As someone who has never been really fashionable, who tends towards comfort, and finds herself impossible to fit - shoes being especially impossible. As someone who hates nylons and has never worn a suit that felt right and can't afford made to order, you might think I have no interest in fashion. But I do.
I embrace fashion for the creativity and skill it takes to create clothing for individuals and the masses and the designers we know about for their fortitude for the world of fashion is vicious and it seems a miracle that anyone makes it to the top and more a miracle that they stay on top. I study fashion and try to understand it from fabrics and construction up.
Diana Vreeland was not a fashion designer but a fashion magazine editor - Harper's Bazaar for 25 years - and was what we call "a force of nature." She got herself hired by the fashion editor Carmel Snow, and her eccentricity and very original world view, her demands for telling detail on the often magnificent photography that took the viewer/reader on a journey are legendary, seemingly entirely narcissic, yet her ideas worked, they sold, they changed history in their way.
Vreeland felt that people were nothing if they didn't have style, their own style. Hers was heavily influenced by Japan and Russia.
This documentary is jam packed with fashion, some you think you remember and some you will remember for seeing it for the first time. Twiggy for instance. Cher. Women who she felt were beyond models. Jackie O.
However what I will take away with me most is this; Diana Vreeland saw fashion photoshoots as stories. She often coached photographers and models to imagine that story. The eye travels to locations all over the world, over the body and face of the model for what the language and emotions are, and you as a viewer/reader will travel too.
C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved 2013
