Free Empress of Fashion by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

that doing so was the key to a happy and successful life. “It’s not just nightmares I can’t stand,” Diana once said to Christopher Hemphill. “If you really want to know . . . I don’t like waking up with an idea stronger than . . . than my own day.” But for all that positive thinking was an American idea, it was also remarkably close to Frederick Dalziel’s resolute denial of his wife’s affairs, his definite preference for the bright side, and his very British insistence that “worse things happen at sea,” when they were going very badly indeed.
    A fter Diana’s death in 1989, a view of her emerged as someone damaged early in life by a great “complex” about her looks, intensified by her sister’s beauty and her mother’s antipathy. In this interpretation Diana became “Diana Vreeland” because of emotional injury inflicted in childhood. “Changing herself covered up a deep wound,” wrote Eleanor Dwight. Insecurity and pain about her ugliness was so great, ran Dwight’s argument, that it induced a lifelong obsession with external appearances that eventually propelled Diana into a position of control where she punished the world by deciding what constituted beauty and ugliness. “In later life,” wrote Dwight, “Diana’s models, her magazine pages and her Costume Institute shows would all benefit from her deep need to wave her wand and transform the ordinary and the flawed into the mesmerizingly beautiful. And one day, rather than being the object of criticism by her classmates and her mother, Diana, the powerful fashion editor, would be the judge and decide who was and who wasn’t beautiful.”
    There is, of course, an element of truth in this. But there is also a danger that this view of Diana unfairly pathologizes her as someone who was driven mainly by a profound and somewhat negative emotional flaw.
    It is perhaps more fruitful to pose a different question and ask: What was it that allowed Diana to survive her mother’s destructive treatment? An alternative answer is that Diana was a vulnerable child who was saved by the power of her imagination. She deployed it with great intelligence to defend herself against Emily’s negative view of her, escaping over and over again to the parallel world of her inner eye in a way that became the basis for much of her later success, which would eventually enable her to challenge conventional ideas about female beauty.
    In the meantime, in the six months between January and June 1918, Diana also discovered that when she took tentative steps to align her fantasies with the real, outer world, the real world saw her so differently that her perception of herself changed too.
    Boris Cyrulnik and others have observed that one of the most common defense mechanisms in unhappy but resilient children is “splitting”—a dividing of the self into a socially acceptable part and a hidden, unacceptable part. “If I can change the way you see me, then I can change the way I feel about myself,” writes Cyrulnik, describing this frame of mind. “I can prove to myself that I am once more in control of my past and I am not such a victim after all.” In 1918 Diana seemed to understand that rather than transform herself, she needed to become the most perfect version of the highly original, imaginative self that she could be. At fourteen she already understood that this would require the courage to stand out, not to mention constant attention to detail and a philosophy of continuous improvement. “I simply must be more perfect. Although I am getting better every day I am not ‘there’ yet,” she wrote. “The damn fool,” she scribbled years later beneath the last entry in her diary, which, apart from one short sentence, fizzled out midsentence in June, incidentally suggesting that the long-haul literary endeavor was not for