Diana Vreeland Quotes

You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.

The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it.

There's only one very good life and that's the life you know you want and you make it yourself.

It’s not about the dress you wear, but it’s about the life you lead in the dress.

I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings. Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows and it all comes together.

You don't have to be born beautiful to be wildly attractive.

The first rule that a geisha is taught, at the age of nine, is to be charming to other women...Every girl in the world should have geisha training.

Too much good taste can be boring

I once heard someone say, "I shall die very young. How young? I don’t know. Maybe seventy, maybe eighty, maybe ninety. But I shall be very young.

A funny person is funny only for so long, but a wit can sit down and go on being spellbinding forever. One is not meant to laugh. One stays quiet and marvels. Spontaneously witty talk is without question the most fascinating entertainment there is.

I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity.

I adore fringe.

You gotta have style to get up in the morning

People who eat white bread have no dreams.

maintainence is elegance. Diana Vreeland. vogue magazine 1984.

Unshined shoes are the end of civilization.

What sells is hope.

I adore that pink, it is the navy blue of India!

A new dress doesn’t get you anywhere. It's the life you’re living in the dress.

You don’t have to be born beautiful to be wildly attractive.

Beauty is in all beings that love and are loved, animals and children, and if older women have it, it is because they feel completely free in this world and in their lives as they feel close to God....and they are spiritually in tune with the universe." December 6 1968. Letter to Miss Anita Colby, 3 East 78th Street, New York

The woman was Diana Vreeland, the high priestess of fashion and legendary fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and editor-in-chief of Vogue. Dana paused, eyes wide. Well, perhaps she was a bit star-struck after all.

All my life I’ve pursued the perfect red. I can never get painters to mix it for me. It’s exactly as if I’d said, “I want Rococo with a spot of Gothic in it and a bit of Buddhist temple” – they have no idea what I’m talking about. About the best red is to copy the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.

<"To bewitch" is to me always slightly artificial as it is always put on -- whereas witchery is a form of naturalness that some people can't help, and the world judges that they don't create it ...> November 15 1967 memo to Mrs. Loew Gross re "THE ROMANTIC POINT OF VIEW

Pale pink salmon is the only color I cannot abide––although, naturally, I adore pink. I love the pale Persion pinks of the little carnations of Provence and Schiaparelli’s pink, the pink of the Incas…And though it’s so vieux jeu I can hardly bear to repeat it––pink is the navy blue of India.

We are not looking for endless variety--we are looking for fashion." February 10, 1967, Memo re HAIR ON SITTINGS

A lie to get out of something, or take an advantage for oneself, that’s one thing; but a lie to make life more interesting—well, that’s entirely different.

She featured so much fashion and so many fashion people in the magazine (Diana Vreeland, Manolo Blahnik) that people started calling it House & Garment and Vanity Chair.

I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings. Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows, and it all comes together.

I don't think you have enough "new" words - and speaking of languor I would speak of it as 'a touch of languor' which comes from the depths of well-rested people who enjoy their life..." November 15 1967 memo to Mrs. Loew Gross re "THE ROMANTIC POINT OF VIEW

Snobs by Julian Fellowes The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee People Like Us by Dominick Dunne The Power of Style by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins (this is out of print; I will lend you my copy) Pride and Avarice by Nicholas Coleridge The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave Freedom by Jonathan Franzen D. V. by Diana Vreeland A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur by Gayatri Devi Jane Austen—complete works beginning with Pride and Prejudice Edith Wharton—The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers, The House of Mirth (must be read in strict order—you will understand why when you finish the last one) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh Anthony Trollope—all the books in the Palliser series, beginning with Can You Forgive Her?

The first thing to do is arrange to be born in Paris. After that, everything follows quite naturally

Snobs by Julian Fellowes The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee People Like Us by Dominick Dunne The Power of Style by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins (this is out of print; I will lend you my copy) Pride and Avarice by Nicholas Coleridge The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave Freedom by Jonathan Franzen D. V. by Diana Vreeland A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur by Gayatri Devi Jane Austen—complete works beginning with Pride and Prejudice

What's that terrible phrase one used to hear? "Relate," as in "relate to." People were always relating to themselves, and that's where they went wrong. I think part of my success as an editor came from never worrying about a fact, a cause, an atmosphere. It was me - projecting to the public. That was my job. I think I always had a perfectly clear view of what was possible for the public. Give 'em what they never knew they wanted.

