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"View Slideshow\n\nThere are no two ways about it. Diana Vreeland is a rare contemporary \"character\": a human find, rewarding for being both unique and authentic.\n\nShe was born in Paris, the daughter of a Scottish father and an American mother, brought up in a privileged between-the-wars European world where elegance went hand in hand with intelligence. Happily married to Reed Vreeland of the Guaranty Trust, an American of handsome presence, charm, and kindness, the devoted mother of two sons, she might easily have subsided gracefully into a conventional life of social popularity and domestic bliss. Instead of which, after the Vreelands settled permanently in New York in 1937, she unexpectedly took off on a career in international fashion, the trajectory of which has continued\u2014with an astonishing recent explosion of accumulated velocity\u2014to the present day.\n\nTwenty-five years as fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar for the most part under the redoubtable Carmel Snow, gave her, along with some invaluable human as well as professional experience, just enough rope to achieve at least a local prewar reputation for way-out, offbeat ideas. These were enshrined in a feature of her own called \"Why Don't You?\": an extravaganza masquerading as a column that by now stands out as a minor landmark in the history of American fashion journalism.\n\nOf her subsequent period as editor in chief of Vogue, beginning in 1962, the least that can be said is that it proved she had not only the will to be original but the courage to be provocative. Since 1971, as special consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum, she has gone one better and deeper and acquired fame. Of the three resoundingly successful exhibitions that she has so far organized at the Costume Institute, the third and current one has already attracted well over 730,000 visitors: a record attendance for any exhibition ever held at the museum.\n\nOutside as well as inside the professional fashion world, her name is by now something of a household word. \"Profiles\" of her proliferate, and with good reason, for there is more than enough about her, quite apart from her career, to attract any writer or reader with an understandable faiblesse for a public figure who\u2014in an era of human clich\u00E9s and ready-made celebrities\u2014is also privately, naturally, unmistakably picturesque. Her face, her hair, her figure, her gestures, her voice, her vocabulary, her marvelous laugh, her invariably perfect manners, have all been dissected and described\u2014often with a stunning assurance and accuracy, since she is the sort of human hyperbole that can most effectively be recorded straight, without the need of any poetic license or caricature.\n\nPerhaps, just occasionally, the constant repetition of her originally spontaneous and off-the-cuff remarks (\"Pink is the navy-blue of India\"; \"I want my apartment to look like a garden: a garden in hell!\") may ironically cause one to recall another, hitherto unpublished, remark of hers, made to a close friend and colleague who was planning to produce a book about the famous people he had known and photographed in prewar Europe and America: \"Beware of the legend!\" But in sober truth, an essential part of her personality is her addiction to an oddly poetical form of oral shorthand.\n\nThere are several things about the apartment that accord well enough with anybody's expectations. Of course the \"garden in hell\" turns out to be neither remotely hellish nor particularly horticultural. But quite aside from the flamboyant scarlet-flowered cotton of the walls and curtains of the living room, there is undeniably an abundance of the color red: red carpets, red-lacquered doors, closet linings, and picture frames. True to form, when Vreeland consented to have her rooms photographed for the present article, she threw in a couple of quotable remarks for good measure. \"Anyone who can photograph this place would find the Sistine Chapel a cinch,\" she says. \"It was all done in 1957, and even then it was already a period piece.\"\n\nAs New York apartments go\u2014or went\u2014it is averagely modest in size: principally comprising an entrance hall, L-shaped living room (half living area, half dining area-cum-library), and two bedrooms\u2014her own, and her husband's. Since Reed's death his room has remained just as it was and is occasionally used by their grandsons when they come on visits to New York. But the relatively limited space of the living room has been made the most of. Its focal point is a capacious sofa with an impressive rampart of cushions. There is an infinity of places in which to sit on a variety of seats of different formats, mostly low and all comfortable. The not especially distinguished proportions of the room are deftly disguised by screens and mirrors.