On the editor who invented what we now think a fashion magazine is — and who watched the form she created begin to decay.
Diana Vreeland was the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar from 1936 to 1962, then the editor-in-chief of American Vogue from 1963 to 1971, then the special consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum from 1971 until her death in 1989. Across these fifty-three years, she was the single most influential editorial voice in American fashion. She invented, in substantial part, the thing we now recognize as the fashion magazine. And she watched, in her later years, the form she had built begin to dismantle itself for reasons she understood clearly and was powerless to stop.
What a fashion magazine was before Vreeland
When Diana Vreeland joined Harper’s Bazaar in 1936, at age thirty-two, the American fashion magazine was a particular kind of document. It showed clothes. It provided short captions identifying the designer and the price. It included some reporting on social events — who had worn what to which dinner — and some advice columns on household management. It was, in structure, closer to a department-store catalog than to what we now understand as a magazine.
The photographs were static and technically competent but editorially neutral. The magazine’s job was to display merchandise. It did not have, in any recognizable sense, an editorial voice. The editors were professionals performing a display function, not cultural interpreters. Magazines competed on the quality of their displays, not on their perspectives.
This is hard to imagine from the contemporary vantage point. The modern fashion magazine is saturated with voice: with editorial positions, with carefully constructed narrative features, with photographic work that makes claims rather than just displaying merchandise. All of this is Vreeland’s doing. She invented it. Before her, it did not exist in the form we know it.
What she did
At Harper’s Bazaar, working under Carmel Snow, Vreeland introduced several innovations that reshaped the form.
First, she introduced the editorial feature. Rather than simply displaying clothes, the magazine began producing narrative visual features — eight- or twelve-page photographic essays that told stories using fashion as the visual medium. A feature on travel, or on a particular decade’s glamour, or on a specific aesthetic mood, would use commissioned photography, carefully chosen models, coordinated styling, and a unifying editorial concept. The clothes appeared in the features but were not the primary subject. The subject was the concept, and the clothes were the vocabulary used to express it.
Second, she introduced the service column with editorial voice. Her “Why Don’t You…?” column, which ran in Harper’s Bazaar from the late 1930s onward, offered reader recommendations in a deliberately eccentric tone. “Why don’t you rinse your blond child’s hair in dead champagne to keep its gold, as they do in France?” was a typical entry. The column was treated by its contemporaries as slightly ridiculous, but it established that a magazine editor could have a personality — witty and idiosyncratic — and that readers would follow a voice whose perspective they found interesting.
Third, she developed the concept of the trend. Before Vreeland, fashion magazines reported on what designers had shown; they did not, in any strong sense, synthesize the reports into directional statements. Vreeland did. She would look at twenty designers’ spring collections, identify the emerging sensibility, and then use the magazine’s resources to dramatize that momentum across its pages. The trend became the magazine’s organizing principle for the season. This reshaped how designers and retailers thought about their own work: they began to calibrate to the trends Vreeland and her peers were naming, which meant the magazines had moved from reporting on fashion to constituting it.
The magazines had moved from reporting on fashion to constituting it. This was Vreeland’s achievement.
Vogue, 1963–1971
When Vreeland moved to Vogue in 1963, she took these innovations and pressed them further than anyone had thought possible. Her Vogue was the most visually ambitious fashion magazine of the twentieth century. She commissioned photography from Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, David Bailey, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin — essentially the entire generation of photographers who would shape the medium for decades. She gave them extraordinary creative latitude. A typical Vreeland-era Vogue feature was shot over multiple days, on location, with an aesthetic concept that the photographer had developed in conversation with Vreeland herself.
The editorial concepts were often unusual by any conventional measure. Vreeland sent photographers to Japan, to India, to the Sahara. She commissioned features on obscure historical periods, on subcultures, on aesthetic problems that interested her personally. She was, in her own description, not primarily interested in clothes; she was interested in style, which she understood as a much broader cultural phenomenon. The clothes were one vocabulary for expressing style; the culture as a whole was another.