She knew the effort it took to keep one’s exterior self together, upright, when everything inside was in pieces, broken beyond repair. One touch, one warm, compassionate hand, could shatter that hard-won perfect exterior. And then it would take years and years to restore it. This tiny, effeminate creature dressed in velvet suits, red socks, an absurdly long scarf usually wrapped around his throat, trailing after him like a coronation robe. He who pronounced, after dinner, “I’m going to go sit over here with the rest of the girls and gossip!” This pixie who might suddenly leap into the air, kicking one foot out behind him, exclaiming, “Oh, what fun, fun, fun it is to be me! I’m beside myself!” “Truman, you could charm the rattle off a snake,” Diana Vreeland pronounced. Hemingway - He was so muskily, powerfully masculine. More than any other man she’d met, and that was saying something when Clark Gable was a notch in your belt. So it was that, and his brain, his heart—poetic, sad, boyish, angry—that drew her. And he wanted her. Slim could see it in his hungry eyes, voraciously taking her in, no matter how many times a day he saw her; each time was like the first time after a wrenching separation. How to soothe and flatter and caress and purr and then ignore, just when the flattering and caressing got to be a bit too much. Modesty bores me. I hate people who act coy. Just come right out and say it, if you believe it—I’m the greatest. I’m the cat’s pajamas. I’m it! He couldn’t humiliate her vulnerability, her despair. Old habits die hard. Particularly among the wealthy. And the storytellers, gossips, and snakes. Is it truly a scandal? A divine, delicious literary scandal, just like in the good old days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald? The loss of trust, the loss of joy; the loss of herself. The loss of her true heart. An amusing, brief little time. A time before it was fashionable to tell the truth, and the world grew sordid from too much honesty. In the end as in the beginning, all they had were the stories. The stories they told about one another, and the stories they told to themselves. Beauty. Beauty in all its glory, in all its iterations; the exquisite moment of perfect understanding between two lonely, damaged souls, sitting silently by a pool, or in the twilight, or lying in bed, vulnerable and naked in every way that mattered. The haunting glance of a woman who knew she was beautiful because of how she saw herself reflected in her friend’s eyes. The splendor of belonging, being included, prized, coveted. What happened to Truman Capote. What happened to his swans. What happened to elegance. What truly was the price they paid, for the lives they lived. For there is always a price. Especially in fairy tales.

THE BEST TIME TO LEAVE A PARTY IS WHEN THE PARTY’S JUST BEGINNING. —Diana Vreeland

not like her grandmother at all. This was a family of volcanic emotions; in another instance of the strong feelings that convulsed it, Weir named her house in Katonah Villa Diana. After the miserable summer of 1917, Diana spent vacations with her grandmother while Emily and Alexandra went back out West. Her grandmother’s household at Katonah provided another source of comfort in the farm animals, especially the horses, which did not have the power to hurt, unlike human beings. “My grandmother had a huge farm horse in the country outside of Katonah. . . . After lunch I’d run off, get on the horse. . . . I’d sit there all afternoon, perfectly happy. It would get hot, the flies would buzz. . . . That’s all I wanted—just to be with the steam and the smell of that divine horse. Horses smell much better than people—I can tell you that.” In

In this instance, however, the answer was quite straightforward: "Men want women beautiful, romantic... birds of paradise instead of hurrying brown hens," said Bazaar in October 1945. As families were reestablished, there was a move toward a celebratory fashion of fecundity, with closer-fitting waists and rounder hips.

January 30: Time publishes “Who Would Resist?” which declares, “The bitter battle was over. Marilyn Monroe, a five-foot five and a half inch blonde weighing 118 alluringly distributed pounds, had brought to its knees mighty Twentieth Century Fox.” Redbook publishes “Marilyn Monroe’s Marriage.” Cecil Beaton photographs Marilyn on a bed draped with a Japanese wall hanging. Diana Vreeland interprets the pose as a portrayal of Marilyn as a “geisha. She was born to pleasure, spent her whole life giving it.

If you concentrate, there is something that emanates from you, and that’s what the great photographer photographs. Diana Vreeland says, “There is no beauty without emotion.” I think that is the responsibility of a model.

A new dress doesn’t get you anywhere; it’s the life you’re living in the dress, & the sort of life you had lived before, & what you will do in it later.” —Diana Vreeland

A new dress doesn't get you anywhere; it's the life you're living in the dress.” Diana Vreeland

Too much good taste can be very boring.

But I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings. Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows, and it all comes together.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen D. V. by Diana Vreeland A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur by Gayatri Devi Jane Austen—complete works beginning with Pride and Prejudice Edith Wharton—The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers, The House of Mirth (must be read in strict order—you will understand why when you finish the last one) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh Anthony Trollope—all the books in the Palliser series, beginning with Can You Forgive Her? I shall do an assessment when you have completed these books to see whether you are ready to attempt some light Proust.

Snobs by Julian Fellowes The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee People Like Us by Dominick Dunne The Power of Style by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins (this is out of print; I will lend you my copy) Pride and Avarice by Nicholas Coleridge The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave Freedom by Jonathan Franzen D. V. by Diana Vreeland A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur by Gayatri Devi Jane Austen—complete works beginning with Pride and Prejudice Edith Wharton—The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers, The House of Mirth (must be read in strict order—you will understand why when you finish the last one) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh