Some of the most wonderful things about the world we live in today is that we can look back, actually thanks to the incomparable Diana Vreeland, we can look back to these wonderful things. Is there much that inspires you in today's publications?
The goddess of Vogue from the late 60's of course was Diana Vreeland- after her reign there-
does anything compare?
Inspiration from her editorial skills and innate sense of style and beauty gave us the great Valentine Lawford-Pauline de Rothschild pairing, & the Richard Avedon-Verushka sojourn to Japan.
In Eleanor Dwight's DIANA VREELAND, an all encompassing book about the Great One, DV's fascination with the novel MOBY DICK, the great white whale, led to a photography shoot with Lord Snowdon and white whales for the December 1968 Christmas issue. Other WHITES were white horses and white swans. According the Eleanor Dwight book, " Tony dahling", drew the line at photographing white tigers in India...
DV "They are so aristocratic, so ravishing."
TS " But Deeanna there's a war going on between Palistan and India. All my photographer friends are going to shoot that. I can't take white tigers."
Here- are the Snowdon Royal Swans from Vogue December 1965-thus ending the holiday posts from collected House and Gardens and Vogue magazines of the era-a swan song of sorts.
The swans Snowdon photographed in 1965 belonged to Lady Galway whose family had kept a swannery for over 300 years at the time. Today the Galway Swannery at Abbotsbury in Dorset is owned by the only surviving daughter of the 9th Viscount Galway,Charlotte Townsend. She is the only person in Britain other than the Queen entitled to own swans. (read more here in the Daily mail)
The royal swans were marked on the bills of the birds to indicate ownership- This Swan-Roll around 1603-the Cantley is from the Broadland region and illustrates the beak mark indicators and the names of the owners.
from the article~
DV photograph by Bill King 1977 for Blackglama
read more about Swan Upping on the River Thames here
read the Errant Aesthete's the fashionably Elegant Mats Gustafson here
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