The Eye Has to Travel, a documentary about the life of legendary Vogue and Harpers Bazaar editor Diana Vreeland, a hero of mine, is aptly named. It roams between magazine layouts, family photos, fashion shows, feature films, newsreel footage, television appearances, and contemporary interviews. The movie scatters itself over so many places that it’s virtually impossible to detect what Vreeland accomplished: she made beauty the eighth virtue. Her own books, D.V. and Allure, remain more powerful representations of who she was.
It’s fun in the film to see off-the-radar tastemakers like Penelope Tree and Veruschka talk about working with the great lady. [Spoiler alert: it wasn’t easy.] But it’s pointless to hear, over and over again, from other fashion celebrities, what a legendary kook she was. Perhaps because I knew so much about Vreeland beforehand I feel the movie didn’t bring me any closer to her. It certainly didn’t capture what she did best in her magazine work, which was to show us beauty where we hadn’t found it before. Towards the end of the film one of the interviewees (it might be John Fairchild), throws his hands up in the air and says, “She understood the genius of vulgarity,” and I imagined that the movie might then show us how she cared so little for good taste and instead veered toward melodrama and the baroque. But this insightful comment gets lost in a montage of similarly spicy quotes. It gives us a lot of people, including Vreeland herself, talking about her ideas about fashion instead of showing them to us.