DianaVreeland-Film.com

DIANA VREELAND: THE EYE HAS TO TRAVEL is an intimate portrait and a vibrant celebration of one of the most influential women of the 20th century, an enduring icon whose influence changed the face of fashion, beauty, art, publishing and culture itself forever.

Along the way, the story of Vreeland illustrates the evolution of women into roles of power and prominence throughout the 20th century, and travels through some of the century’s greatest historical and cultural eras, including Paris’ Belle Epoque, New York in the roaring twenties, and London in the swinging sixties. It also spans such historical events as the great wars, the flights of Lindbergh, the romance of Wallis and Windsor, the Kennedy inauguration, and the freewheeling spirit of the 1960′s youthquake, and the advent of countless fashion revolutions from the bikini to the blue jean.

Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) was the 20th Century’s greatest arbiter of style, an exotic and vibrant character who, during her fifty-year reign as the “Empress of Fashion,” dazzled the world with her unique vision of style high and low. She launched Twiggy, advised Jackie O, and coined some of fashion’s most eloquent proverbs such as “the bikini is the biggest thing since the atom bomb.” She lived a vibrant and remarkable life, and as the star performer in her own drama, Diana began writing the script for it at an early age.

It all started during the Belle Époque: modernism, Art Nouveau, the Ballets Russes, and haute couture. Diana was fascinated with the glamorous and eccentric characters of this era who paraded through her parents’ living room in Paris. But her childhood was also marked by the loveless relationship she had with her mother, an American beauty. “I was always her ugly little monster,” Diana recalled. As World War I started, the family moved back to America. Diana, forced to speak English, developed a stutter and failed in school. Eventually she dropped out and found refuge in dance, a true passion.

If Diana felt insecure about her looks, she never wallowed in it. Instead, she created her own world in which style, originality, and allure were supreme. She invented a dazzling persona that embraced every moment of life as an adventure, whether she was witnessing the coronation of George V or riding horses with Buffalo Bill in Wyoming. At 19, she captured the heart of one of the most handsome and eligible bachelors, Reed Vreeland – “the most ravishing, devastating killer-diller,” as she put it later. Together they settled in London and started a life full of romantic trips around Europe in their Bugatti coupé: Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Rome. During these years, she cultivated her love of couture and became friends with all the couturiers in Paris.

Diana’s unexpected career in fashion began upon her return to New York in 1936 when Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, noticed her unique style and look at a party. Diana was hired as Bazaar’s fashion editor, and she immediately became renowned for her provocative “Why don’t you?” column that dared readers to open their imagination and live their dreams. She would write homilies such as, “Why don’t you rinse your blond child’s hair in dead Champagne to keep its gold,” or “have a white monkey-fur bedcover mounted on yellow velvet?” Through her column and photography spreads, Diana lent the magazine pages of her amazing flair for beauty, high and low. Photographer Richard Avedon, who affectionately called her his “crazy aunt,” exclaimed, “she was and remains the only genius fashion editor.”

After twenty-five years at Harper’s Bazaar, Diana resigned and took over as Vogue editor-in-chief. It was the swinging sixties, where – as Diana would say – “you could have a bump on your nose, it made no difference so long as you had a marvelous body and carriage.” Uniqueness was being celebrated and Vreeland’s transformation of Vogue was at the vanguard of this cultural revolution. The pages of Vogue exploded with fashion, art, music, film; this became its “golden years.” It was suddenly a young, new and exciting magazine, where models had personalities and fashion spoke to all women. Diana became a living legend, with her striking silhouette, her jet-black hair, and her peculiar voice, somewhere between high society and street slang. Her famous red living room, “a garden in hell,” became the headquarters for New York arts and society. Diana would look upon these years as her most glorious ones; she had finally found an era fit for her vivid and wild imagination.

Shortly after the death of her husband, Diana was abruptly fired from Vogue in 1971, turning the fashion world upside down. Rumors had it that she was so distraught that she took to bed for a year, but Diana was far from having her last dance. In 1972, at age seventy, she started working at the Met’s Costume Institute where she set new standards for exhibiting fashion worldwide, awakening an institution that had been forever sleepy. Like a film director, she created sets in which elaborate fantasies came to life. Her controversial approach – based on drama and theatre sometimes more than historical fact – was criticized by some historians, but they were silenced when her shows brought in huge crowds and put the Costume Institute on the map. Diana blended fact with fantasy throughout her career, even once exclaiming that Charles Lindberg had flown over her lawn in Brewster on his way to Paris. Upon being asked if her story was fact or fiction, she responded, “Faction!”
 
