Natalie Bridges: A matter of confidence worn well

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, a documentary about the acclaimed fashion editor.

Conversation often is not spoken. We get our point across in other ways. It involves style.

I love fashion documentaries for their messages, not just about clothes, but about life.

Fashion always tells a story about society and the age in which the clothes are worn: the economic conditions, the social status of women (or lack of it), the zeitgeist, the predominant sentiments.

The most recent fashion doco I watched is about fashion icon (and I don't use that word lightly, she really is) Diana (pronounced Dee-anna) Vreeland. Acclaimed magazine editor for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue from the early 1930s to 1960s, she defined style.

Her eccentric sense of self, long red fingernails, outspoken, strong voice and belief in the need for style as a "way of life" ("Without it you're nobody.") inspired fashion and creativity for four decades.

That statement from Vreeland may seem harsh, but once we understand more about her ethos, unwrap her beliefs, we can learn much from her encouragement to all women to celebrate themselves. She constantly dreamed and imagined the world as it could be when a woman was at her most beautiful.

"There's only one life. It's the life you want and you make it yourself," Vreeland says in one of the documentary's interviews. This was highly daring for the period, when women were still trying to emerge in business and the world of work.

To Vreeland, fashion didn't necessarily mean clothes, it meant style, posture, skin, movement and, most of all, education. For her, a woman was alluring when she was interesting and interested - hungry to know more and express herself through knowing herself well. I couldn't agree more.

She wasn't classically beautiful, but believed a woman should accentuate her bold features and even her faults. If you're tall, wear heels, according to Vreeland. If you have a big nose, hold it up and out. I love that. Fashion for Vreeland was a way to present and prepare oneself for the day ahead, because "life is artifice".

I think she was saying that life is about what you want to present to the world. We are all capable of doing and being what we want to be and, for Vreeland, fashion aided that process of realising oneself. I know that I dress to feel strong or soft, feminine and even masculine (I love the man-style shoes and white-shirts-with-blazer androgynous look of the moment).

Style and caring for oneself is also a personal thing. Like having your toenails perfectly painted in the height of winter when only the inside of your boots sees them. Vreeland said such attention to style makes you walk differently, makes you feel more confident. The same applies to wearing beautiful lingerie - only you know about it and it makes you feel good.

Vreeland was also fascinated by ballet and surfing for their rhythmic qualities. She believed that life and our relationships, everything, was driven by a rhythm and pulse. Things like body language, the glance of an eye or flick of the hair, is what drove life for Vreeland and the style factor informed those rhythms of a person. She said, "The eye must travel." And it must.

We are forever absorbing impressions from one another. It's often not about words, but what's said silently in the way we walk, move or stand. That's why the right clothes worn with confidence can be so liberating and fulfilling.

Natalie Bridges is director of Tauranga communications agency Blink Public Relations. www.blinkpr.co.nz