Like A Moth To A Flame
Attraction Is Personal...And Powerful
Happy Spring to all in the Northern Hemisphere…and Happy Autumn/Fall to all in the Southern Hemisphere. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you take some time to enjoy the views and the weather…let’s get our equinox ON!
Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel is one of my favorite documentaries about one of my favorite fashion icons. Not everyone remembers her name, but almost everyone would recognize Diana Vreeland’s work.
From her early days as a writer at Harper's Bazaar to her legendary tenure as Vogue’s editor-in-chief, and finally to her role as a “special consultant” to The Met’s Costume Institute, Diana Vreeland was a force of nature. And the majority of her superpowers were of the visual variety.
As one of the biggest 20th-century tastemakers, Vreeland has always fascinated me. She wasn’t a conventionally "pretty" woman, yet she helped define beauty and style for at least two generations of American women.
In her era, tastemaking was an elite position—one had to be at the pinnacle of the fashion world to shape its direction. Today, anyone with an internet connection and a compelling aesthetic can be a tastemaker—if enough people align with their vision.
What catches my eye is what catches my eye. What catches your eye is what catches your eye. Attraction and beauty are deeply personal and subjective. But sharing what draws us in can create community and define a new way of seeing the world. There is power in our points of view. When enough people see what we see, feel what we feel, and respond to what we share, a new zeitgeist can emerge.
Diana Vreeland understood this innately. She didn’t just report on fashion—she shaped it. She encouraged people to see beauty in the unusual, the bold, and the unexpected. “The eye has to travel,” she famously said, and through her work, she took generations of fashionistas on journeys they might never have otherwise taken.
Attraction is personal, but it’s also contagious.
The right image, idea, or vision can ignite something in others, drawing them in like moths to a flame. That’s the power of taste, of curation, of having a distinct point of view—and daring to share it.
Focus on what catches your attention, what excites you, what inspires you.
The world wants to know how you see it, too. Yes, YOU, boo.
Make it a great day!
Clint 🌈✌️
ON THIS DAY = MARCH 20
BIRTHDAYS
43 BC = Ovid = Roman poet 🌈
1828 = Henrik Ibsen = Norwegian poet, playwright, and director
1836 = Edward Poynte = English painter, illustrator, and curator
1890 = Lauritz Melchior = Danish-American opera singer 🌈
1901 = Gavin Arthur = American astrologer and sexologist 🌈
1904 = B. F. Skinner = American psychologist and author
1906 = Ozzie Nelson = American actor and bandleader
1908 = Michael Redgrave = English actor and director
1915 = Sister Rosetta Tharpe = American singer-songwriter 🌈
1918 = Jack Barry = American game show host and producer
1922 = Carl Reiner = American actor and filmmaker
1922 = Ray Goulding = American actor and screenwriter
1928 = Fred Rogers = American tv host and producer
1936 = Lee "Scratch" Perry = Jamaican singer-songwriter, producer, and inventor
1937 = Jerry Reed = American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor
1940 = Mary Ellen Mark = American photographer and journalist
1943 = Gerard Malanga = American poet and photographer 🌈
1943 = Paul Junger Witt = American director and producer
1957 = Chris Wedge = American animator, producer, screenwriter, and voice actor
1957 = Spike Lee = American actor and filmmaker
1958 = Holly Hunter = American actor
1960 = Norm Magnusson = American painter and sculptor
1963 = David Thewlis = English actor and filmmaker
1971 = Murray Bartlett = Australian actor 🌈
1972 = Chilly Gonzales = Canadian-German singer-songwriter
1975 = Dominique Jackson = American actor and activist 🌈
1976 = Chester Bennington = American singer-songwriter
1986 = Ruby Rose = Australian actor, tv presenter, and model 🌈
1988 = Jan Cina = Czech actor 🌈
2003 = Cooper Hoffman = American actor
EVENTS
1602 = The Dutch East India Company is established.
1923 = The Arts Club of Chicago hosts the opening of Pablo Picasso's first United States showing, entitled Original Drawings by Pablo Picasso, becoming an early proponent of modern art in the United States.
1948 = With a Musicians Union ban lifted, the first telecasts of classical music in the United States, under Eugene Ormandy and Arturo Toscanini, are given on CBS and NBC.
1978 = The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passes what is described as “the most stringent gay rights law in the country.” Only one of the eleven supervisors— Dan White—votes against the ordinance. Later that year, he murders Harvey Milk and Mayor George Mascone.
1990 = Queer Nation forms in NYC to eliminate homophobia and increase visibility of LGBT people.
1992 = Basic Instinct is released in theaters.
2016 = Barack Obama becomes the first POTUS to visit Cuba since 1928.
HOLIDAYS + OBSERVANCES
PORTRAIT + QUOTE OF THE DAY
“No person and no character is beyond redemption, ultimately. That's the great thing about playing a character that has kind of a dark side; there's room to explore the opposite.”
Murray Bartlett
Thanks Clint, for the Murray Bartlett of the day. He was on The Guiding Light for the last 2 of its 57 years.
Dear Clint,
You asked for my review of "The Eye Has To Travel," so here it is.
The documentary is quite well produced, with the quality of the images sharp and the selection of the images from archive appropriate to support the discussion of the subject. The interviews with people associated with Diana Vreeland were nicely excerpted and, I would presume, well done in each one's entirety. Similarly, they supported the historical report well.
Judging from the bibliography, this documentary was thoroughly researched and likely that was quite expensive to do.
Diana Vreeland is a woman who had to grow into her best face. The first images we see of her are of the very mature Diana Vreeland, and my initial reaction was, "what a beautiful lady." It is sad to learn that her mother called her ugly as a child. The photographs I saw of her at ages earlier than thirty showed a somewhat unmemorable, but not ugly, face. There were intelligent things going on behind that face, as was proven by her ability and determination to rise to the occasion when life thrust her into the sudden necessity of earning her own living. She did not whine; she looked around and pursued remunerative work.
. After enduring the emotional abrasions of having to "suck it up" doing entry-level jobs, she displayed her talent for attention-grabbing photo-journalism to the right person and got hired into a position of influential writing, from which she launched into the photographic creativity that defined her ultimately. She was fortunate to ride the rising tide of United States quasi adolescent exuberance after its emergence as the only fully functioning industrialized economy after World War II, when we in North America (including Canada somewhat) were buying it up, burning it up, roaring it up consuming, consuming, consuming. In our urban centers the forces that made money slosh from one place to another were pursuing success via excess, and Diana Vreeland had the mind to compete in that environment with images that jumped off the page at the reader.
. In the documentary we see Diana Vreeland almost invariably dressed in lovely garments of the highest quality fabrics tailored beautifully to drape just right and allow her the freedom of motion to do her work; while she turned the women who appeared on her pages in "Vogue" into the most hideous specters of ugliness I would rather not imagine. Indeed, a slashed-open corpse could not be any uglier than those women after the Diana Vreeland treatment. She got paid well for it, and so laughed all the way to the bank, I suppose. It is not surprising that the documentary ends with Diana Vreeland's curatorial work on the 18th century rich women's high fashion, notable for its preposterous daring and shameful abuse of women's bodies.
It is good that Diana Vreeland was picked up from her devastation at being terminated from employment in journalism, and employed honorably as a curator and presenter of women's clothing history. She was self-reliant and heroic. Her strength and bravery are rightly chronicled in this documentary.
. - Sam