As I watched Susan talking directly to her customers through the television screens I became very excited. I envisioned myself reviving my cosmetics line on TV, but the QVC people had something else in mind. They wanted me to design dresses for them. I was hesitant, not really understanding how you could sell dresses on TV and, also, in fairness, a bit concerned about the “tackiness” of their presentation at the time. I told them I would have to think about it.
I reported my QVC visit to Barry. Coincidentally, he knew about the shopping network from discussions he had had with Comcast and Liberty, the cable companies that owned the station. The timing was fortuitous. Barry had left Fox and was also looking for a new direction. Just as we had been two young, successful tycoons at the same very early age, at that moment we were both “unemployed” and looking for our next opportunities. Little did we know that both our next careers would start from the very same spot: QVC.
Back at my design studio, with the help of the young women I had inherited from the moderate dress company, Kathy and Colleen, we designed not dresses, but a concept we called Diane von Furstenberg Silk Assets. It was a line of washable, coordinated, printed silk separates and scarves. The styles were simple and did not need to be tried on: shirts with a generous cut; easy pants with elastic waists. The colors were bright and cheerful, the prints bold and pretty, and the pieces could mix and match in many combinations. Every mini-collection had an inspiration story. “Giverny” was the print story inspired by the palette of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet. “Pietra Dura” was another collection, inspired by Florentine marble. The stories created a narrative that was easy to discuss on air with enthusiasm.
Here I was, back to my roots, creating color palettes and designing prints. Equally exciting was the financial arrangement I made with QVC for them to buy the clothes directly from the manufacturer in Hong Kong. My responsibility would be to design the line, and make sure it was well made and arrived on time. I would then sell it personally on TV and do all the promotions. For that QVC would pay me 25 percent on top of their cost from the factory. It was a great deal for QVC and for the consumers because there was no intermediate wholesaler. It was an even better deal for me: I had no liability of inventory because the clothes would be shipped directly from the factory to QVC. That arrangement was a huge relief. After all, twice I had had to sell my company because I had not managed inventory properly!
The day I was to have my first Diane von Furstenberg Silk Assets show, in November 1992, I arrived in my hotel room at the Sheraton Great Valley, next door to the TV studio, and found beautiful flowers with a note: “Welcome home and good luck! I love you, Barry.” The “Welcome home” referred to Barry’s secret and successful negotiations to take over control of QVC, launching him into the new world of interactive, a move he continued to build on to reach where he is today.
In two hours I sold $1.3 million of Silk Assets while Barry (who surprised me at the show) and the management of QVC watched the galloping sales figures on a computer. They were all cheering! Kate Betts, a young editor at Vogue, had come along to witness the first show and documented it with wonderment. “Show and Sell,” her article began. “Vogue witnesses a fashion phenomenon in the making.” Overnight, I went from a has-been to a pioneer once again.
It is not inappropriate to say that Barry and I put the teleshopping industry on the map. Barry’s involvement in the new retail phenomenon legitimized it and my participation as a designer glamorized it. A steady stream of people started showing up in West Chester to witness the retail revolution. There were many, many stories about us and QVC in magazines and newspapers.
It just got better and better. Viewers couldn’t get enough of Diane von Furstenberg Silk Assets. On one show in 1993, I sold twenty-two hundred pairs of silk pants in less than two minutes!
Success is not only glamorous, it’s also a lot of work. Being on live television, often in the middle of the night, was exhausting, and driving back and forth on the New Jersey Turnpike made me feel like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. But the exhaustion was worth it; in very little time, Silk Assets generated $40 million in sales.
Barry sold his stake in QVC in 1996 and bought controlling interest in the Home Shopping Network. I followed him there with my business and sales continued to grow. The success of Diane von Furstenberg Silk Assets gave me confidence again, but on television I could not sell the simple, body-hugging, more sophisticated dresses that were my own style. I missed that.
What I desperately wanted was to revitalize my signature brand and return to high-end stores. There were glimmers that it might just be possible. There was a growing nostalgia in the nineties for the fashion of the seventies, spearheaded by Tom Ford, who had revitalized Gucci and put the mood of that legendary decade back into motion.
“You should bring back your dresses,” Ralph Lauren told me when I was pitching TV shopping to him, trying to persuade other designers to join me. Karl Lagerfeld and Gianni Versace said the same: “We love your original dresses. You should bring them back.” Rose Marie Bravo, then president of Saks Fifth Avenue, agreed, asking me time and again to relaunch the little jersey dresses. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was some kind of icon of the seventies. In the new nostalgia, hip, young designers seemed excited to see me. I remember one day walking past Bar Pitti in the West Village where the edgy new grunge designers Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui were having dinner. They waved enthusiastically. I was surprised, to say the least, and very flattered that such hot young talents would notice me. Another young designer, Todd Oldham, named his fashion show “Homage to Diane von Furstenberg.” Again, I was flattered though a little taken aback. “I’m not dead yet,” I remember thinking.
