Telluride Film Festival #38: Devil Wears Prada For Real

Probably the most delightful and funny film I had an opportunity to see was Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, the iconic fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and designer for the Fashion Institute at the Metropolitan Modern Art.

The film was made by her granddaughter in law, Lisa Immordino-Vreeland, who also wrote a book on the iconic Fashion Editor. Immordino-Vreeland had no formal training in film but a good team behind her and her film was the best received by any audience at the festival I was a part of. It is a fun, honest look at a real women, which was refreshing since most of the women I was seeing on screen have only been  helpless and desperate.

The real Diana Vreeland has inspired many a fictitious fashion editor such as in The Devil Wears Prada...

Alli McGraw...

who was an assistant to Vreeland actually threw back the editor's coat when it was tossed at her and Vreeland proclaimed her, "Such a rude girl."

Aurdrey Hepburn dealt with a Vreeland inspired Editor in Funny Face...

By the way, Kay Thompson who played the Editor in Funny Face is also the author of...

Ahh the "connection" in Hollywood!



Diana Vreeland is as extravagant, off the wall as any of these characters. maybe more. One of her assistance saying that if she got a wild hair for orchids to be flown to the North Pole for a shoot, by gosh they were!

In the documentary, Vreeland...

critiqued Adolf Hitler's fashion sense, declaring the little black mustach was just not working,

said the best thing to come out of Wolrd War 2....

was the bikini, which she is credited with bringing to America...

She also popularized the jean, no joke.

Vreeland had two sons, who are interviewed in the documantary. One son said, "I wish I had any mother other than this one." if that is any indication where the sacrifices were made for a women who transformed our fashion and our culture in the mid decades of this century.