DOCUMENTARY; 1hr 26min
DIRECTED BY: Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Image maker: Vreeland
In this great-looking, generally laudatory documentary directed by her granddaughter-in-law, fashion doyenne Diana (“DEE-ana”) Vreeland is an imperious tempest. The one-time Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor, Vogue editor-in-chief and Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute special consultant came of age in the Roaring Twenties, never gave a fig what people thought of her, worked into her seventies and had something incisive to say about pretty much everything. Hitler’s moustache, which she saw one night at the opera, was “so hilarious.” The bikini was “the biggest thing since the atom bomb.” And on style, which ran her life, she is most emphatic of all. “Without it,” she says firmly, as indeed she says everything, “you’re nobody.”
Vreeland died in 1989 at age 86, yet the likes of Lauren Bacall, Anjelica Huston and Ali McGraw remember her as though she had just left the room. The sourest notes, sadly, come from her two disaffected sons: Vreeland was an impeccably chic mother, but style is no substitute for maternal substance.
