The busy social life I had with Egon in New York proved to be an important fashion education. Because I was Egon’s girlfriend and he was so visible as a young, attractive aristocrat, various designers in New York, like those in Paris, offered me their clothes to wear. I spent time discovering the back rooms of those designers and saw how different the fashion in America was from Europe. In England it was the time of Carnaby Street, Biba, and Ossie Clark, influenced by India and the hippie movement. In France, fashion was more serious with couture and dressmakers leading the way, although in 1966, Yves Saint Laurent had cleverly democratized fashion by creating the first designer ready-to-wear at his Rive Gauche boutiques.
In America, fashion was different because of its large distribution through hundreds of department stores across the country. Seventh Avenue firms were running the show, keeping their designers anonymous. But a clever publicist, Eleanor Lambert, had the idea of bringing those designers out of the back rooms and into the spotlight. She created the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Bill Blass, Anne Klein, Geoffrey Beene, and Oscar de la Renta became celebrities. I fell in love with the new breed of designers—Giorgio Sant’Angelo, Stephen Burrows, Halston—who used soft fabrics, jersey, and bright colors. All that inspired me no end and as I left New York to return to Ferretti, I was excited, hoping I could learn more and one day create some things on my own to sell in New York.
I looked at all of Ferretti’s resources with a different set of eyes when I went back to Como. He was extremely successful at making tens of thousands of silk scarves and jersey tops, but I believed more could be done with the incredible infrastructure he had built. The innovative uses of jersey I had seen in designs from Giorgio Sant’Angelo and Stephen Burrows inspired me, and an idea began to percolate in my mind. I wanted to try and make some dresses in the Ferretti printed fabric. I was drawn to the opportunity of filling the void I had seen in New York between the high-fashion hippie clothes and the stale, double-knit dresses. Maybe I could fill it with an offering of colorfully printed sexy easy jersey dresses.
I started to spend lots of time at the factory outside Florence and became friends with Bruna, the patternmaker. Together we made my first dresses: a T-shirt dress, a shirtdress, a long tented dress, and a long tunic with pants. We used whatever printed fabric was leftover in her sample room. Then, on my days in the Como factory, I spent hours going through Ferretti’s archival prints, choosing some and begging Rita, Ferretti’s right hand, to print some sample yardage for me.
The family had adopted me and I felt very much at home with them. Ferretti’s son, Mimmo, was around a lot and he helped me, too. We had fun working together. The Tuscan countryside around the factory was lovely and Mimmo and I used to have some great meals in the neighboring villages. Ferretti was encouraging and allowed me to carve out a small corner for myself in their sample room. Even though I was cautious, I knew it was disruptive. I now realize he must have seen in me some potential I didn’t yet see in myself. He also introduced me to his tailor in Milan, and with him I started to drape some fancy evening clothes, but I was more comfortable in the factory working with Bruna on simple little dresses.
I don’t know what my future would have been without the generosity and support of Ferretti. I was still working at the factory when I got pregnant and my life changed drastically. With my accelerated marriage to Egon, the dream I had of a career in fashion also accelerated. The only person that could help make that dream come true was Ferretti.
“This is what’s happening,” I said to him on a short trip to the factory in the midst of the wedding preparations. “I am pregnant, I’m getting married to Egon, and I’m moving to America. Please allow me to complete all the samples I have been working on and let me try to sell them in New York.” Ferretti smiled and his response was more than I could have dreamed: “Go ahead. I believe in you and I think you will be successful.”
I put a sample line together, most of it made with Bruna in Ferretti’s printed jersey, except a few velvet dresses made by the tailor in Milan. All the clothes had easy shapes, were sexy in their simplicity, and packable for sure. One hundred dresses folded in a single bag. I was at another door to my would-be career. I could only hope it would open.
Egon and I married on a beautiful, sunny day, three weeks after his twenty-third birthday. I love the photo of us laughing and smiling under a shower of rice as we exited the town hall in Montfort-l’Amaury. It was taken by Berry Berenson, a young photographer and Marisa’s sister, who later married actor Tony Perkins and was tragically killed on 9/11 aboard the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. That exuberant photo reminds me not only of our wedding day and of beautiful Berry, but right behind us, out of the five hundred guests, is Ferretti! There, in one happy image, are the two most important men in my life at the time, though I didn’t know yet just how important Ferretti would be.
After a short honeymoon sailing the fjords of Norway and a great month with our friends at Liscia di Vacca on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda, I picked up my samples from the factory in Tuscany.
As I boarded the Italian liner Raffaello, I carried all of my hopes with me: the baby in my womb, and that suitcase filled with dresses. Egon had gone by plane weeks before but I insisted on sailing. I wanted to take the time to visualize my new life and arrive slowly in New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, like any immigrant with an American dream. I had no idea how quickly that dream would come true.
When young people eager to start their own lives and careers ask me for advice I smile and always say: “Passion and persistence are what matter. Dreams are achievable and you can make your fantasy come true, but there are no shortcuts. Nothing happens without hard work.”