\n\nIt is scarcely an apartment for pretentious entertainment, but it is ideally suited for small parties. When Vreeland entertains, she receives her guests and lets them congregate in the living area\u2014the horizontal stroke of the L\u2014of the living room. Then, more often than not, she wanders off herself to the dining area\u2014the perpendicular stroke\u2014for a t\u00EAte-\u00E0-t\u00EAte with a single friend.\n\nThe detailed workmanship of the interior decoration is so superlatively good as to be virtually unnoticeable. Billy Baldwin is one of Vreeland's oldest and closest friends. The prevailing feeling is one of warmth and smoothness, comfort and privacy: an interior ambience so subtly, unemphatically strong and pervasive that one is utterly oblivious\u2014or at most, only casually, sporadically aware\u2014of the existence of the teeming city beyond the windows.\n\nHer bedroom, lined and curtained with a blue-grounded, Spanish-made version of the scarlet-flowered cotton print of the living area of the living room, has something\u2014and more\u2014of the same quality. \"A very happy room to be in,\" she says, \"even when I was ill.\" Knowing that she habitually works at home in the mornings, one looks\u2014but in vain\u2014for something like a writing table in daily use. There is a very pretty red-lacquered Chinese desk not far from the bed, but it is all but submerged in memorabilia, like her dressing table. Her office consists solely of a few square feet of space in her bathroom, close to a telephone.\n\nTo go around the apartment with Diana Vreeland as a guide is an unforgettable experience, and a vital aid if one wishes not merely to absorb to the full its outward and visible charm but also to gain an inkling of its inner, personal significance. There is scarcely an object in her apartment, large or small, that hasn't a close connection with its owner's story.\n\nA vase of her favorite deep-red peonies leads her to list some of her other favorites: \"green nicotiana and zinnias, old-fashioned French striped roses, like tigers and piebald ponies.\"\n\nShe has a way of speaking of plants as though they were animals, and vice versa. This is presumably because flora and fauna equally share two of the appealing qualities which she especially respects in human beings: innate elegance and natural grace.\n\nThere is an enviable and eclectic selection of books in the apartment. In the wall-length bookcase in the dining area are many 17th- and 20th-century French classics, Beckford's Vathek, the 19th-century English Yellow Book, a nostalgic set of antique Baedekers, and a number of particularly favorite books from \"my Oriental department.\"\n\n\"I could live only with books,\" she says. But actually the bookcases in both parts of the living room\u2014like the tables and writing tables\u2014serve also to hold a part of the heterogeneous agglomeration of personal possessions\u2014objets trouv\u00E9s, collections drawings, paintings, and photographs. The collections\u2014Scottish horn, seashells, Staffordshire dogs, Battersea enamel\u2014consist almost in their entirety of gifts from friends. The objects\u2014\"mostly just things of no value that I picked up on travels\"\u2014also include a notable present or two: a little crown, for instance, once worn by the ballerina Karsavina.\n\nAmong the paintings and drawings are pencil portraits of Reed and of their sons by Jean Oberl\u00E9; and an oil painting of their elder son by Nora Auric, \"a surprise birthday present.\" Just outside the front door hangs a beguiling portrait of Vreeland in the bloom of youth, painted by William Acton in Florence in 1934. On the wall of the dining area of the living room is an equally enchanting portrait of her in a turban, which Ned Murray painted \"in Sargent's studio in Tite Street.\" Nearby, there is Augustus John's portrait of her in pencil, not to mention a galaxy of sketches of her by two of her dearest friends, Cecil Beaton and Christian B\u00E9rard. They knew her a good deal better than John did.\n\nOf photographs there is no end. They abound in every room and stand on almost every available piece of furniture. There are family photographs; photographs of old friends, including the Duke of Windsor in a kilt which he had donned, exceptionally, at Diana Vreeland's insistence and with the duchess's encouragement; photographs of colleagues: Snow, Marie-Louise Bousquet, Margaret Case; photographs of women whose beauty has appealed to her, with a life-enhancing, eye-refreshing contingent of the young. The whole array is a touching testimony to their collector's genius for friendship.\n\nHowever, the fact is that Vreeland herself as a human being is more colorful than an apartment, even her own. It is she who emerges naturally as the star of the mise-en-sc\u00E8ne, precisely because it is so truthful a reflection of her private self.\n\nClick here to view a slide show of Vreeland's opulent New York apartment."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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