Consider the October 1965 issue: Vreeland put Marisa Berenson and Lauren Hutton in a spread photographed in the Yucatán, amid Mayan ruins, wearing pieces that had no narrative relationship to the location except the one Vreeland invented through sheer editorial will. The result was not an ad for Mexico or for the clothes. It was a visual argument that the world was a strange and beautiful place and that fashion was one instrument for perceiving it. No previous editor had attempted that claim at that scale.
This approach produced a magazine that felt, to its readers, like participation in a larger cultural project. Vogue was not just telling them what to buy; it was telling them what the culture was doing, what was interesting, what was beautiful, what was coming next. The magazine’s authority derived from the sophistication of its interpretation, not from any commercial arrangement.
This caused sustained tension with the magazine’s publishers, who wanted more focus on merchandise and less on concept. The tension intensified through the 1960s. By 1971, after a series of expensive editorial projects that Vogue’s publisher considered commercially inadequate, Vreeland was fired. She was sixty-eight years old. She would never work at a fashion magazine again.
What happened after
Vreeland’s successors at Vogue — first Grace Mirabella, then later Anna Wintour — operated in a different register. Mirabella’s Vogue was more commercial, more service-oriented, less conceptually ambitious. Wintour’s Vogue restored some of the glamour but in a different mode: more celebrity-focused, more fashion-industry-integrated, less interested in the broader cultural interpretation that had been Vreeland’s territory.
This was not a decline in talent. Mirabella and Wintour are both significant editors. It was a change in what the magazine was for. Vreeland had operated on the theory that a fashion magazine’s job was to be a cultural interpreter; her successors operated on the theory that its job was to be a commercial platform serving industry needs. The two theories produce different magazines.
The broader industry followed the same trajectory. The Vreeland-era ambition — the expensive editorial features, the cultural reporting, the committed editorial voice — required budgets and commercial patience that the industry increasingly could not provide. By the 1990s, almost no American fashion magazine was operating in the full Vreeland mode. By the 2010s, the mode had essentially disappeared from mainstream American fashion publishing.
Vreeland’s lesson
In her later years, Vreeland gave a series of interviews and wrote an autobiography in which she reflected on what had happened to the form she had invented. She was not nostalgic; she understood the economic pressures that had changed the industry. But she was clear-eyed about what had been lost.
Her core observation was that fashion magazines had stopped interpreting and had started serving. Serving the industry, serving the advertisers, serving the celebrities, serving whatever commercial need presented itself. The interpretation — the cultural work of looking at the world and saying what it meant — had been mostly abandoned because it did not pay.
Vreeland thought this was a genuine loss, and not just for the magazines. The broader cultural conversation about style, fashion, beauty, and the evolution of taste depended on the magazines to host it. When the magazines stopped hosting the conversation, the conversation did not move to a different venue; it largely dissipated. What replaced it, in her view, was a series of commercial transactions in which various parties sold various things to readers without anyone doing the interpretive work of explaining what the things were for or why they mattered.
She said this, with characteristic bluntness, in an interview given close to the end of her life: the industry had become, she thought, a very beautiful shop with no one in it who knew what was actually for sale.
What this teaches us now
Vreeland died in 1989. The underlying pattern she identified — the shift from interpretation to service, from cultural ambition to commercial transaction — has accelerated dramatically in the period since her death.
What we are trying to do in Frivolity is, explicitly, a small attempt at the Vreeland-era editorial posture. We write long features. We develop editorial positions. We treat clothes as a vocabulary for larger cultural concerns rather than as the primary subject of their own display. We have a voice and are willing to defend it against the pressures toward blandness that the contemporary commercial environment creates.
We are not going to succeed at the scale Vreeland did. The commercial and cultural conditions that made her Vogue possible no longer exist. But we think the project itself — the interpretation rather than the service — is worth continuing in whatever form the current moment allows. Vreeland showed what was possible. Her immediate successors abandoned most of it. We are trying, in a smaller way, to pick up what was left behind and see how far it can still carry. The answer, we suspect, is further than most observers believe.