s, said Diana, was that individual style no longer had anything to do with money. “That's what's so great! Why should we wait six months because one woman in Paris had the privilege of dressing at great expense at a great maison de couture?” But Ann Taylor did not want to look like a nun. She wanted clear advice about hemlines, proportions, and outfits that would last from dawn till dusk with small adjustments. She thought other readers would welcome this advice, and she thought they needed it too. In practice, she said, the problem with “do whatever” was that everyone just looked a complete mess.

M
eanwhile a challenge to fashion itself was building on another flank. Betty Friedan had published
The Feminine Mystique
in 1963, and although this book did not ignite the contemporary women's movement as sometimes suggested, it hit a nerve. On the one hand, most Americans believed that a normal family consisted of a homemaking mother who looked after the children, and a breadwinning father. On the other, women were going back to work in larger numbers than ever before by the early 1960s; and the young women of the Youthquake were going to college in greater numbers too, frequently becoming involved in protest movements and left-wing debate when they arrived on campus, since it was impossible to ignore. As young, educated women emerged into the job market in the late 1960s, they saw discrimination and sexist attitudes with fresh eyes, and at every turn; and as small groups of women started to raise their own “consciousness” in the late 1960s, they drew the attention of much less extreme women to a panoply of mechanisms designed to keep them in their place, including the all-powerful media, supported by advertising, especially on television and in women's magazines.

Possibly because they were unsure how to address the success of
The Feminine Mystique
, which was excerpted and much discussed in midmarket women's magazines, Diana and Allene Talmey waited until the March 15 issue of 1966, the year in which Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), before giving her any kind of platform. They also approached her sideways, by commissioning an article about Friedan's book from Jessica Mitford, who, by dint of being author of
The American Way of Death
, a well-known radical, and the sister of the writer Nancy Mitford, the Nazi sympathizer Unity Mitford, and the Duchess of Devonshire, had a unique point of view that could not possibly be mistaken for
Vogue
's. “Oh Betty Friedan, what hast thou wrought?” wrote Mitford. “An obsession with being Interesting, a new mass movement, a craze for the individuality of women, that's what. Mrs. Friedan's thesis . . . is that women whose interests are limited to household responsibilities tend to become bored and neurotic. I must quickly say that I agree with the substance of her argument; but as so often happens, it has been seized upon and pulled out of shape by some of her devotees.” Jessica Mitford, an Englishwoman by birth, noted that America had a long tradition of highly original, individual women with an “inborn buoyancy of spirit that enables them to withstand the slings and arrows of outraged conformists,” and that modern feminists were simply following in their footsteps. Tongue in cheek, she added: “Beware! There are indications of sinister forces at work seeking to undermine your newfound individuality. Somebody up there is watching you, namely the fashion editors. They may force you into a common stereotype yet.”

By 1969 this had ceased to be a joke. Many different “feminisms” were now emerging; and while early twentieth-century suffragists—including Mrs. Pankhurst—had embraced fashion and beauty as weapons in the female arsenal, groups more radical than Betty Friedan were loudly taking exception to the idea that women should be judged by their appearance, and that a woman's life should be dedicated to making herself alluring to men. At sixty-seven, Diana did not deal easily with the idea that a woman should want to do anything else. “I believe women are naturally dependent on men,” she told Christopher Hemphill. “The beauty of painting, of literature, of music, of
love
. . . this is what men have given the world, not women. I think all women are muses—
m-u-s-e-s
in one way or another. You're not exactly talking to a feminist mover.”

Partly because of Reed, Diana could see that male identity was changing, and she thoroughly approved. “The feminine side of SO
MANY
men has come out that has never come out before. I see this all the time. It's practically every man.” She was, however, confounded by changing conceptions of the way women lived their lives. Now that they had the Pill, asked Diana, what else did they want? Her view, in line with Jessica Mitford's article, was that America had a long tradition of doughty female individualists, and once such women had reliable contraception there was nothing to hold them back. “How free can you get? Isadora Duncan was free. How liberated can you get? I remember my grandmother very well. She was an impossible, extraordinary woman. If
anyone
was liberated, she was.” Later, Diana liked to recall her riposte to a scruffy radical feminist who challenged
Vogue
's emphasis on surface decoration and explained that she had no wish to be any man's plaything: “If that's the case, my dear,” said Diana, “you haven't got a
worry
in the
world
.”

