Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland
Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2012: In several ways,Empress of Fashionis much like the woman it covers. Like Diana Vreeland (1903&#x2013;1989)--the imperious, transformative editor ofVoguemagazine, then the creator of the Costume Institute at New York&#x2019;s Metropolitan Museum--British journalist Amanda Mackenzie Stuart&#x2019;s biography lasts a long time. And while it isn&#x2019;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&#x2019;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&#x2019;s childhood diaries to her social life (shimmying at Studio 54 in her 80s!) makes this bio, which has the approval of Vreeland&#x2019;s estate, nothing short of--as Mrs. Vreeland herself might say--&#x201C;divine.&#x201D; --Sara Nelson