I had no idea who Diana Vreeland was until my wife and I saw the lovely little exhibition of Vreeland “fashion art” at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice earlier this year. That experience made The Eye Has to Travel a must-see for us, and it did not disappoint. This is a very well-made documentary, with good pacing and a skillful balance of interview and visual footage. It benefits enormously from its use of audio taped interviews conducted very late in Vreeland’s life for her memoirs, footage which serves as a counter-point to the historical TV interview footage, almost like she is being interviewed for the documentary itself. They also do a great job getting across the beauty of her Harpers and Vogue layouts, and her ground-breaking exhibitions at the Met, without overloading the audience. I wish they had explained the direction Vogue went in after she was fired, so I could better understand her influence on society through fashion, but this is just a minor quibble. It’s a really enjoyable documentary.

Diana Vreeland was certainly a visionary of sorts. She willed the entire society in a very definite cultural and social direction, born largely from her own imagination and flights of fancy. The thing that really struck me about Vreeland was how refreshing it was to hear to someone talk who completely lacked the pretensions of book knowledge, who at the same time possessed a fresh and incisive mind capable of great creative imagination – it’s very fun to listen to her!

Everyone should check out Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel. (It’s playing at Angelika in New York.) It’s well worth it!