However,
Vogue
was not straightforwardly antifeminist in the late 1960s. One glance at Diana's 1960s fashion pages reveals that she was on the same side as feminists who believed that women should enjoy their bodies and embrace sensuality. She had always loved fashion that worked with the dynamic, active body, and she continued to venerate it throughout her time at the magazine. At
Vogue
, Diana's predilection for body-celebrating fashion showed in spread after spread, from the body-hugging psychedelic catsuit modeled by Mme Jean-Claude Abreu at Giza in 1965, to the stripped-back fashion of the miniskirt and the midriff-baring top, the minidress that required toned upper arms, and eventually designs that bared bosoms too. “Rosemary, don't forget that transparency has taken a big step in this world. It is very much part of fashion. It is not peekaboo,” she wrote in a memo to Rosemary Blackmon, with a copy to Richard Avedon.

The body is quite clearly defined whether it is the bust (BIKINI), whether it is the legs, whatever it is. . . . we are dealing with an entire generation who are insane about revealing their bosoms and when I say insane I mean insane with joy and one day soon they hope they will walk down the Champs Elysee
[sic]
with nothing above the waist.”

Here
Vogue
had some catching up to do. While its staff were canceling navels in 1962, Christina Paolozzi appeared naked from the waist up in
Bazaar
, photographed by Richard Avedon. But from 1966 on, images tumbled onto
Vogue
's pages that no one would have dreamed of suggesting to poor Jessica Daves: a model photographed by Gianni Penati in a Galanos dress, with bare legs and feet, pulling up the skirt of her dress in an erotically suggestive way; Lauren Hutton's breast (but not her face) emerging glistening from an unbuttoned Van Raalte bodysuit, on a beach in 1969, photographed by Richard Avedon; Irving Penn's photo of a naked Marisa Berenson, draped only in chain necklaces, that appeared in a beauty bulletin in April 1970. “Pride of body,” proclaimed
Vogue
in September 1967:

It shapes the mores, stamps the art, and helps form the special character by which every age is forever identified. . . . In the very best sense, we enjoy our bodies—not in their tape-measured perfection, but in the naturalness with which we've become free to use them. . . . It has taken a century, but at long last we've emerged from our Victorian past.

Moreover, Diana's pleasure in the glory of the human body was not confined to women. In the early 1960s Richard Avedon photographed Rudolf Nureyev dancing naked, with every muscle, every sinew stretched in a backward arch that suggested the outer limits of human endeavor striving for perfection. “Nureyev, here in an agony of action, could have been the source and inspiration for many of Michelangelo's sublime realizations of the human form,” read the caption. It was an image Diana reserved for the 1967 Christmas issue of Vogue, and later recalled that it had been captured at a memorable shoot. She was a great admirer of Nureyev, and unusually, she made sure she was present when he came to Avedon's studio. Nureyev, who arrived straight from an overnight flight, warmed up by dancing around the studio, in and out of the waiting crowd of assistants. Then he disappeared behind a screen and removed all his clothes. At this point the assistants were dispatched, leaving only Diana and Avedon in the studio as Nureyev emerged from behind the screen. “You know how it is with men in the mornings,” said Diana to the writer Andrew Solomon when she was in her eighties, startling him with an extraordinary vertical gesture. “And it was like that! And it stayed that way for
such
a long time! And there was nothing we could do but wait for it to go down! . . . And it was very strange, but it was . . .
impossibly
beautiful!”

