Watch: Diana Vreeland's big screen debut

The life and career of legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland is celebrated in the new documentary film 'The Eye Has To Travel'.

BY Bibby Sowray | 14 August 2012

Before Wintour there was Vreeland, the enigmatic fashion editor best know for her 25-year tenure at US Harper's Bazaar and later for her work at Vogue was the original iconic editor, turning unknowns into stars and making herself a celebrity in the process. She was the first editor to interweave fashion with music, art, society and culture and now her career has been celebrated in a feature-length documentary, The Eye Has To Travel.

READ: Diana Vreeland to be honoured on the Walk of Style

"I wasn't a fashion editor, I was the one and only fashion editor" Vreeland's voice is heard saying in the trailer for the documentary, which has been created by her granddaughter-in-law Lisa Immordino Vreeland.

The likes of Calvin Klein, Diane von Furstenberg, Manolo Blahnik and David Bailey contribute to the film which aims to explore Vreeland's "challenging childhood, fraught with parental strain, insecurities and academic failures, her self-preservation and her break through - reinventing herself as the dazzling, adventurous woman who would win the heart of ravishing bachelor Reed Vreeland."

READ: Long-time Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown dies aged 90

"She would say: You're not supposed to give people what they want, you're supposed to give them what they don't know they want yet," writer Bob Colacello reminisces. We can't think of a better way to describe fashion than that.

The Eye Has To Travel is released in UK cinemas on September 21.