Diana Vreeland was the oracle of fashion for much of the 20th century, inviting us to join her on a voyage of perpetual reinvention and take part in the adventure of life. Through her trained and diligent eye, she opened the door of our minds and gave us the freedom to imagine. Her images and accomplishments are as fresh and relevant now as they were then, and her spirit is just a vibrant and relevant today. As Jackie Onassis once put it: “To say Diana Vreeland has dealt only with fashion trivializes what she has done. She has commented on the times in a wise and witty manner. She has lived a life.”

I fell in love with Diana Vreeland as a young college student, mesmerized by her pages in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. I later fell in love with her grandson and became a member of the Vreeland family. Although I never got to meet Mrs. Vreeland, I became fully immersed in her world. I have been given the confidence and trust of her family and friends, as well as access to Diana Vreeland’s archives, and the archives of Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and The Costume Institute.

When I was conducting research for a book I wrote on Mrs. Vreeland, I realized that her real strengths and subtleties needed to be conveyed in a three-dimensional platform in which she could come alive. Film is the most obvious and effective medium to communicate Mrs. Vreeland’s unique and visual journey, so I decided to make a documentary about her fabled life.

DIANA VREELAND: THE EYE HAS TO TRAVEL is more than just an intimate portrait of the legendary fashion icon. It captures Vreeland’s life visually through a multitude of media including film, photography, animation, graphics, text, sound, and music. Vreeland’s own voice and persona — strong, eloquent and often much exaggerated — guides us through her life, adventures, accomplishments, and passions.

Diana Vreeland was much more than just “the empress of fashion.” She used her magazines and costume shows as a platform to convey her imaginative perspective on life. Her philosophy was much deeper than what she put forward in her pages at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Her perseverance and determination showed us that we could dare to think in a different way. She has reminded us that it is important to imagine how life can be different. She lived for new experiences and new ideas, and was able to transmit that to us. She used her passion for the world as an instrument to let us expand and enrich our minds, as I set out to do with this film.

 

More Background On DianaVreeland-Film.com

DianaVreeland-Film.com was created as the official website for Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, the acclaimed documentary about one of the most influential figures in 20th-century fashion. Released theatrically in the United States in 2012 after making its festival debut the previous year, the film explored the life, career, personality, and enduring influence of Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor associated with Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Like many official film websites of its period, DianaVreeland-Film.com served several purposes simultaneously. It introduced the documentary, provided biographical information about its subject, explained the filmmakers’ approach, collected press coverage, and helped build an audience for the film as it moved from festivals into theatrical distribution.

The site was particularly well suited to its subject. Vreeland did not simply report on fashion; she believed in presentation, fantasy, visual impact, and the creation of an atmosphere. A dedicated website gave the documentary another platform through which audiences could enter that world.

Today, the domain also has value as a record of the marketing and cultural environment surrounding an independently distributed fashion documentary from the early 2010s.

The Film Behind DianaVreeland-Film.com

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel was written and directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt, and Frédéric Tcheng. Lisa Immordino Vreeland was especially important to the project because she had married Diana Vreeland's grandson Alexander Vreeland and had consequently become immersed in the Vreeland family and its history.

Immordino Vreeland never personally knew Diana, who died in 1989. Her interest instead developed through family stories and research. While working on a book about Vreeland, she concluded that a printed biography alone could not adequately communicate a woman whose impact depended so heavily upon images, speech, movement, fashion, photography, and personality.

Film offered a solution.

The resulting documentary combines archival film, magazine photography, interviews, animation, graphics, music, and recordings of Vreeland herself. Rather than simply assembling a chronological résumé, the filmmakers attempted to recreate something of the energy associated with their subject.

That distinction is important. Diana Vreeland's career could easily have produced a conventional documentary about magazine publishing. The Eye Has to Travel instead uses fashion history as an entrance into a broader story about imagination, ambition, self-invention, celebrity, publishing, art, and changing ideas about women and cultural authority.

