Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

(Harper, $35)

“Cleopatra could not have been more fascinating,” said Craig Seligman in Bloomberg.com. Diana Vreeland, the fashion impresario who helped shape the industry’s aspirations for decades, was a larger-than-life figure from the moment she was hired at Harper’s Bazaar in 1936. Across the following 35 years, she insisted on having the soles of her shoes polished, outfitting her offices with leopard skin, and taking a swig of scotch with her midday peanut butter sandwiches. But she also “used fashion to project an entire worldview” built on her devotion to inventiveness and personal freedom. No one has ever doubted how influential Vreeland was during her 1963–71 run as editor-in-chief of Vogue. But this “assiduously” researched new book may just convince you that she was “one of the 20th century’s premier figures.”

Vreeland “learned early on that controlling her own image was the quickest way to getting what she wanted,” said Noreen Malone in TNR.com. Born in 1903 in Paris but not raised there, as sheclaimed, the young Diana had a privileged but hardly frictionless Manhattan upbringing: Her socialite mother didn’t hesitate to pronounce her oldest daughter ugly. But Diana decided as a teenager that, instead of searching for female idols, she would become an idol to others. That strategy paid off when Harper’s Bazaar made her its fashion editor. She built her long career on a capacity to offer women readers a “fathomable road map to becoming a better, more up-to-date version of oneself.”

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Vreeland was farsighted, though, in fashion matters only, said Robin Givhan in TheDailyBeast.com. She embraced the hippie aesthetic while ignoring the politics behind it, and was prone to casual displays of anti-Semitism. Her disregard for budgetary concerns led to her eventual dismissal at Vogue, and despite her fruitful work as a consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she lived her final years in reclusion. Author Amanda Mackenzie Stuart misses nothing: She “dissects Vreeland’s life with the analytic fervor that might be reserved for a battle-weary general or a poet laureate.”