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.

The first Vreeland book to focus on her three decades at Harper’s Bazaar, where the legendary editor honed her singular take on fashion. In 1936, Harper’s Bazaar editor in chief Carmel Snow made a decision that changed fashion forever when she invited a stylish London transplant named Diana Vreeland to join her magazine. Vreeland created “Why Don’t You?”—an illustrated column of irreverent advice for chic living. Soon she was named the magazine’s fashion editor—a position that Richard Avedon later famously credited Vreeland with inventing. The troika of Snow, legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch, and Vreeland formed a creative collaboration that continued Harper’s Bazaar’s dominance as America’s leading fashion magazine. As World War II changed women’s role in society, Vreeland’s love for fashion and endless imagination provided exciting, modern imagery for this new paradigm. This book covers Vreeland’s three-decade tenure at Bazaar, revealing how Vreeland reshaped the role of the fashion editor by introducing styling, creative direction, and visual storytelling. Her innovative perspective and creative working relationships with photographers such as Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lillian Bassman, and Hoyningen-Huene brought the American woman into a modern world. Through more than 300 images from the magazine, this book shows how Vreeland’s work not only influenced her readership, but also forged the path for modern fashion storytelling that endures today.

Here she tells how Buffalo Bill taught her to ride, describes how she redefined the standards of attractiveness with the quirky models she brought to Vogue in the sixties, disparages her own looks, relates her search for the perfect red, and discourses on the nature of elegance. Whatever her subject, from backaches to nostalgia, from Paris to New York, from marriage to dinner parties, from Clark Gable to Swifty Lazar, you never want her to stop. For D.

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's signature style and revolutionary approach to design changed women's fashion forever. Featuring handwritten text paired with sweet illustrations this ebook sheds new light on the woman behind some of the last century's most iconic designs—from her impoverished childhood in an orphanage to her dreams of becoming a singer and her tumultuous love affairs with Europe's elite. Brimming with excerpts from Chanel's own letters and diaries, these pages reveal the passion and vision of one of the most celebrated fashion designers of all time.

Advice with wit and wisdom on a variety of topics from makeup to dressing up, shopping and entertaining.

After nearly a lifetime spent in the Industry, author and fashion insider Simon Doonan is ready to let you in on a little secret: his peers in this multibillion-dollar industry are just as nutty as the denizens of your local loony bin. In The Asylum, an unabashedly hilarious collection of autobiographical essays, Doonan, the creative ambassador for Barneys New York, tells the real-life stories of glamorous madness and stylish insanity. Doonan has witnessed models unable to work for fear of ghosts, gone deep-sea fishing with a couturier pal and his jailbird companion, and watched Anna Wintour remain perfectly calm while the ceiling fell—literally—in the middle of Fashion Week. Once you start looking, he says, you’ll notice telltale signs of lunacy everywhere. Style insiders see patterns and trends in everything; they suffer from outsize personality disorders and delusions of grandeur; and of course, they have a predilection for theatrical makeup and artfully destroyed clothing. No one is more suited to the asylum than the truly die-hard fashionista—after all, eccentricity and extremism are the foundations of great style. With his gimlet eye for the absurd and a love for eccentricity, Doonan’s personal and professional stories never fail to entertain. “The David Sedaris of the style universe” (The Boston Globe) gives us the scoop on the kooky, cutthroat—but always fabulous—fashion world, and proves himself one of the sharpest humorists writing today.

"Why Don't You . . . tie black tulle bows on your wrists?have a yellow satin bed entirely quilted in butterflies?remember how delicious champagne cocktails are after tennis or golf? Indifferent champagne can be used for these." For more than half a century, Diana Vreeland, doyenne of American fashion, beguiled, awed, astonished, and was adored by almost anyone who created or wore clothes. Irresistible and flamboyant, socialite Mrs. T. Reed Vreeland began her now legendary twenty-five-year tenure at "Harper's Bazaar writing a column of audacious advice: extravagant ideas that helped redefine American women and twentieth-century fashion. Her commentary created a fashion frenzy when it began appearing in "Harper's Bazaar in 1936. Her ideas were simultaneously stylish and outrageous, and have as much appeal today as they did decades ago. Here for the first time, John Esten has compiled one hundred of Mrs. Vreeland's kaleidoscopic "Why Don't You . . . ?" suggestions, and pairedthem with the breathtaking works of such renowned photographers and artists as Munkacsi, Dahl-Wolfe, Hoyningen-Heune, and Berard, which further capture the dazzling legacy of whimsy, elegance, and style of Mrs. Vreeland's "Bazaar years.