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Diana Vreeland

American fashion columnist and editor (1903–1989)

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Early life

Born Diana Dalziel in Paris in 1903, she lived at 5 avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne (known as Avenue Foch post-World War I). Vreeland was the eldest daughter of an American socialite mother, Emily Key Hoffman, and a British stockbroker father, Frederick Young Dalziel. Hoffman was a descendant of George Washington's brother, as well as a cousin of Francis Scott Key. She was also a distant cousin of writer and socialite Pauline de Rothschild (née Potter). Vreeland had one younger sister, Alexandra (1907-1999), who later married Sir Alexander Davenport Kinloch, 12th Baronet (1902–1982). Their daughter Emily Lucy Kinloch married Lt.-Col. Hon. Hugh Waldorf Astor (1920–1999), the second son of John Jacob Astor, 1st Baron Astor of Hever and his wife, Lady Violet Mary Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound.

Vreeland's family emigrated to the United States at the outbreak of World War I, moving to 15 East 77th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City, where they became prominent society figures. Vreeland was sent to dancing school as a pupil of Michel Fokine, the only Imperial Ballet master ever to leave Russia, and later of Louis Harvy Chalif. She performed in Anna Pavlova's Gavotte at Carnegie Hall. In January 1922, she was featured in the pages of her future magazine, Vogue, in a roundup of socialites and their cars. The story read, "Such motors as these accelerate the social whirl. Miss Diana Dalziel, one of the most attractive debutantes of the winter, is shown entering her Cadillac."

On March 1, 1924, Diana Dalziel married Thomas Reed Vreeland (1899–1966), a banker and international financier, at St. Thomas Church in New York. The couple had two sons: Tim (Thomas Reed Vreeland, Jr.) born 1925, who became an architect, as well as a professor of architecture at the University of New Mexico and then UCLA, and Frecky (Frederick Dalziel Vreeland), born 1927, who would become U.S. ambassador to Morocco. A week before Diana's wedding, The New York Times reported that her mother had been named co‑respondent in the divorce proceedings of Sir Charles Ross and his second wife, Patricia. The ensuing scandal estranged Vreeland from her mother, who died in September 1927 in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

After the Vreelands' honeymoon, they moved to Brewster, New York, where they raised their two sons and remained until 1929, when they relocated to 17 Hanover Terrace, Regent's Park, London, previously the home of Wilkie Collins and Edmund Gosse. In London, she danced with the Tiller Girls and met Cecil Beaton, who became a lifelong friend. Like Syrie Maugham and Elsie de Wolfe, society women who ran their own boutiques, Diana operated a lingerie business near Berkeley Square. Her clients included Wallis Simpson and Mona Williams. She often visited Paris, where she would buy her clothes, mostly from Chanel, whom she had met in 1926. She was one of fifteen American women presented to King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace on May 18, 1933. In 1935, her husband's job brought them back to New York, where they lived for the remainder of their lives.

As Vreeland would later recall, "Before I went to work for Harper's Bazaar, in 1936, I had been leading a wonderful life in Europe. That meant traveling, seeing beautiful places, having marvelous summers, studying and reading a great deal of the time."

A biographical documentary of Vreeland, The Eye has to Travel, debuted in September 2012 at the Angelika Theater in New York City.

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