Poor, darling fellow - he died of food. He was killed by the dinner table.

Vreeland’s line is a characteristically barbed, theatrical epigram: it treats overeating and social excess as not merely unhealthy but fatal, as if the rituals of dining and high-society indulgence were a literal weapon. The mock-elegiac “Poor, darling fellow” heightens the irony—sympathy is offered in the same breath as a cutting diagnosis. The “dinner table” stands in for a whole culture of appetite, luxury, and self-destruction, suggesting that refinement and pleasure can become compulsions. Read this way, the quote is less about one man’s death than about a milieu where consumption (food, status, sensation) is both identity and undoing.