Diana Vreeland said she was always her mother’s “ugly little monster.”
And it wasn’t just one time, in a bad moment. Nope. Her sister was the beautiful one. Diana was told plainly and often that she was not.
She went on to spend twenty-six years at Harper’s Bazaar, most of them as its fashion editor, then took over Vogue, then went to the Met as a special consultant to its Costume Institute. For about fifty years, she helped decide what beautiful meant in America.
She stayed exactly as she was, and that’s the part I love. She made herself the most magnetic person in any room she walked into.
She had one way of doing it, and it’s the opposite of everything we’ve been taught. I call it pushing the fault.
If a model had a gap in her teeth, Vreeland wanted the gap in the picture. Long neck, wear it proudly, don’t hunch. In 1966 she put Barbra Streisand on the cover of Vogue, nose and all.
Her only rule was to amplify.
PUT ON Today, notice someone who isn’t hiding a thing, the gray, the height, the big laugh. Notice how hard it is to look away.