The nostalgia for the seventies and my first designs kept growing. In New York, young girls, contemporaries of my cool daughter, Tatiana, were scouring vintage shops and thrift shops in pursuit of original DVF wraps. All the signs were there for a comeback. The question was how. The answer, it seemed at the time, was Federated Department Stores, which, after many mergers and acquisitions, had become one of the largest better retailers in America, owning Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, among others. I had breakfast with Allen Questrom, the chairman, whom I had known from the old days, and I proposed designing a private label brand exclusive to his stores. It could start with dresses, and over time expand to an array of products including accessories, intimate apparel, and home furnishings. It was a bit audacious to try and sell myself to Federated considering I hadn’t been in the retail world for ten years, but the idea of striking an exclusive agreement with a designer appealed to Allen.
He introduced me to his management and we discussed both the merchandising aspect and the financial side. I wanted to use the same formula as the TV shopping: I would design, and they would buy from the manufacturer and own the liability of the inventory. Since it would require a large commitment and investment on their part, I felt I should show my commitment, too. I would invest in setting up a professional design studio with experienced and talented designers. It sounded like a plan.
Without further ado, I gave up my office at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, where I had been since 1979. It had shrunk from a full floor to a small corner that was outdated, inadequate, and too expensive for what it was. I needed a larger, new space that would inspire creativity—something that could be both a design studio and a showroom where we would make presentations to buyers and press.
At thirty, I had wanted a very grown-up, glamorous space uptown. Approaching fifty, I wanted something more bohemian and my own. I looked downtown and found an 1858 brick carriage house in the Meatpacking District, way, way west on Twelfth Street, very close to the Hudson River. The fifteen-thousand-square-foot space was both charming and open, with a small pool inside the entrance, exposed beams, and redbrick walls. The building had had many lives—a stable for police horses, a studio for the painter Lowell Nesbitt, and most recently the headquarters of an advertising agency.
/> I fell in love with it immediately, to the deep concern of Alexandre, who could not understand why I would buy a house in the smelly neighborhood of butchers, meatpackers, and prostitutes. He was so horrified that he called my mother to get her to try and talk me out of it. They failed, though there was some truth to their objections. It was smelly, and in the morning pretty bad to step around the condoms and the trash in the street. Yet I loved it. In a weird way the cobblestone streets reminded me of Belgium, and I paid no attention to the naysayers. I bought myself the carriage house for my fiftieth birthday.
In the West Village there was a lot of energy, diversity, and a sense of community I never felt on Fifty-Seventh Street. I was in a real neighborhood and quickly established relationships with my colorful neighbors. The first was Florent Morellet, the flamboyant son of the famous French painter François Morellet. Florent had a diner nearby on Gansevoort Street that was open twenty-four hours a day where local artists, workers, and drag queens ate. He often dressed in drag himself and was so upfront about being HIV positive that he posted his T-cell count next to the menu over the counter. Florent was really the godfather of the community and determined to preserve the old, low-brick surrounding buildings. Would I help his campaign to turn the neighborhood into a historic district by holding a fund-raiser? “Of course.”
The fund-raiser, the first of many I had in the second little building I bought next to my studio, was like a fair, with a lot of local restaurants participating. It was a great success, and in 2003, Florent managed to get local legislation through to declare the neighborhood the Gansevoort Market Historic District. It was a huge accomplishment and saved the wonderful old brick buildings from the wreckers’ ball. Florent turned a dream into reality. Alexandre began to appreciate the colorful eclecticism of the neighborhood and soon moved his office there into my space.
Everything seemed new and vital on West Twelfth Street, including my fledgling business. From the moment we moved in, everything seemed to go faster and grow larger—the pressure and stress along with it.
The team was small. Kathy and Colleen handled all of the Silk Assets business I still had with HSN. The design team for my new project with Federated was international: Christian from Holland, Evelyn from Puerto Rico, and Sergio from Colombia. Alexandra, my son’s new bride, who had studied fashion at the Parsons School of Design, joined us. Her first role was to go through the prints. Just as I had done decades ago at Ferretti’s factory, she came quietly into the studio and began sorting through the archived prints from my early years. Together, we created the first designs during the months we were still negotiating with Federated.
I felt the need to recreate the jersey I had used for my dresses in the seventies. Ferretti had died and his factories were closed, but I had kept swatches of the fabrics. After Ferretti and I parted ways in 1979, a certain Mr. Lam in Hong Kong produced my dresses for Carl Rosen and Puritan Fashions.
I hadn’t see Mr. Lam in almost fifteen years when I visited him in Hong Kong to talk to him about re-creating my Italian jersey from the seventies. His factory had been small when I’d last seen him. Now his factories were very large and my business very small, yet he welcomed me with open arms. In return for the investment he would have to make to develop my signature fabric and set up better printing facilities, I moved the production of Silk Assets to his factories. He put his technical people at my disposal and together we developed the perfect jersey fabric, as tight as the original Italian one but this time 100 percent silk and more luxurious. I also shared my knowledge about hand printing, and spent long hours with their technicians. The process took a lot of patience and determination, but it was worth it for sure. The results were astounding.