Who Was Diana Vreeland?

Diana Vreeland was born Diana Dalziel in Paris in 1903 and became one of the most recognizable tastemakers of the 20th century.

Her career in fashion journalism began at Harper's Bazaar in 1936. She initially attracted attention with the imaginative "Why Don't You?" feature, which presented readers with extravagant, playful, and sometimes deliberately impractical suggestions. The column established an important part of the Vreeland persona: fashion was not merely about purchasing clothes. It was about imagination.

She remained with Harper's Bazaar until 1962, eventually becoming one of the magazine's defining editorial figures.

Vreeland then moved to Vogue, becoming editor-in-chief during a decade of enormous cultural transformation. Fashion was increasingly interacting with youth culture, popular music, photography, cinema, celebrity, sexuality, and changing attitudes toward class and social convention. Vreeland understood that shift unusually well.

Her editorial vision emphasized personalities as much as garments. Models could be distinctive rather than conventionally perfect. Youthfulness, eccentricity, movement, fantasy, and unconventional beauty could become editorial assets.

Her influence extended beyond magazines. After leaving Vogue in 1971, Vreeland began working with the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in 1972. The Met credits her with creating a memorable series of exhibitions that helped galvanize audiences and establish standards for fashion exhibitions internationally. Among them were The World of Balenciaga in 1973, The Glory of Russian Costume in 1976, and Vanity Fair in 1977.

This phase of her career is crucial to understanding both the documentary and its website. Vreeland helped advance the idea that fashion could be interpreted publicly as culture, spectacle, history, and art rather than treated simply as a commercial industry.

From Personal Research to Documentary

Lisa Immordino Vreeland's relationship to her subject gave the film unusual access.

As a member of the extended Vreeland family, she could draw upon family memories and archives while also researching Diana's professional world. She had access to material associated with Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, the Costume Institute, and the people who had known or worked with Vreeland.

The documentary consequently contains an impressive collection of voices from fashion and culture.

Participants and archival appearances include figures such as Manolo Blahnik, David Bailey, Bob Colacello, Anjelica Huston, Ali MacGraw, Oscar de la Renta, Diane Sawyer, Veruschka, and others. Vreeland herself remains the most memorable presence because existing interviews and recordings allow her unmistakable voice and personality to shape the narrative.

The production team also had considerable experience with fashion filmmaking. Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng had worked on Valentino: The Last Emperor. Tcheng would subsequently become particularly well known for fashion documentaries, including Dior and I and Halston.

Festival Premieres and the Road to Theaters

The documentary began building its reputation before its general theatrical release.

It premiered in 2011 at the Venice International Film Festival and also appeared at the highly selective Telluride Film Festival. It was additionally part of the 2011 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam program.

The festival circuit positioned The Eye Has to Travel at the intersection of documentary cinema, fashion, art, and cultural history.

The film also received Best Documentary recognition at the 2011 Chicago International Film Festival. Metacritic records a Chicago International Film Festival win and additional festival and critics-group nominations associated with the film.

Its U.S. theatrical release followed on September 21, 2012, with Samuel Goldwyn handling domestic distribution.

This progression explains much of the function of DianaVreeland-Film.com. An independent documentary did not have the marketing resources of a major studio blockbuster. Its website therefore provided a central location where festival interest, reviews, trailers, biographical material, and the film's identity could be assembled for audiences, journalists, exhibitors, and fashion enthusiasts.

Popularity and Commercial Performance

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel was not designed as a mass-market Hollywood release, but its theatrical performance was substantial for a specialized documentary.

Box Office Mojo reports that the film opened domestically in only three theaters, earning $63,700 during its opening weekend. That represented an impressive per-theater average of more than $21,000.

Its release subsequently expanded, reaching a maximum of 27 theaters.

The documentary ultimately earned approximately $1.02 million domestically and another $704,000 internationally, producing worldwide theatrical revenue of roughly $1.72 million.

International markets included the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand. Its performance demonstrated that interest in Vreeland extended well beyond the American fashion industry.

For a documentary centered on a magazine editor who had died more than two decades before its release, the results also illustrate the durability of the Vreeland name.

