Fashion: The Vreeland Vogue

She dwells in a world of beauty, yet no one has ever called her pretty. She likens other women to swans and skylarks, but finds herself described (by such an expert as Designer Cecil Beaton) as "an authoritative crane." Though she is a generous flatterer of the physical attributes of others, even her own admiring friends must strain to return a compliment ("Well," said one, straining, "she has a strange and marvelous spine"). Her walk has been described as a camel's gait, her nose as something stolen off a cigar-store Indian. Yet thousands of women cut their hair because of her, cream their skins, shorten their sleeves, and belt their coats, all at the iron whim of a woman whose face is as rarely photographed and widely unknown as the moon's other side.

Her name is no more familiar. But Diana (pronounced Deeann) Vreeland is better known than her anonymity tells; as the new editor in chief of Vogue Magazine, she is the professional bellwether to a certain special clique of chic. She has long been a flamboyant and energetic tastemaker; designers have been known to tremble at her nod, customers at private showings to pick purely what she picks, manufacturers and merchandisers to watch her every move with rapt fixation. She is, in fact, probably the single most fabled, venerated and respected backstage fashion force in the world today.

Leopard & Incense. It is a role she adores, and she plays it to the hilt. At close to 60, she moves with supersonic speed. She doesn't walk, she strides; she doesn't talk, she broadcasts. She surrounds herself with the calculated and the outlandish, paints her Manhattan office walls adulterous red, covers the floor with simulated leopard skin, burns incense through the day. She invents cliches and talks in capital letters, whether dismissing a contender for the best-dressed ranks ("On her, EVERYTHING looks like a chandelier") or praising a swatch of material ("I ADORE that pink, it's the navy BLUE of India"), with the sort of outrageous rhetoric that has reduced hardened fashion types to awed obeisance.

Mrs. Vreeland took over Vogue's helm only four months ago on the retirement of longtime (30 years) Editor Jessica Daves. Other editors, such as Harper's Bazaar's thoughtful, tranquil Nancy White, function in an atmosphere of relative calm; not so Deeann. In her 27 years at Harper's, most of them as fashion editor, she had already established her legend as a human maelstrom. She tore in and out of offices, trailing hats, belts, secretaries and photographers behind her, churned around designers at work, doing a touch of pinning here and there, patted on makeup and cut models' hair herself. It was while she was at Harper's that she originated the now legendary "Why Don't You?" column, peppered with such items as "Why don't you bring back from Central Europe a huge white baroque porcelain stove to stand in your front hall? . . . Why don't you have your bed made in China? . . . Why don't you wash your child's hair in champagne?"