Unlike many women of her generation, Diana welcomed the arrival of the Pill and the sexual freedom that came with it, though at the time this was implied in
Vogue
's fashion spreads rather than made explicit. It was Jessica Daves who first commissioned an article about the Pill a year after it was licensed for use, in 1961. Diana did not run another major feature on the subject until April 15, 1967, when the number of American women using the Pill was thought by
Vogue
to have risen from one hundred thousand in 1961 to more than 5 million. (Passionately interested in the relationship between science, health, and beauty, she gave more space, page for page, to the promise held out by hormone replacement therapy.) Looking back later, however, she saw the Pill as one of the great breakthroughs of the twentieth century. “To me, the Pill was the turning point in the whole younger generation, because it created a totally different society. . . . The Pill was true freedom. Girls and boys could do anything; they were protected.” She particularly welcomed the dent made by the Pill in puritanical American attitudes. “We all know people were as stiff as starch before they met their . . . mmmmm. Sex loosens up.”

Vogue
's reader, as imagined by Diana, was a sensual, sexy, strong, independent, intelligent, and creative woman. Diana had long believed that women animated clothes rather than the other way around, and had been the first to publish the names of her top models and work with the grain of their individual personalities. Diana's constant emphasis on doing one's own fashion thing, and her conviction that style was accessible to anyone, accelerated the collapse of restrictive ideals of “proper” womanhood that
Vogue
had promoted in the 1950s; and there were moments when the magazine explicitly grappled with the whole issue of changing female identity. A feature in January 1967 mused on the way girls and boys were dressing alike, a phenomenon that fascinated Diana. However, as the stripped-back fashion and the undressed women in
Vogue
became ever more erotic and eroticized through the lens of David Bailey, Richard Avedon, Bert Stern, and Helmut Newton, the magazine came in for sharp criticism, and not just from a shocked older generation.

By 1969 feminists of different political hues were questioning just who was gaining most from the sexual revolution of the 1960s. This reaction was undoubtedly provoked on the left by boorish male radicals who denied women a voice at protest meetings and expected them to do the typing and make coffee. But there was also wider unease at the extent to which the sexual revolution was taking place on male terms. This was a revolution where young women were expected to be constantly “up for it,” but characterized as sluts if they exercised sexual freedom. Women who saw sexual liberation differently, as a way of achieving true sexual equality with men, with exciting potential for a new balance and harmony between men and women, often ended up being made to feel ashamed of themselves. It was also clear that men were enjoying all the advantages of sexual liberation but walking away from intractably old-fashioned problems like pregnancy.

Unsurprisingly, feminist groups started to notice a gap between everyday reality and the rhetoric of sexual liberation with which they felt bombarded by advertisers and the media. By 1970 feminist debate, some of it quite extreme, was concerning itself with images of women's bodies as they appeared in fashion magazines, with voices arguing that fashion itself was mired in false consciousness. Women, went the argument, were being fooled. They were being deluded into thinking they could buy perfection; they were being manipulated into seeing themselves as inadequate; they were even being tricked into thinking that women's magazines were really for them, when in fact, images of seminaked women in fashion spreads were being created by men designing women for the male gaze. From this perspective, Irving Penn's photograph of Marisa Berenson clad in nothing but jewelry represented nothing less than male colonization of the female body, an act of aggression that more radical feminist groups sought to reverse.

As feminist antifashion pronouncements became more doctrinaire,
Vogue
's position on feminism equivocated and then hardened. In June 1970
Vogue
ran a profile of several powerful American women titled “People: Liberated, All Liberated,” which reflected Diana's view that female liberation was really nothing new. On September 1, 1970,
Vogue
ran an article by Sally Beauman entitled “Who's So Liberated? Why?” which was at best uncertain in tone and at worst positively sneering. It was all very well being liberated in a seminar, said Beauman, but it was quite another matter at a dinner party, in the office, or in bed. The article included a “Feminism v. Femininity” rating, poking uneasy fun at women like Susan Sontag: “A tomboy who suffers from a bad Electra complex, has mysteriously produced a son, and tends to look upon men as intellectual wrestling opponents. Regrettably, no humor.” The same issue also ran a beauty feature asserting that “the true impact of an unforgettable woman is a heart-stopping face, each feature an enchantment on its own.” Clearly
Vogue
was never going to appeal to radical feminists. But in dismissing all feminism as so much nonsense, Diana not only ignored the possibility that some feminists might have a point, but overlooked the way in which the insights of more moderate feminism were persuading less extreme women to reconsider their own position, not just at work but at home.