Putting bezazz into Bazaar

Carmel Snow, routinely called ‘the legendary Mrs Snow’ by news- papers in her lifetime, edited the most perfect fashion magazine in the history of glossies, American Harper’s Bazaar, for 25 years from 1933 to 1957. It’s probably a fashion statement in itself (‘Sooooo yesterday’) that her legend has almost entirely faded from public memory. Having spent long years toiling as a professional mag-hag myself, I knew the mythopoeic bits already. It was Snow, at Christian Dior’s first Paris show in 1947, who told son cher Tian that ‘your dresses have such a new look’, thereby ensuring a) his name and thunderous fortune, and b) the triumphant return of postwar Paris as the centre of the world’s fashion industry. (For which she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1949.)

It was Snow who famously created a magazine for ‘the well-dressed woman with a well-dressed mind’. It was Snow, the talent-spotter, who found a bold, brilliant, modernist art director in the Russian émigré Alexey Brodovitch (he gave the graphic design world its ‘bleed pages’, should you care). And it was Snow who appointed the unknown Diana Vreeland as fashion editor and indulged her barking obsessions (e.g. ‘The whole issue must be about fuchsia’). Vreeland’s infamous column ‘Why Don’t You?’ (e.g. ‘Why don’t you rinse your blond child’s hair in flat champagne, as the French do?’) ran in Bazaar for only a few years, but its engaging lunacy was still being parodied decades later. Sometimes the lunacy was more disturbing than engaging: e.g. ‘Why don’t you wear bare knees and long white knitted socks, as Unity Mitford does when she takes tea with Hitler at the Carlton in Munich?’