I'm a day late, but I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the late Diana Vreeland, who would be 109 today.
If you haven't read her memoir D.V., I highly recommend it. Arguably the best fashion editor of all time, she was truly one of a kind.
To celebrate, the best of her famous 'Why don't you' column:
Why don’t you…
… use a gigantic shell instead of a bucket to ice your champagne?
… cover a big cork bulletin board in bright pink felt, banded with bamboo, and pin with colored thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms as your life varies from week to week?
… tie an enormous bunch of silver balloons on the foot of your child’s bed on Christmas Eve?
… paint a map of the world on all four walls of your boys’ nursery so they won’t grow up with a provincial point of view?
… tie black tulle bows on your wrists?
And here are some of the more extravagant ones, inspiring nonetheless.
Why don’t you…
… own, as does one extremely smart woman, twelve diamond roses of all sizes?
… bring back from Central Europe a huge white baroque porcelain stove to stand in your front hall?
… wear violet velvet mittens with everything?
… have an elk-hide trunk for the back of your car? Hermès of Paris will make this.
…wear, like the Duchess of Kent, three enormous diamond stars arranged in your hair in front?
…have a room done up in every color green? This will take months, years, to collect, but it will be delightful—a melange of plants, green glass, green porcelains, and furniture covered in sad greens, gay greens, clear, faded, and poison greens?
