Diana Vreeland After Diana Vreeland

The Palazzo Fortuny is set to host the first major exhibition in Italy dedicated to the life and work of Diana Vreeland in a three month long show opening Saturday, 10 March. Vreeland's work and legacy will be presented and examined in a myriad of ways, from the display of garments to her articles for various publications. Having established herself as a lynchpin of Harper's Bazaar through her column writing, she stepped down to take the reins at Vogue as editor-in-chief. Her influence in the world of fashion and magazine publishing cannot be understated, and she is often still referred to by those circles as "The High Priestess of Fashion."

This moniker is not one that she gained undeservedly, considering her twenty five years at Harper's, followed by eight at the helm of Vogue, were then succeeded by her appointment as "Special Consultant for the Costume Institute" at New York's Metropolitan Museum. Amongst the articles on display at the exhibition, curated by Judith Clark and Marina Luisa Frisa, will be iconic pieces from Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, Missoni and Pucci amongst others which helped to shape 20th Century Fashion.

The exhibition will run through 26 June at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. On the occasion of the show's opening on 10 March, Venice's University of Visual Arts (IUAV) organizes A disciplina della moda fra museo e fashion curating, a symposium organized with the London College of Fashion (University of the Arts London) and in collaboration with the Centre for Fashion Studies (Stockholm University).

Where to Put the Ideas - Re-Curating Diana Vreeland
Judith Clark

The question raised when curating an exhibition of the work (and life) of Diana Vreeland, and more importantly when designing it, is where to put the ideas, or rather what kind of interpretation suits her work. I have long been a defender of Diana Vreeland, working within the world, not of fashion magazines, but of the museum, and my position has been mainly a sort of stubborn reaction to British dress historians whose criticism of Vreeland is often joyless. My interest begins at the end of her life when she was Special Consultant within the Costume Institute and so with what is now considered her curatorial work. In brief, her attitude to dramatically styled fashion that created iconic double page spreads for Harpers and Vogue was criticized as anachronistic frivolity when applied to historic costume within a museum setting by dress historians who believed this corrupted the ability for dresses to clearly and accurately represent the age in which they had been created [1].

As an exhibition-maker and not a dress historian I have a perspective that is perhaps new in relation to Diana Vreeland, which is that I take her mannequin gestures, her abstracted heads, her huge props, her music, her perfumed halls just as seriously as I take her well documented "mis"-accessorizing of the gowns and the verisimilitude of the historical 'look'. I have in fact been seduced by her audacity to take nothing as given however old it might be, within what was a very narrow vocabulary and in many ways still seems so today.

Diana Vreeland After Diana Vreeland wants to imitate Vreeland, to work in the manner of, as though mimicking a school of art, and to see what we might make of her now — now that so much of her curatorial idiom is seen in museums everywhere. It has been difficult to make anything in fact look very different or new within this exhibition such has been the pervasive use of her distinctive style within museum displays world-wide.

Now that fashion exhibitions have become blockbuster spectacles, and it is no longer exceptional for a living designer to have a show, it is more interesting than ever before to look at what Vreeland was doing. Now, when the shock of her work has been absorbed, to design an exhibition of her work is to exercise restraint not excess.

Representing her — commissioning wigs, plinths, mannequins and props, wanting to try to get her "look" right — takes us back to square one. Curatorial theory is now too established, too academic for us to act unintentionally, and the question might now be, how intentionally was she acting? How much precision was there in her creative delirium?

Diana Vreeland provoked a discipline to collide with its limits. Dress historians and curators were asked to address the difference between what was considered until then "neutral" historicized display (however disingenuous) and over-interpretation, or worse over-styling which is not a risk that other arts run. Within art criticism there was (certainly until recently) a conviction as to where the limits of the work of art were. Usually somewhere around the frame. Dress is always incomplete. It is always asking of the curator to complete it, with a surrogate body, a head, arms and legs that emerge from the dress. It is interesting to consider [within dress] what might dilute or corrupt a silhouette. In 2000 Robert Wilson took the question to its extreme with La Rosa perfectly crafted "invisible" mannequins for the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim — nothing visible other than the dress. As visitors we completed the mannequins in our contemporary minds; I am convinced that we edited out the 1970s styling that accompanied some of the outfits in their initial design — so why was Vreeland literally completing the dress according to contemporary fashionable criteria so disturbing?

For the purpose of this exhibition, the question is how does her distinctive if controversial voice come through in the presentation of objects: both in their selection and how they are staged; an exhibition that has to contain within in it the 12 exhibitions that Vreeland curated at the Met. Re-created exhibitions is a concept rehearsed and debated within the art world, but never in the world of dress history, and it is strange that this discipline should have lagged so far behind. It has become a motif within a debate around a creative hierarchy between artist and curator, and curator as "maker." If the curator becomes an author then a whole exhibition might be quoted.

[1.] I have written about those years in an essay entitled Re-styling History: Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute pp.225-244 in "Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel", Abrams 2011, associated with this project commissioned and edited by Lisa Immordino Vreeland.