Vreelands: Happiness Is Strictly a Matter of Style

Tim and Nancy Vreeland--you see their names in the society columns as favorite party guests, or attending a brand-name benefit. Or perhaps on a few select letterheads such as the boards of the Music Center’s Amazing Blue Ribbon, Cedars-Sinai Women’s Guild, the Costume Council of the County Museum of Art.

There they are in the April issue of House and Garden Magazine, pictured in evening dress in their new 2,600-square-foot condominium with its view of Century City like a cityscape through the trees on their balcony.

‘High Achievers’

Or with their friends--people like Andrea and John Van de Kamp, Harry and Maggie Wetzel, Betsy Bloomingdale, Dennis and Terry Stanfill, James Galanos, Esther and Thomas Wachtell, Lynda Palevsky--people who, like them, as Nancy Vreeland says, are all “high achievers.”

But also, like them, people associated with--what’s that word . . . style. Style. It’s one of Nancy Vreeland’s favorite words. “Style is making things appear effortless. A gown, a painting, a dinner party. It’s a type of fluency.

“No, it’s not the same as chic. Chic is more glossy, more superficial. It’s easy to be chic at one moment.

“You can have too much chic, but you can never have too much style.”

Nancy Stolkin Vreeland, 42, is the former clothing designer turned high-voltage volunteer. Her husband, Tim, 60, is associated with the architectural firm of Albert C. Martin and is a professor of architecture at UCLA. He is also the son of Diana Vreeland, America’s Grande Dame of Fashion, the former fashion editor of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and now consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Taste, Elegance

Among People Who Know About These Things, the Vreeland name is to taste, elegance and flair what the Kennedy or Rockefeller names are to politics, what Charles and Diana are to royalty. It’s their heritage; it’s their destiny; it’s akin to a divine duty. Indeed, Nancy Vreeland says, her husband’s heritage is “what he’s able to bring to Los Angeles in his designs, the sophistication of the buildings that this city is now ready for. And it’s exactly what I’m trying to do myself with my involvements downtown.”

Place the Vreelands at home, in their living room with the charming little bibelots on the Biedermeier tables; the beige with green and salmon stripe on the Janet Polizzi-designed banquette perfectly matched to the floral chintz used for the sofa; the English library look of the faux-bois finished bookshelves and bar.

Leaning forward on the sofa, her long, narrow body dressed for at-home on a dark gloomy day in a gray cardigan over a man’s T-shirt with a denim skirt, knee socks and loafers, Nancy Vreeland pursued the subject.

“Style has very little to do about clothing, material things. It’s how you perceive yourself in the whole, how much impact you have on society. There’s style like Thoreau, going off into the woods. Everybody has it (style). Style is your personality. It can be obnoxious and abrasive, or it can just as easily be charming.”

For herself and her husband, “I think we both have an urban style. Where we are unique in this city is that we’re apartment dwellers. We love to pound the pavement.

“Our home . . . I think it’s a combination of a touch of drama, but mixed with a great deal of warmth, coziness and relaxation. But also, I have to get back to my definition of style--effortlessness in dress and interior design treatment and entertaining.

“I have a fetish about anything that looks contrived. The nicest compliment when we moved in here came from some friends who said it looked as if we’d been here for years. I don’t like to live in a set design, and I don’t like to dress for stage entrance. I adore statements in clothing and in everything I do in my life, but it’s terribly important not to be overstated.”

Married Three Years

Elegantly erect in a Regency side chair, Tim Vreeland listened attentively. He married Nancy Stolkin three years ago. She was raised on the North Shore of Chicago, the daughter of a wealthy financier and his wife, a graduate of Syracuse University who worked for designers Jean Louis, Bill Blass and Seymour Fox before starting her own line of women’s ready-to-wear in 1971. He spent his youth traveling, attending schools throughout Europe before receiving his B.A. and M.A. in architecture from Yale University. Upon graduation, he worked for superstar architects Philip Johnson in New York and the late Louis I. Kahn in Philadelphia.

In 1965, deciding the changes were occurring out West, Vreeland moved to Albuquerque, N.M., with his first wife and two daughters, now 23 and 24. Three years later, they came to Los Angeles. Nancy Stolkin initially met Vreeland and his first wife through his mother. Vreeland was divorced and his acquaintance with Nancy was later renewed at a party for jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane.

Both Vreeland women--Nancy and Diana--have what Nancy Vreeland calls “rather definite personalities.” When they get together, “I listen,” Tim Vreeland said with a laugh. “I’m very captivated by the exchange of these two unorthodox, original women in my life.”

