A fashionable life
Diana Vreeland brought couture to pop culture
The world is not short on documentaries about the world of fashion. A great many good biopics have been made about everyone from Anna Wintour to Yves Saint Laurent, and you get the feeling the filmmakers behind Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel have seen them all — and watched with an itchy sense of competition.
After all, why should Wintour take all the credit for recreating the fashion magazine in her own image when really, according to this documentary, it was Vreeland who reinvented the wheel of what to wear.
Born in 1903, decades before Wintour during La Belle Epoque in France, Vreeland came from an different age, when women were still carrying parasols and sporting bustles. By the time she died in 1989, Vreeland had not only embraced the sexual awakening of the 1960s, she was credited with redefining the supermodel look thanks to her groundbreaking spreads in Harper’s Bazaar featuring Lauren Hutton and other nontraditional beauties.
There’s no debating Vreeland’s role in recreating the function and social formatting of fashion. There’s also no doubt she taught Wintour just about everything she knows, but the devil in Prada barely merits a mention in this movie created in part by Vreeland’s family.
A decidedly linear look at the twisting and turning life of the former dancer, The Eye Has to Travel plows through one interesting story after another with an almost scholastic approach to exposition.
Filmmakers Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frederic Tcheng (all of whom share director’s credits) begin with Vreeland offering her life story to a writer or broadcaster with one of those Walter Cronkite intonations and an all-American accent.
She’s clearly up for the performance, because when he asks her to begin, she offers a hoarse laugh and says: “Where do I begin … the first thing to be done, my love, is to arrange to be born in Paris. After that, everything follows quite naturally …”
Certainly, it did for Vreeland, who met Coco Chanel and became a close friend — a move that would eventually get her noticed by the Hearst corporation, and set her on the path to becoming editrix at what was then the most important fashion mag in the world.
These backstories of the now iconic fashion houses are familiar, but through Vreeland’s eyes we can see them through a new lens and gain a better appreciation for just how revolutionary some of these designers really were.
Vreeland truly believed there was genuine art in fashion, but not in any traditional sense of the word. She believed the art was in the doing, not necessarily the final artifact — which explains why she sent the archivists and restorers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art into paroxysms of displeasure when she manhandled the collection, slapping the dust from centuries-old taffeta and freely over-coiffing the model for MarieAntoinette.
Oh yes, it was Vreeland who turned a static collection of hanging clothes into the current fashion gallery at the Met — where mannequins are posed to tell a whole story, and clothing is sewn into a larger social context.
Indeed, Vreeland did a lot of things first and this movie is more than happy to point out each and every one of them with the pride of ownership — often through Vreeland’s own self-assured words.
For the most part, this feels like a laundry list of accomplishments stuck to a calendar of important events.
Halfway through the movie, the viewer will no doubt be struck by the startling lack of emotional content — and it’s the lack that becomes the movie’s most interesting element because it pulls out the parts of Vreeland she refused to show.
Though she was a larger-thanlife character who hung out with Andy Warhol, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, we get the feeling Vreeland never truly felt comfortable in her own skin.
Told by her mother she was ugly, and doomed to remain in the shadow of her pretty sister, Vreeland found dance at a young age and eventually learned to turn her biggest problem into her biggest asset.
Her long, patrician nose became her trademark — something she even exaggerated through the use of makeup and kabuki rouge.
To see a woman take charge of her own looks, and use the lessons learned to free her sisters from the shackles of conformity, is a rather empowering voyage. Sadly, this movie never really captures the full force of Vreeland’s persona because it’s all by-the-book filmmaking.
Vreeland never let the rules stand in the way, yet this talking heads documentary piece of history feels dated and just a tad stale.