Everything I touched seemed to turn to gold, including a cosmetics line I started with a friend simply because I loved cosmetics. The idea began to form after I lost all my makeup on one of my trips and went to replace it in an emergency, only to find that makeup lines in department stores looked and smelled old. They were very serious and not fun or relevant to the new, playful fashion mood. “If I dress women so successfully,” I said to myself, “why could I not create colorful makeup they could play with that would make them even more beautiful?”
The makeup I was personally using and loved was the professional stage makeup sold at the Make-Up-Center a block from my first office. The little pots of reds, lavenders, turquoises, and purples were irresistible to me and I used to buy all the colors they had. I loved sitting on the big square sink in my bathroom with my feet in the basin to be close to the mirror and play with my face. I had a good face for makeup: lots of eyelid and strong cheekbones. I loved applying the makeup on others, too, and I got good at it.
The idea of turning that passion into a business was solidified in an unexpected way. I was in Los Angeles, staying at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. At the time I was having a mini fling with the movie star Ryan O’Neal. He had come to my room to pick me up for dinner and he teased me about the quantity of makeup I had in my bathroom. “Why do you need all this stuff?” he asked. He may have been a big movie star and I a starstruck young girl, but I could not let his condescension go unanswered. “I don’t need it. I just like it,” I replied. But when he persisted in patronizing me in that arrogant way, I came up with a boastful reaction. “I’m thinking of buying the company,” I said. It was a bluff, of course, but right at that moment I decided to create my own makeup line and go into the beauty business.
It was a ridiculous caper, for sure. As much as I loved cosmetics, I knew nothing about the business. Neither did my friend Sylvie Chantecaille, who had just moved from Paris with her husband, Olivier, and a newborn baby, and was looking for something to do. Sylvie, too, loved cosmetics (she now has a very successful line of her own with her daughter, the grown-up baby Olivia, who I remember learning to walk amongst pots of makeup and creams), so we set out to learn what we needed to do, visiting laboratories and talking to experienced product developers. “You have to create a fragrance,” we kept hearing. “That’s where the money is.”
I had no idea how to do that, so I hired someone who did, Bob Loeb, a beauty business consultant, and the three of us developed my first scent, a light, lovely fragrance named Tatiana after my four-year-old daughter. Tatiana’s scent was a wonderful bouquet of white flowers . . . gardenia, honeysuckle, and jasmine. To introduce it, we sent out thousands of free samples by attaching a packet of the scent to the hangtag of the dresses I was shipping all over the country. Tatiana not only quickly became very popular when we officially launched it in 1975, but inspired a generation of new floral fragrances such as Revlon’s Charlie, among others.
In the midst of perfecting Tatiana and developing a cosmetics line, I started researching and writing my first book: Diane von Furstenberg’s Book of Beauty: How to Become a More Attractive, Confident and Sensual Woman. It was bold of me to feel I could dispense that advice at the age of twenty-eight, but wherever I went people wanted to know how I lived, what I ate, what I did for exercise, what makeup I wore. They wanted to know my secrets, so I decided to write the book. I didn’t really think I had any secrets, but those questions made me think about the subject of beauty.
I had an ulterior motive as well. I wanted to learn all I could about the business of beauty. Researching for the book, I talked to many experts about nutrition, hair treatment, skin cleansing, exercise, cosmetics—everything to do with beauty. Evelyn Portrait, Bob Loeb’s lovely wife, helped me with the research and the book did very well when it was published in 1976.
We officially launched our cosmetics line at the end of 1975 at a small salon I opened on Madison Avenue. I wanted women to have the same fun I did sitting on my bathroom sink and playing with makeup, so in my little store on Madison Avenue (real estate was cheap at the time), I installed four little bars and stools in the front room where women could experiment with testers. The boutique was my version of the Make-Up-Center, and I loved it. So did the women who came in unsure how best to use makeup, and left with lots of products and a personalized chart after a session with Nicholas, our professional makeup artist. Women wore a lot of makeup in the seventies, so our timing was just right.
