This evocative collection celebrates the prescience, wit, and enduring relevance of a fashion legend.
Diana Vreeland's insightful edicts and evocative aphorisms remain her strongest legacy. She looked at life as a romantic and lived through dreams and imagination. Showing leadership, vision, and timeless wit, this book celebrates her visionary words that not only transformed the world of fashion, but also gave us sage advice to live by.
Sourced and edited by her grandson Alexander, Diana Vreeland: Bon Mots covers Vreeland's incisive views of subjects such as allure, fashion, and style ("I mean, a new dress doesn't get you anywhere; it's the life you're living in the dress"); beauty ("The neck is the beginning and end of looking like anybody"); age ("The quickest way to show your age is to try to look young"); color ("Black is the hardest color to get right--except for gray"); and her powerfully creative way of thinking ("I'm looking for the suggestion of something I've never seen") Brought to life by illustrator Luke Edward Hall, Bon Mots vividly displays Mrs. Vreeland's original thought and speech, which is equally as inspiring and relevant now as it was then.
"This volume is devoted to the musings of Diana Vreeland, the one-of-a-kind star in the fashion firmament who left her prescient, edict-filled mark on magazines, the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute, and a generation (or two) of dedicated followers of fashion."
—SOCIETY TEXAS
"TOP 10 pick in Spring Announcement issue: Diana Vreeland: Bon Mots: Words of Wisdom from the Empress of Fashion, Edited by Alexander Vreeland, illus. by Luke Edward Hall. Rizzoli, Mar. 17 ($35, ISBN 978-0-8478-6471-3) The grandson of fashion leader Diana Vreeland gathers her advice to live by, such as, "A new dress doesn't get you anywhere; it's the life you're living in the dress." —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Anyone who loves fashion and has had an affection or attraction to "the empress of fashion" will undoubtedly fall in love with this book and come back to it time after time to remind themselves of just how incredible this woman was in real life." —NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS
"'You don’t find gossipy put-downs' in [Diana's] writing, Alexander [Vreeland] says. 'She really didn’t say things unless it could be positive; she wasn’t a big critic. She wasn’t trashing people, and she wasn’t speaking badly about things. If she went to somebody’s home and she didn’t like what it looked like, but they had a beautiful bouquet of flowers, she would just rave about how beautiful the flowers were. She would find something to speak about that was positive, and just let the rest go.'" —VOGUE