That advice is the essence of my journey with the little dresses when I arrived in New York. Egon would go off in the morning to his new job at the Lazard Frères investment bank and, greatly pregnant and with my dream in place, I’d struggle out of the apartment with my suitcase full of clothes to make the rounds of department stores and centralized buying offices. The people I met were amused and intrigued by the unorthodox presentation of little jersey dresses pulled out of a Vuitton suitcase by a young, pregnant European princess, but it did not materialize into anything. I persevered, though, especially after the birth of Alexandre.
The door that opened two months later, in March 1970, was the most critical one in New York: that of Diana Vreeland, the intimidating, all-powerful dragon lady editor in chief of Vogue. It seems amazing to me now that I had the audacity to enter her fashion shrine and show her such simple little dresses. I had the advantage, of course, of having social status, but my youthful confidence is what made me push open that door. Diana Vreeland? Why not? And that was the beginning.
It was Diana Vreeland who first understood and appreciated the simple uniqueness of the jersey fabric and the easy, flattering fit of the dresses. They may have looked like nothing on hangers, but the dresses looked strikingly sexy and feminine when she put them on two of her in-house models, Pat Cleveland and Loulou de la Falaise, both of whom later became my friends. “How incredibly clever of you, and how modern this is,” Mrs. Vreeland told me, ending our brief meeting with “Terrific, terrific, terrific.” And along with my suitcase I was back out that door and facing another.
I opened that one, too, with the assistance of Kezia Keeble, one of Diana Vreeland’s young and beautiful fashion editors. I had no idea what to do next as I folded my dresses back into the suitcase outside Mrs. Vreeland’s office, so I asked Kezia. “Take a room at the Gotham Hotel on Fifth Avenue during fashion week. The California fashion companies show there. There will be a traffic flow of buyers around,” she told me. “List yourself on the Fashion Calendar and put an announcement in Women’s Wear Daily.” I didn’t hesitate. “Can I use your phone?” I asked as I sat at Kezia’s desk.
I settled in a room at the Gotham Hotel and spent the first long days waiting for buyers. I had previously done some interview
s and those early articles said much more about me being a socialite princess than the clothes I was showing, which, at first, I found frustrating. But that publicity prompted curiosity. Traffic picked up after several early articles in Women’s Wear Daily, the New York Post, and the New York Times.
I was so excited to write the first order from a little boutique in New Jersey on my freshly printed custom order forms. Sales really began to gain traction the next season at the Gotham Hotel after my dresses appeared in Vogue. I remember large orders from Hutzler’s, a department store in Baltimore, and Giorgio’s, the fashionable boutique in Beverly Hills. Then Bloomingdale’s came in. Their five-person team took over the room, discussing windows and advertising. I was overwhelmed. Not only was my English still a bit shaky; I understood nothing of the rag trade jargon.
Those early years were difficult for many reasons. On one side Ferretti was not easy to deal with. My first orders of a few dozen dresses in a specific style was not what he had expected. “I have a factory, not a sample room,” he insisted. Flying to Italy once a month, I would beg for his attention. He would yell. I would cry. “Stick with me,” I kept pleading with him. When my orders were finally delivered they were often wrong—wrong color, wrong style, wrong size, wrong everything, yet whatever I shipped to the stores would sell immediately. That is what encouraged me to persevere.
I was totally on my own, with no experience, and the challenges were enormous. I remember Air India’s freezing warehouse at Kennedy Airport, where, sitting on the floor sorting out a new shipment from Italy, I had to cross out all the labels written in Italian and rewrite them in English. I can see myself crying from the cold and exhaustion, but now, of course, that experience has become a fond memory. So has the way I stored the folded dresses in our dining room and shipped all the orders myself, while also handling the invoices.
My very first print was the chain link print, a black-and-white geometric design made in a button-down shirtdress that I wore sitting on a cube for the first announcement in Women’s Wear Daily in 1970. In 2009, Michelle Obama, as the new First Lady, wore that same print I reissued in a slightly larger scale on a wrap dress for the Obamas’ first official White House Christmas card. What a lovely surprise! Decades after I introduced the chain link print, it was still relevant, making it truly timeless. At the time I designed it, however, timeless had a different meaning. During those same first two years of my new business, I also had two babies. To say I was busy is a huge understatement.
It was really getting to be too much to do by myself. I could not keep running the business out of my apartment, so I took a tiny two-room office on West Fifty-Fifth Street that became a showroom, a warehouse, and an office all in one. Olivier, my best friend from Geneva who was now a photographer, would come in and help with buyers. I tried to convince some large Seventh Avenue houses to distribute the dresses. One after another turned me down. “These boutiquey little dresses could never sell in large enough volume” became the constant refrain. That door remained closed to me, but another far more important door opened when I met Johnny Pomerantz, the sympathetic son of one of those Seventh Avenue businessmen, who told me all I needed was a showroom on Seventh Avenue and a salesman.