What Visitors Found on DianaVreeland-Film.com

The original site's organization reflected the principal information audiences would have expected from an official documentary website.

Its major sections centered on Diana Vreeland herself, the film, a synopsis, the director's perspective, press coverage, and promotional material.

The "About Diana Vreeland" material functioned as an extended biography. It placed Vreeland within a much larger historical setting, moving through the Belle Époque, World War I, the Roaring Twenties, London, New York publishing, the Swinging Sixties, and her years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The "About the Film" material explained how Immordino Vreeland's original research developed into a documentary and emphasized the filmmakers' use of archival footage, interviews, photography, graphics, animation, and music.

A synopsis gave visitors a more concise description suitable for people deciding whether to see the film.

The director's statement went further by explaining the project's philosophy: Diana Vreeland could not be adequately understood simply as a fashion editor. Her belief in originality, reinvention, curiosity, and imagination was central to the documentary.

The press area collected reviews and media attention, turning critical praise into an important marketing asset.

In practical terms, therefore, DianaVreeland-Film.com functioned as both an electronic press kit and a public introduction to Vreeland.

Critical Reception

The documentary was received favorably by critics.

Metacritic records a score of 69 based on 21 critic reviews, placing it in the site's "generally favorable" category. Sixteen of those reviews were categorized as positive, five as mixed, and none as negative.

The range of reviews is instructive.

Critics frequently praised the documentary's visual richness, energy, archival material, and the sheer entertainment value of Vreeland herself. The Los Angeles Times emphasized how effectively the filmmakers combined her personal history with surviving footage of her extraordinary personality. The Boston Globe praised the film's energy and its ability to compress Vreeland's private life and editorial philosophy into less than 90 minutes.

Other critics identified a limitation that often accompanies documentaries made by people close to their subjects: admiration sometimes outweighed interrogation.

Time Out described the filmmakers as clearly captivated by Vreeland. The Guardian similarly regarded the documentary as strongly admiring and suggested that its generous treatment could become excessive. The New York Post observed that Vreeland's personal shortcomings received less attention than her accomplishments.

That tension helps explain the film's appeal. It is less an investigative exposé than an exuberant portrait.

Audience Response and Long-Term Reputation

The documentary continued to attract viewers after its theatrical run through home-video and streaming distribution.

Rotten Tomatoes and Apple TV have reflected exceptionally strong critical approval, with Apple TV displaying a 96 percent Tomatometer figure based on 72 reviews. Audience comments collected by Rotten Tomatoes repeatedly describe Vreeland as fascinating, inspiring, unusual, and culturally important, even when viewers are more divided about the documentary's filmmaking choices.

Metacritic's user score has also remained generally favorable.

The continuing availability of the film has given DianaVreeland-Film.com a second historical function. What began as a current promotional site eventually became part of the documentary's archival footprint.

Fashion, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Although Vreeland was born in Paris and lived in Europe during important periods of her life, the central geographical setting of her professional career was New York City.

Her work at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue placed her within Manhattan's publishing and fashion industries, while her final major professional chapter took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue.

The Costume Institute remains one of the most visible fashion institutions in the world. The Met specifically recognizes Vreeland's service as special consultant from 1972 until her death in 1989 and credits her exhibitions with energizing audiences and influencing the presentation of costume internationally.

This gives the documentary a geographical dimension beyond simply being "about fashion." It chronicles a period when New York increasingly functioned as a global center where magazines, designers, photographers, models, artists, celebrities, museums, and popular culture interacted.

Why Vreeland's Museum Work Was So Significant

One of the most important insights provided by the film's subject matter is that Vreeland's influence did not end when she stopped editing magazines.

At the Costume Institute, she approached exhibitions with an editor's instinct for drama.

Traditional museum scholarship tends to emphasize chronology, attribution, provenance, and historical precision. Vreeland understood the museum visitor as an audience that could also be seduced, surprised, and entertained.

Her approach could be controversial, particularly when theatrical effect competed with academic exactitude. But the crowds demonstrated its effectiveness.

Modern blockbuster fashion exhibitions owe something to this transformation. Today, major museum fashion shows can attract enormous attendance, generate international media coverage, inspire merchandise and publishing, and turn designers into subjects of art-historical interpretation.

Vreeland helped establish the cultural conditions in which that became possible.

