Musings at a tea boutique reading the legendary Vogue editor’s memoir DV

Late lunch at TWG Tea at Greenbelt 5—and halibut millefeuile was in order, with crisp ravioli puffs accompanied by sautéed artichokes, carrots, and a beurre blanc sauce infused with Ocean Voyage Tea.

“Why don’t you paint a map of the world on all four walls of your boys’ nursery so they won’t grow up with a provincial point of view?”

So recommended Diana Vreeland and I believed every word she said, the same way I thought it made sense to rinse your blond child’s hair in dead champagne, as she proposed, “to keep its gold as they do in France.” 

But Diana was from another time. Back in those days long ago, when travel was unaffordable to most, and she was fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, who maintained her whimsical yet practical, out-of-this-world yet inspiring column “Why Don’t You?” Let’s just say she cooked these things up between 1936 and 1962, just before she ruled the world in 1963 by becoming editrix of the American Vogue.

“The eye has to travel,” she sighed, as if I didn’t get it. I looked through the handcrafted glass walls of the tea boutique and there were myriad stores hauled in from overseas.

Just across the hall was Furla and, though its current collection was thoroughly modern with its neat lines, bold colors, geometric shapes, and ultratechnological finishes, if you closed your eyes long enough, you could be at the Italian flagship store in a historic 19th-century villa overlooking the Spanish Steps at Piazza di Spagna in Rome.

Next door was Massimo Dutti from Spain.   

Nearby was Tory Burch whose lush painterly flower prints, abloom in the current collection, so reminded me of Lee Radziwill’s Happy Times I might as well have been in New York.

Just before lunch, I was at the Gucci store at Greenbelt 4, immersed in an alternate universe abuzz with dragon-wrapped laceup shoes, technical jersey jackets with repetitive panther face, laminated sparkling GG jersey jogging pants, and (Re)Belle leather backpacks. But it was not so much the posthuman musings for fall as it was the idea of a Gucci-fied life, more than a life but la dolce vita.

At Alexander McQueen at the Shangri-La Plaza, a short drive away without the usual traffic congestion, it was paradise found all over again, replete with duchesse satin butterfly wing patterns and exotic insect embroideries.

Yes, Diana, if I might borrow your words, ‘the best thing about London is Paris,’ and the best thing about Manila is the world.

Yes, Diana, if I might borrow your words, “the best thing about London is Paris,” and the best thing about Manila, where I was, sitting on a black velvet chair, my elbows leaning on crisp white table linens, my face awash in the incandescent glow emanating from the crystal lamps and bouncing off the bronze fittings, was the world—and so here at the TWG tea salon, rooted on Italian marble floors, were the early days of Singapore as a trading port. 

But for Diana, speaking from a much earlier time, this might not be the world enough.

“Take an idea from Africa,” she insisted, her strong urgings articulated by a woman in a white-and-black elephant-printed jacket kneeling on a white-and-black spotted fur rug on the pages of Bazaar.

Wear bolder hues, she pontificated in the age of subtle-does-it, when parents forbade their children from calling attention to themselves. Bolder hues were what Diana meant when she declared “Pink is the navy blue of India!” She meant colors that seemed to say, “Look at me,” like the perfect red, which she described as “rococo with a spot of Gothic in it and a bit of Buddhist temple” or, better yet, “the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.”

Staring life right in the eye, Diana had been in a lifelong chase of the colors of the world, the chase that brought her, along with many photographers like Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Richard Avedon, to such outlandish locations as the African savannahs, the Moroccan desert, the ruins of Syria, and the snow forests of Japan.

You could say Diana Vreeland, a true visionary, had seen back in the heady days of the ’50s and the ’60s how we would travel the world and how the world would travel to us. Never mind that she saw it only in fashion, though, as she put it, fashion said it all. “Fashion is part of the daily air and it changes all the time, with all the events,” she barked. “You can even see the approaching of a revolution in clothes. You can see and feel everything in clothes.”

With that in mind, I took the last sip of my Jade Dragon Green Tea, resisting the urge to get sidetracked to the Empire of the Sun.  

“The map of the world on all four walls of your boys’ nursery!” said Diana in a tone more urgent than ever before I closed my copy of her memoir D.V.

As I left the tea boutique, all the world awaited me, all these shopwindows that led to places across the globe and beyond.

So I walked into Hugo Boss and, in that instant, found my way to Metzingen or, better yet, six hours away by train, to Berlin.

Ah, Diana, the world is everywhere now.

The boys (and the girls) will be all right.

Note: Reprised from 2018, when this was written as a tribute to the 30th anniversary of Stores Specialists, Inc (SSI). The world, and especially Greenbelt, has changed dramatically since then, but Diana Vreeland is forever.