I was twenty-five, in business alone in a new country, and totally inexperienced in the ways of the garment trade. “I don’t know any salesmen,” I told Johnny. “Call me in a few days,” he replied. And so Dick Conrad, a thirty-nine-year-old salesman with lots of experience who was searching for a new business to run, came into my life. He took a gamble and agreed to join me if I gave him $300 a week and 25 percent of my company. I could find the weekly amount and 25 percent of nothing is nothing, so we struck a deal. I put $750 into our new company, Dick put $250, and I signed a lease for a showroom on Seventh Avenue. We were in business!
I made a few men’s shirts for Dick to wear in Ferretti’s jersey so that he could experience and understand the uniqueness of the fabric. He did. Dick knew all the best buyers in the specialty stores and better department stores across the country and he called them all. They all came into our new showroom at 530 Seventh Avenue and bought. By the end of 1972, our wholesale revenues were $1.2 million.
Though Ferretti remained very difficult to work with, he generously financed us by allowing a long-term credit of 120 days so we had time to ship and get paid by our customers before paying him. Before we agreed to those terms, at one point we got so far behind I went to a pawnshop across the street from the New York Public Library and pawned the diamond ring Egon and my father had given me when Tatiana was born. (I bought it back four weeks later at enormous interest.)
First there was the simple, perfect T-shirt dress; my favorite, the shirtdress; and a very popular tent dress that came in long and short lengths. Then came a little wrap top, somewhat like the top ballerinas wear to practice, which I designed with a matching skirt. It sold out immediately. The ultimate breakthrough came when I saw Julie Nixon Eisenhower wearing the wrap top and skirt on TV speaking in defense of her father, President Richard Nixon, during the Watergate scandal. “Why not combine the top and the skirt into a dress?” I mused. And the concept for the wrap dress was born.
It wasn’t easy to figure it out at first. I wanted to keep the wide belt of the top to keep the waist small, I wanted the skirt to be bias cut, the neckline low enough to be sexy but high enough to be proper, and I wanted a strong collar and cuffs, just like the original top. Bruna and I spent many hours at the factory outside Florence standing around the cutting table playing with paper patterns, figuring out the puzzle. Sue Feinberg, an Italian-trained American designer, worked with us, too. I’d hired her to oversee the production and design at Ferretti’s factory. She and I used to spend half of our time naked, wrapping and unwrapping ourselves in dresses as they came off the table to check the fit. Finally, one did.
T/72—that was the number assigned to the first Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress produced in 1974. Forty years later, the dress is still alive. Wrap dresses had existed before, of course. A wrap is a very classical shape: a dress that closes itself without buttons or zippers, like a kimono. But this wrap was different because it was made of jersey. The fabric molded to the body in the most flattering way, and was incredibly soft and comfortable while at the same time tight enough to fit the body like a second skin.
The wrap dress made its debut in 1974 at a fashion show Egon and I, who had separated by this time, shared at the Pierre Hotel. (Egon had left the bank wanting to be a menswear designer and was showing a line of shirts he had designed also out of Ferretti’s material.) For the wrap dresses I had chosen two animal prints: snakeskin and leopard. I wanted women to feel sexy, slinky, and feline in the dress and they obviously did. The wrap dresses and the animal prints took off like a stampede, and soon could be seen on the streets of cities all over America. Thanks to the little wrap dress, the business multiplied sevenfold.
Ferretti was very happy, of course; by the end of 1975, production had escalated to over fifteen thousand dresses per week. His factory near Florence was working for us in full capacity. Ferretti had believed in me and I had more than fulfilled his expectations. Over five years, I gave him $35 million in orders.
All of this without a business plan, without any market analysis, without a focus group, without a publicist, without an advertising or branding agency. What I did have was a very good idea, a talented manufacturer who was passionate about his product, and an ambitious salesman who believed in me and sent me all over the country to make personal appearances at different department stores. The stores loved promoting the arrival of a real, live, young princess who was designing easy, sexy dresses that most women could afford. I plunged into the fitting rooms to show the women how to tie the wrap and feel confident about their bodies and themselves.
But it went further. As I was watching women become more confident and beautiful thanks to these new dresses, I was personally becoming more and more confident and, therefore, feeling more beautiful mys
elf. I was projecting what I was selling—ease and confidence. I was becoming one with the dresses and what they stood for. I did not know it then, but I had become a brand.
The pace of growth was dizzying. Suddenly I had close to a hundred people on the payroll, including the staff at the warehouse I’d had to rent on Tenth Avenue to house all the thousands of dresses arriving from Italy. That one little wrap dress had taken the world by storm and I was running behind it as fast as I could. Opportunities were coming in left and right, and as I was young, inexperienced, and not equipped to assess them all, I had very little way to discriminate and decide what offers to choose and for what purpose.
When various entrepreneurs started approaching me as early as 1973 to “license” my name and use my designs to put on their products, I didn’t even know what that word meant. They were varied: a mom-and-pop silk scarf company, a Seventh Avenue veteran who wanted to sell shirts made out of Ferretti’s fabric, a small luggage company owner who wanted to put my name on a new line of totes, a clever entrepreneur who decided to get into eyewear. I signed contract after contract until my name was on seventeen product categories. By the end of 1976, the licenses were worth more than $100 million in sales. I was twenty-nine.
The Woman I Wanted to Be Page 15
