Well-Read: Diana Vreeland's Memos

Diana Vreeland was an individual. The way she walked, the way she dressed, the way she talked, and the way she wrote were all in a signature, inimitable fashion that she set. Forty-two years after leaving the top of the masthead at Vogue and 24 years after her death, people are still infatuated with her incomparable panache. Out this month, a new coffee table tome Diane Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years compiles more than 250 pieces of Vreeland's personal correspondence during her decade rein as editor-in-chief of the fashion glossy. The memos, personally selected by her grandson Alexander Vreeland, give unprecedented insight into the creative mind and unconventional management style of the dame that was D.V.

"I am extremely disappointed that no one has taken the slightest interest in freckles on the models," Vreeland reprimands in an inner-office note stamped 1967. "This is the year of the ribbon," she declares to her staff in another dated 1971.

What's perhaps just as amusing as her irreverent pronouncements: Vreeland dictated these memorandums via phone each morning to one of her assistants from her Park Avenue apartment. When she arrived at the Vogue office-which was never before noon-she annotated the typed-up results, sometimes adding her initials with a red felt-tip pen before the missives were sent-off.

Dispatches to renowned photographers Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, Norman Parkinson, and Snowdon, depict the genesis of some of Vogue's most celebrated stories. While her letters to and about designers-Cristobal Balenciaga, Coco Chanel, Oscar de la Renta, Valentino Garavani, Guccio Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Diane von Furstenberg-typify her insatiable love for fashion.

In a September 22, 1965 note to Countess Consuelo Crespi she asserts, "really the only way to do anything is to do it the best way you know how… if it suits you there can't be anything too bad about it."