I was happy with my tiny makeup venture—Sylvie and I did it on a small budget, using stock packaging and working out of my apartment—and was a bit reticent to grow it beyond my shop on Madison Avenue. I was finally persuaded by the legendary Marvin Traub at Bloomingdale’s to open my own cosmetics counter there and to go national. I was very involved with the dresses and my licenses and committing to Bloomingdale’s would mean more salespeople, advertising costs, and a lot of my time, of which I had none. But I had fantasized about joining the ranks of such pioneers as Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, and Estée Lauder, and did it anyway. It was a blast.
I went on the road with Gigi Williams, a makeup artist and hilarious travel companion, to promote the cosmetics and the dresses, as well as the publication of my beauty book. Gigi was hip and cute, a true downtown little girl with early piercings who was married to artist Ronnie Cutrone, Andy Warhol’s favorite assistant. Gigi and I felt like rock stars touring the country, doing interviews at local news stations and visiting all the stores where long lines of women were patiently waiting for makeup applications. We loved doing those makeovers and making women feel more secure with a little eye shadow, a little highlight on the cheekbones, and, equally as important, a little pep talk (and of course a spray of Tatiana perfume).
More and more I was realizing from my conversations with women how many had insecurities. By listening to their insecurities and sharing my own, we all felt stronger. It was an authentic dialogue, a very even give and get. The stronger I became, the stronger I wanted others to be. I realize now that it was at that time, as I was feeling stronger, that my desire to empower women started, a desire that exists to this day, more and more.
Back then, however, my main goal was to be free and independent. I was constantly on the go. I loved being that woman high on her heels walking in and out of places like a tornado, taking planes as if they were buses, feeling pragmatic, engaged, and sexy. I loved the idea of being a young tycooness who smiles at her shadow and winks at herself in the mirror. I loved having a man’s life in a woman’s body. In a sense I had become the woman I wanted to be, and it was then, at twenty-eight, that I met Barry and we fell in love. He, too, was a young tycoon, barely thirty-three. We both were living an American Dream, separately and together.
My wrap dress had become the “it” dress and I had become a celebrity. I was identified with all my products and was the model for them, all that in no time at all. I had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.
Even the staid Wall Street Journal took notice and on January 28, 1976, ran a feature about my “fashion empire” on the front page. I was beyond proud of myself that morning as I took a very early flight to Cleveland for a personal appearance (having young children, I tried to stay home with them at night and fly early in the morning). There were almost no women on that flight. I sat next to a businessman with my pile of magazines and newspapers on my lap. The Wall Street Journal was on top. After a few minutes of staring at me and my legs, huffing and puffing, trying to figure out how to start a conversation, the man asked, “What’s a pretty girl like you doing reading the Wall Street Journal?”
I looked at him, but said nothing. I could have shown him my front-page story, but it seemed too easy, and to this day, the fact that I did not remains one of the best personal satisfactions I’ve ever had. I kept my triumph to myself. Though of course I have told that story so many times since that I have more than exploited this poor guy’s chauvinist attitude, which was so common at the time.
Exposure attracts exposure and two months later, I was on the cover of Newsweek. That was a very big deal in those days before CNN and the Internet. President Gerald Ford had been slated for the cover, having just won the Republican presidential primary, his first since replacing Richard Nixon in the White House, but the editors must have thought I’d make a more appealing sell and decided to put me on the cover instead. When an urgent call came from Newsweek, I snatched one of my favorite green-and-white jersey shirtdresses off the rack and raced over to Scavullo’s studio, where he squeezed me in for the photo in the midst of a cover shoot for Cosmopolitan.
The Newsweek cover ended any anonymity I might have had, which, at first, I found intimidating. I’d been invited to the White House just before the cover ran by Luis Estévez, the Cuban-born California designer who made First Lady Betty Ford’s clothes. It was my first visit, so you can imagine my amazement to find myself seated at President Ford’s table and joking with the president about Newsweek choosing me for the cover over him! It all seemed unbelievable, especially when Henry Kissinger introduced himself to me as if I wouldn’t recognize him. He subsequently became a good friend and after he and his wife Nancy bought a home near me in Connecticut we often had dinner together.
