Photograph: Horst P. Horst, 1979

“Red is the great clarifier - bright, cleansing, revealing. It makes all colors beautiful. I can’t imagine being bored with it - it would be like becoming tired of the person you love. I wanted this apartment to be a garden - but it had to be a garden in hell.”
—Diana Vreeland

Diana Vreeland was the fabled editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine with the big personality. She followed Vogue with a stint curating the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s famed costume collection. Vreeland single-handily created the stereotype of the extravagantly impulsive fashion mag editrix. She is rightfully celebrated as a genius whose passion and intellect—and unerring eye for style, both high and low—shaped the world of fashion for five decades.

This weekend a new documentary about her life is being released by Samuel Goldwyn FIlms, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, the fashion icon’s granddaughter in-law and it looks really good.

Diana Vreeland was known for making quips like “As you know, the French like the French very much,” and she wrote a fabulously witty anecdotal autobiography titled D.V. (the greatest gift for both highly intelligent women and gay men alike). What makes this film seem unmissable to me is that it utilizes audiotapes of Vreeland speaking that George Plimpton recorded when he interviewed her for D.V., which she co-wrote with him. So her story is told in part by Vreeland herself in her own words and via interviews with photographer David Bailey, Polly Mellen, Diane von Furstenberg, Vanity Fair’s Bob Colacello and Oscar de la Renta.