In Los Angeles, however, it would appear to be Nancy Vreeland’s show. It is her involvements that lead to the social life. There’s the Music Center, where she was chairman of the Amazing Blue Ribbon’s Chanel Gala last month and on the executive advisory committee of Mercado III. She’s co-chairman with Andrea Van de Kamp and Joanne Kozberg of the March of Dimes Gourmet Gala on March 6. She and Vreeland are honorary co-chairmen with the Van de Kamps of the Junior League Antique Show Nov. 7-10.

“By inclination, I’m not as social as Nancy,” Tim Vreeland admitted, “and left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t go (to the parties and benefits). But once I’m there, I enjoy it and through Nancy, I’ve met most of the leaders of our world.”

‘Not Every Night’

“And not every night is a black-tie party,” his wife said. “One of our favorite things, maybe once a week, is to have friends in for dinner. And the evenings that we don’t go out, we’ve started to stay home with each other. Or go into Westwood to a movie. . . .

“It (their marriage) has been a settling down in the community for me,” Nancy Vreeland said. “Since being married to Tim, I’ve gotten a better view of the city. I’ve felt an increasing responsibility toward helping Los Angeles become a world-class city. I’ve been involved with the Music Center since 1967, which has probably given me a downtown attitude. I want to see more dance, more attractions, better attendance. There are a corps of Angelenos who think we need to expand, who think we need more theater space . . . these are the visionaries.”

“My sense,” Tim Vreeland said, “has been from the other side. For years, I lived and worked on the Westside. In the four years I’ve worked for Albert C. Martin (where among his projects are the design of the Music Center expansion, the California Center and Mitsui-Fudosan’s 50-story office building), I’ve seen a different side of L.A. and Nancy has shown me her side of L.A., the Music Center. . . . We’re a team.”

Theirs, it would seem, is a comfortable marriage, a merger of common interests and common values. Vreeland nodded. “We both enjoy the same things. One of those things is traveling. Between the two of us, we know quite a few people abroad. That’s a nice consideration. I’ve a sabbatical coming up in the spring. We’ll stay outside Florence in a farmhouse.”

“It’s to contrast what we usually do,” Nancy Vreeland explained. “You know, traveling with the hotels, the airplanes. The idea here is getting back to the roots, the people, and Tim can concentrate on doing watercolors, which takes time.”

“And Nancy, she’ll be visiting Gucci, Pucci,” Vreeland teased.

Except that’s not really Nancy Vreeland’s style. “I love to find one marvelous thing,” she said. “I’m not really a consumer.

Style again. Better to buy one great, albeit expensive, item that will last a lifetime than something meant for only a season. Look at Tim Vreeland, still wearing the Xenobe-tailored tuxedo he bought in Rome in 1952; look at Nancy Vreeland in her favorite Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta and Giorgio Armanis that get better, she says, only as they get older.

“If I have one reservation about California,” Vreeland said, “it’s that Californians seem to place so much value on newness for newness’ sake.”

‘Design for Obsolescence’

Nancy Vreeland agreed. “The typical American (clothing) customer has a short span on how long she wants to wear the same outfit. We design for obsolescence,” she said.

Of course, that’s what the Chanel showing was about: an opportunity for Los Angeles to see the same haute couture collection presented in Paris and to pay the incredibly expensive (Vreeland estimated $10,000 for a suit) price of having something made expressly to your measurements. Even the most expensive American designers are still “off the rack.”

After the benefit gala, women who wanted to buy “the real thing” were fitted at the Chanel boutique in Beverly Hills. Just maybe, Nancy Vreeland hoped, this would be the beginning of haute couture collections being shown in Los Angeles, just the way they are in Paris and New York. “We’ve got terrific-looking women here, who are terrific consumers, and we should be afforded the opportunity to see the collection for ourselves rather than relying on department stores and boutiques to choose items for us . . . if indeed,” she added, “one can afford the choice.”

She apparently has always been able to. In fact, in the late 1960s, Coco Chanel herself persuaded her to buy “an incredible red and yellow tweed boucle suit with monkey fur around the collar and cuffs. And then skirts got shorter and I cut off the hem. It was so stupid. I think I ended up giving the suit to the county museum.”

But she hardly resents the price. After all, a ready-to-wear sports outfit can run $2,000. “I wouldn’t have 20 things at that price. But one thing like a suit. It’s a staple. Get three blouses and you can wear it daily. It can last you the rest of your life . . . that is,” Vreeland said with a wry laugh at herself, “if you don’t cut off the skirt.”