The Caftan Queens: Diana Vreeland, Talitha Getty and the Icons of Resort Wear
There is a particular vision of glamour that belongs specifically to the 1960s and 1970s — a world of warm evenings on terraces, of long lunches under bougainvillea, of women who dressed for pleasure rather than protocol and understood instinctively that the most sophisticated thing they could wear was something that looked effortless. At the center of this vision, worn by its most compelling practitioners, was the caftan. And the women who wore it most magnificently have never been surpassed.
Talitha Getty: The Marrakech Moment
No single image did more to establish the caftan as a glamour garment than Patrick Lichfield's 1969 photograph of Talitha Getty on a Marrakech rooftop — wearing a white embroidered caftan, her husband Paul Getty Jr. beside her, the golden city spread behind them. The photograph ran in Vogue and became one of the most referenced images in the history of fashion. Getty's particular combination of aristocratic ease, artistic sensibility, and genuine beauty made her the perfect embodiment of a certain kind of 1960s jet-set bohemianism, and the caftan was its perfect garment.
Diana Vreeland: The High Priestess
Diana Vreeland — editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1936 to 1962 and then of American Vogue until 1971 — was the most influential fashion editor of the twentieth century, and she wore caftans with the authority of someone who had personally invented glamour. Her Mustique wardrobe, her Manhattan apartment, and her legendary editorial vision all incorporated the caftan as a garment of serious aesthetic intent. Where others wore them as vacation cover-ups, Vreeland wore them as statements.
Babe Paley and Marella Agnelli: The Society Icons
Among the great beauties of the postwar social world, Babe Paley and Marella Agnelli were the ones who understood resort dressing most completely. Both women had the kind of bone structure and self-possession that made any garment look like a considered choice, and both embraced the caftan as the natural expression of their particular elegance — relaxed enough for a day on a yacht, beautiful enough for a Capri dinner, and sufficiently individual to be unmistakably their own.
The Legacy Today
The caftan style these women perfected has never gone out of fashion — it has simply been inhabited by each subsequent generation of women who understand that true elegance is about ease as much as effort. Explore our resort wear collection for caftan-inspired pieces that carry this legacy into the present.
