“Paint every door in a completely white house the colour of a different flower.” “Have an elk-hide trunk for the back of your car: Hermès of Paris will make this.” “Rinse your blond child’s hair in dead champagne, to keep its gold, as they do in France.” “Have a yellow satin bed entirely quilted in butterflies.”
These pearls of advice — flights of fancy, really — were dispensed in Diana Vreeland’s ‘Why Don’t You?’ columns in Harper’s Bazaar from the late 1930s, offering wealthy readers whimsical ways to make life even more charming, and more down-at-heel folk — this was the Great Depression era — brief windows of respite from the drudgery of day-to-day life. Were they meant to be taken seriously? Yes. Ostensibly. Possibly. Were they?
Yes and no, is the answer. Vreeland’s mastery of the
