Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2012: In several ways, Empress of Fashion is much like the woman it covers. Like Diana Vreeland (1903 1989)--the imperious, transformative editor of Vogue magazine, then the creator of the Costume Institute at New York s Metropolitan Museum--British journalist Amanda Mackenzie Stuart s biography lasts a long time. And while it isn t always traditionally well formed, it is far deeper, smarter, and more important than it first appears. Who was Diana Vreeland? An arbiter of beauty who, by just about everyone s admission, was not beautiful; a working woman before it was fashionable; a fiercely independent soul with an overriding, lifelong, bourgeois concern about money. And while Mackenzie Stuart might tread a tiny bit too heavily into the Freudian--Vreeland constantly tried to prove herself to her neglectful and often nasty mother, even years after the older woman's death--her deep research into everything from Vreeland s childhood diaries to her social life (shimmying at Studio 54 in her 80s!) makes this bio, which has the approval of Vreeland s estate, nothing short of--as Mrs. Vreeland herself might say-- divine. --Sara Nelson