Diana Vreeland’s pearls of wisdom gleam in a new book, Bon Mots

By Laird Borrelli-Persson4 March 2020

Her son, Alexander Vreeland, curated over a hundred of her proclamations in the collection, which furnishes good advice along with gorgeous illustrations.

Alexander Vreeland’s collection of his grandmother’s quotes, Diana Vreeland: Bon Mots, could almost be categorized as an audiobook. So distinctive was this editor and curator’s personality, so succinct and clear her point of view, that it’s virtually impossible not to “hear” such quips as: “A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika.” And that’s not by chance—Diana, the Harper’s Bazaar alum turned Vogue editor-in-chief was an audiophile. “My grandmother would wake up in the morning and call her office, and she would dictate memos and letters. It was all an audio experience, so these are all spoken words,” says Alexander, who chased all but two of the hundred-plus quotes in the book (edited down from a thousand) to their original sources.

“This illustration is of my grandmother sitting at her big black desk at Vogue. Her walls were covered with bulletin boards of images that inspired her. The carpet was leopard print. A phone was always within reach.”

A “strong, long relationship of ease,” is how Alexander categorizes his connection with his extraordinary grandmother, whom he knew “was very different from everybody else. I had plenty of benchmarks to establish the fact that she was quite remarkable,” he says. Though Diana has often been categorized as a sort of oracle who spoke in pronouncements, she was a good listener, and very accepting, he says. “One of the things that really struck me as amazing was the fact that she never told me what I should do with my life,” notes Alexander. “She never told me who I should go out with, or where I should live...all those kinds of things that parents and grandparents specialize in. But she would ask me what I liked in music, and what I liked in movies, and what I liked in the world.”

“My grandmother adored leopards: the way they moved, the way they looked, their raw energy, their inherent beauty.”

Diana, who had striking looks, was the daughter of a conventional beauty, after whom her younger sister took. “I was always her ugly little monster,” Diana wrote of her mother in her memoir, D.V. By calling on her inner resources, and through sheer will power, Diana became the woman she wanted to be and thereafter led by example. “She felt very strongly that she was a creature of her own creation,” says Alexander, “and I think that is a wonderful message today for people to be who they want to be. And I think that’s how she saw her own life.” It’s possible to describe the editor as an enabler—in the most positive sense of the world. Diana surrounded herself with young people, and many people credit their careers to her encouragement. “Manolo Blahnik,” Alexander relates, “speaks about her telling him to concentrate on the extremities and to pursue that. And he saw that as being hats, gloves, and shoes!”

“My grandmother understood that fashion is not about possessions, but about living.”

Diana was already being mythologized in her time as an oracle, as a stentorian despot, as a visionary, but that’s not how Alexander knew her in person, nor what he found through interviews with her colleagues, or through her writings. Bon Mots is at once optimistic and realistic. The same cannot be said for Kay Thompson’s caricature of Diana, as the snappy editrix Maggie Prescott in the 1957 film Funny Face. If Prescott was thinking pink, Diana, the character’s real life inspiration, was looking for silver linings. “You don’t find gossipy put-downs” in her writing, Alexander 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.”

Diana never lost sight of her responsibilities, however. Alexander stresses that his grandmother’s legacy must be seen “in a framework of tremendous amount of work. It’s not like she had a salon and she’d sit around and philosophize about, you know, fun hats all day long. [There was a] tremendous amount of personal work involved.”

“My grandmother would have loved the Eurostar.”

In editing Diana Vreeland: Bon Mots, Alexander wanted to introduce Diana to a new generation and to form connections with people. Though some quotes might sound, in his words, a bit “goofy,” there’s straight-talking wisdom to be found here as well. “I didn’t want it to be just a bunch of fashion references about, you know, different hairdos or whatever,” he says, pointing out that the books deals with deep topics too, like loss. “Empowerment for women is [so] important today; women inspiring young people today is so important,” Alexander says. His hope is that Bon Mots transmits a positive message—that when it’s read, “you hear a voice of someone saying, these are the important things. This is what matters.” Diana delivers words to live by.

“My grandmother was very proud of having been born in Paris. She felt that being from Paris gave one a life-long connection with creativity, art, and beauty.”