We all know the value of publicity, but the Newsweek cover launched a tsunami. The story spiked sales of the dresses, with more stores fighting for them, and brought me a whole new and very profitable line of work: home design.
There is an energy and an audacity that comes with youth. Older people often find this unchecked spirit uninformed and irritating, and are surprised when that spirit triumphs. And so it was with me and Sears, Roebuck. I’d been approached shortly after the Newsweek cover by a bedspread manufacturer who wanted to put my name on the bedspreads he was making for Sears. Bedspreads? I thought. Why stop at bedspreads? At the time, Sears was a very powerful company with many stores and a large catalog on everyone’s kitchen counter. They had enormous advertising power and would take out eight- to ten-page magazine ads showing an entire house. Why not give the Sears customers the choice of more interesting home products? Mine.
I put together some sketches and flew to Chicago to see the all-powerful Charles Moran, the head of Sears’s huge home furnishing division, which did about $1 billion a year in sales. My mother often reminded me of that day when I left the apartment at six a.m. carrying a huge folder with my presentation. I think even she was impressed by my drive and energy.
I can see myself now in that boardroom with a lot of white, middle-aged midwestern men glancing at my sketches and staring at this strange creature from New York with masses of curly hair, a foreign accent, and a lot of leg trying to sell herself to design home furnishings for Middle America. I can only imagine what they were thinking when, in response to Moran’s question of what I wanted in compensation for my work, I said I wouldn’t do it for less than half a million dollars. That was an unheard-of amount in those days, but I was young and bold. As weeks passed I became afraid I’d pushed too far, but then I got the call that they had accepted my proposal. What I did not know was that when I signed the contract with Sears I broke a taboo. If you sold to upper-tier stores like Neiman Marcus and Saks you were not supposed to also sell to a mass merchant like Sears. But because my dresses were so hot in department stores, I managed to get away with it.
For the third time I set up a studio in my apartment and hired Marita, a young girl with great taste, to help me design what was in essence a private label line for Sears, The Diane von Furstenberg Style for Living Collection, which quickly grew beyond sheets and towels into curtains, tableware, rugs—eventually even furniture. It was a lot of hard work designing and color-coordinating the different products, then presenting them to the legions of Sears buyers in different categories, and I soon hired an experienced textile designer couple, Peter and Christine d’Ascoli, to manage the Sears collection. It was well worth it. In the seven years I worked with Sears, retail sales of my home furnishings line grew to $100 million a year.
No wonder I call this phase of my business The American Dream. Even I find it hard to believe, as I write this, what I achieved in so little time. In less than five years, I’d gone from a little European girl determined to support herself to achieving success that far exceeded that dream. I was only twenty-seven when I bought Cloudwalk, twenty-nine when I was on the cover of Newsweek, barely thirty when I bought a huge apartment on Fifth Avenue as a birthday present to myself.
There was a price for my success, of course. I always felt I had to run faster and faster just to keep up with the business, which filled me with anxiety. The anxiety proved to be justified when the American Dream turned into a nightmare.
I saw it coming, but my partner didn’t listen to me. Neither did my lawyer, my accountant, or Ferretti, for that matter. I was the one on the road making personal appearances, noticing the racks and racks of the printed jersey dresses in one department store and the racks and racks of the same dresses in the department store across the street. They, on the other hand, looked at the avalanche of orders after the Newsweek cover and supported the decision to up the production at Ferretti’s factories, all wrap dresses: blue and white, red and white, green and white! Women all over the country had at least two, five, sometimes ten of those dresses, if not more, already hanging in their closets—and the market for them crashed.