The Film as a History of Women's Cultural Authority

The documentary also has significance beyond fashion.

Vreeland's career unfolded during decades in which women's opportunities for institutional authority changed dramatically. She worked inside industries associated with women but exercised a level of cultural influence that extended far beyond clothing.

Her editorial decisions affected photographers, designers, models, celebrities, artists, and the way readers imagined modern life.

The documentary consequently doubles as a story about a woman constructing authority through taste.

Vreeland had no conventional academic preparation for such a role. She transformed perceived personal disadvantages into an unmistakable identity and made originality itself part of her professional method.

That story of self-creation helps explain why the film appeals to viewers who may have little interest in haute couture.

Vreeland's Broader Cultural Influence

Fashion journalism before and after Diana Vreeland are meaningfully different worlds.

Her great contribution was not the discovery of one designer, model, garment, or trend. It was an editorial philosophy.

She recognized that magazines could sell dreams as effectively as products.

Photography could create imaginary worlds. Models could possess character. Imperfection could become distinction. Fashion could borrow from youth culture, aristocracy, street style, Hollywood, historical costume, contemporary art, music, travel, and fantasy.

This philosophy helps explain why people continue to compare later fashion editors with Vreeland.

A 2026 Vogue retrospective again emphasized her revolutionary effect on fashion publishing and her belief that fashion should absorb energy from both elite culture and the street. More than half a century after her years as editor-in-chief, Vreeland remains part of the vocabulary through which fashion journalism explains itself.

Who Was the Website's Audience?

DianaVreeland-Film.com potentially served several overlapping audiences.

The most obvious consisted of moviegoers considering whether to see the documentary. Fashion students, designers, photographers, magazine editors, museum professionals, historians, and Vreeland admirers represented another important constituency.

The site also had educational value.

A student encountering Vreeland for the first time could use the site's biography and film information as an introduction to subjects ranging from fashion publishing to museum exhibition design. Film students could examine how archival material and interviews were assembled into a personality-driven documentary. Media historians could view the project as a study of the extraordinary influence once exercised by major print-magazine editors.

The site therefore occupied an unusual intersection of film promotion and cultural education.

Why DianaVreeland-Film.com Is Worth Remembering

The historical importance of DianaVreeland-Film.com rests on the convergence of three subjects.

First, it documents the release of a successful independent documentary.

Second, it preserves material associated with one of fashion history's most influential editors.

Third, it represents a period of the web when individual movies commonly received their own dedicated domains rather than existing primarily as pages inside streaming platforms and social-media accounts.

That last point gives old film domains an importance that may not have been obvious when they were active.

Official movie websites could contain director statements, biographies, press excerpts, production information, trailers, photographs, screening information, and other material assembled specifically for a film's release. Once those sites disappeared, part of the contemporary record surrounding the films could disappear with them.

DianaVreeland-Film.com is therefore more than the leftover address of a 2012 theatrical campaign. In preserved form, it can be understood as a small digital artifact connected to fashion history, documentary filmmaking, independent film distribution, and the evolution of online movie promotion.

The Lasting Legacy of The Eye Has to Travel

More than a decade after its release, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel remains one of the most accessible introductions to Diana Vreeland.

Its longevity owes much to the subject herself.

Vreeland's career touched several institutions that remain central to global fashion: Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her professional story intersects with Richard Avedon, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Twiggy, Balenciaga, the youth culture of the 1960s, magazine photography, museum exhibitions, and the transformation of fashion into a widely studied component of modern culture.

The documentary captures that history while allowing Vreeland's personality to dominate the screen.

That may also explain why some critics considered the film insufficiently critical. Vreeland was extraordinarily skilled at creating her own mythology, and The Eye Has to Travel largely allows viewers to experience its power.

Yet that mythology is itself historically significant.

Diana Vreeland believed style was not merely decoration. It was a means of interpreting life, constructing identity, encouraging imagination, and transforming the ordinary into something memorable.

DianaVreeland-Film.com existed to introduce audiences to a documentary built around that proposition. Its original promotional purpose may have passed, but as an archived film website it continues to point toward a remarkable intersection of fashion, publishing, museums, cinema, celebrity, and digital history.

DianaVreeland-Film.com