I remember that Sunday in January 1978 when every department store in the city took a full page in the New York Times advertising the wrap dress on sale. I was so used to seeing the dress advertised that I wasn’t particularly alarmed. I didn’t realize the negative impact until the next day, a snowy Monday, when Women’s Wear Daily announced that the market for my little dresses was “saturated,” that the sales marked the “end of a trend.” The dresses were still hot with the public, but overnight the market for new sales collapsed in department stores across the country. I was close to panic. Orders plummeted and I faced $4 million of dead inventory. What to do? The only thing I could think of was to immediately stop the twenty-five thousand new wrap dresses Ferretti was making each week. He was furious with me, but I had no choice. My company was on the verge of bankruptcy. I was in shock.
I felt even then, and know now for sure, that we had done it to ourselves. We had behaved like amateurs on a runaway horse. My instincts to diversify the offerings and expand from just making wrap dresses had been ignored when I reported seeing the glut on the market. That little dress was everywhere. I wanted to expand the dress into a collection, a wardrobe, but my associates didn’t consider that the demand would ever end. I should have been more forceful in cutting back the orders after the Newsweek cover.
I separated with Dick Conrad, paying him $1 million for his 25 percent share of the company, hired a new president, replaced the lawyer and accountant who had ill advised me. I was now chairman, sole owner, and head designer of Diane von Furstenberg, Ltd. So it was I who received the letter from Roy Cohn, the most feared lawyer in America who had been Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right hand. Ferretti had hired him to sue me. My heart stopped, but I didn’t show my fear. I called Roy Cohn and screamed bluffs: “With all the things I know about Ferretti, I don’t think you want to go after me,” I threatened. Then I hung up. My bluff worked. I never heard from him again.
But I still had a huge inventory and an even bigger knot in my stomach. Barry was looking at my numbers and looking for a solution. He was incredibly supportive but knew nothing about the fashion business.
The good thing was that success had made me into a household name. The Seventh Avenue companies that had snubbed me a few years before were suddenly all interested in buying my business. It was another flamboyant fashion person who appeared in my life and saved me. I think of Carl Rosen as the “Seventh Avenue Ferretti”: passionate and visionary. Carl had just made a deal with Calvin Klein to make a line of jeans. Now he wanted to sign a license with me to make Diane von Furstenberg dresses. Not only would he buy and dispose of my inv
entory, but he would run the business and pay me a royalty with a guaranteed minimum of $1 million a year. Barry negotiated the deal. Barry is known to be a tough negotiator but so was Carl. They went on for days. Only recently, Barry confessed to me that at one point he had pushed so far he thought he had blown it and that Carl would walk out. But he didn’t.
Once again, my mother’s credo proved true: What had seemed the worst, turned out to be good. I had managed not only to get rid of a terrible liability but also to work out a profitable arrangement.
My American Dream was still alive and well as I moved forward. Again, I drew on my mother. “If one door closes, another will open,” she would say—and it did. My beauty line. It had done very well since I’d launched it in 1975, especially Tatiana, the fragrance, but with the dress business no longer my responsibility, I could now concentrate on taking the beauty line to new heights. Without a moment of nostalgia I got rid of my showroom in the garment district and moved uptown to glamorous offices on Fifty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, in the heart of the cosmetics world. I leased the entire twenty-fourth floor in the old, art deco Squibb building at 745 Fifth Avenue with a view of Central Park and Revlon and Estée Lauder right across the street. I converted what the prior tenant had used as a storeroom into my private, airy, pink office with a terrace. I felt happy and on top of the world!
Since I was chairman and sole owner of the company, it was mine to make or break. I did not think much about funding the beauty business. All my licenses, including the dresses and my home furnishings for Sears, reached $150 million in sales and provided a large income.
My new president was Sheppard Zinovoy, and I hired a professional beauty salesman, Gary Savage, whom I lured from Pierre Cardin fragrance. A ravishing girl, Janet Chin, joined me as a product development person and I even built a state-of-the-art laboratory in the office that was run by an Italian chemist called Gianni Mosca. It all felt very serious when I put on a white coat to enter the lab and test the samples he and his assistant developed, and for me it was a dream come true.
The Woman I Wanted to Be Page 16