Working hands-on in Mr. Lam’s factories, I felt I had gone back in time, except now I was in China eating noodles with the workers for lunch and not in Italy eating spaghetti. It was exhausting going back and forth from Mr. Lam’s office in Hong Kong to the factories in China, accompanied by Patso, his right hand. She worked just as hard, totally committed to what we were trying to do.
Another part of my investment was to write a business memoir to draw a line between the present and future, and introduce myself to new customers. Without hesitation, I went to my friend Linda Bird Francke, who had played such a big part in my life with her articles in New York magazine and Newsweek, to help me write the book. I would time the publication of Diane: A Signature Life to coincide with the launch of my first collection for Federated. The plan was to do personal appearances in their stores across the country, promoting the book and the clothes. I was close to finishing the book in the summer of 1996 when the crushing news came in: the deal with Federated had fallen through.
I got the call in my car on a Friday afternoon, while driving to the country. Allen Questrom, the chairman, had left the company. The collaboration no longer seemed right for them. They were sorry. I’m sure there were other reasons, too, but if they ever told me, I’ve forgotten them. I was in total shock. I was devastated. I had counted so much on this arrangement. What was I going to do?
That weekend Barry was with me in Cloudwalk. As usual, he reassured me and encouraged me to move on. By Monday morning, I had a new plan. An obvious plan. One that had been under my nose the whole time. The wrap dress. My quintessential symbol of the seventies. I would relaunch the wrap and once again I would do it on my own.
There were many positive signs. The success of QVC had made my name extremely well known again; I was surprised to see how high I ranked in a poll of brand-name recognition published in Women’s Wear Daily that year. So there I was, with name recognition, a demand for the dress, and the perfect fabric at my disposal.
I called Rose Marie Bravo and my mother’s adage proved right once again. One door closed. Another door opened. “How exciting,” Rose Marie said. “We would be proud to launch your wrap dresses at Saks.”
I had retired at thirty-six, and here I was beginning again, at fifty. I was nervous but it was unbelievably exciting. Reintroducing my brand successfully in a high-end department store like Saks would prove to the world, and to myself, that the first time hadn’t been an accident. But first I had to make it happen.
I decided to call the new line “Diane,” the same name I had used, with a label in my handwriting, for my short-lived couture line. That label also became the first new print I designed: an allover “Diane” signature print. The idea had come to me while I was talking on the phone, looking at the label and doodling on a piece of paper. All those intertwined “Dianes” looked very much like the original prints and felt right. That led me to rework the original twig print by adding more colors. I reissued the original wood print and added a few new ones, all geometric and bold in the style of the seventies.
The announcement of my exclusive arrangement with Saks set off an enormous buzz about the return of the wrap, and me! Newspapers and magazines revisited my marriage to Egon, the children, and the phenomenon of the wrap. The International Herald Tribune described the dress as “The Image of an Era,” over the subhead, “The Charmed Lives and Free Spirit of Diane von Furstenberg.” The New York Times Magazine saw me as a fairy tale—“Once upon a time, there was a princess with an idea. The idea was a dress”—and Women’s Wear Daily really got it right: “Diane’s Wild Ride.”
Beginning again made me feel young and fearless, but, looking back, my diary of that year also reveals many fears. As usual, I did not show my insecurities. I sounded full of confidence in all the interviews I gave, but it was a complicated time for me. On the one hand, I felt excited and rejuvenated, restarting the adventure of the wrap dress, flattered by the reaction of young girls and the excitement of Rose Marie Bravo. On the other hand, I was scared and constantly questioning myself. I did not feel secure. I was going ahead but I was afraid to fail. My rejection by Federated had left me off-balance in my business life and I was also living a major rejection in my private life: Mark Peploe had left me for another woman and I was hurting. What
a strange time it was. Part of me felt old and for the first time ever, on a trip to LA, I consulted a few cosmetic surgeons. Those visits made me feel even more scared, insecure, and confused, although I did know that cosmetic surgery was not the solution. I did, however, get my teeth fixed; I’d had problems since a bad fall when I was ten years old, and seven weeks of radiation made the situation much worse. Alexandra introduced me to her dentist, Dr. Irwin Smigel, and after months of work he left me with two gifts: a beautiful smile for the first time in my life, and the phone number for Tracie Martyn.
The launch at Saks was set for September 1997, and during the summer countdown there were a few unexpected and very welcome confidence boosters. I went to an elegant wedding of friends of my children, in Virginia, where all the young girls were wearing the “it” Tocca dresses: simple, colorful shifts by the then very popular Dutch designer Marie-Anne Oudejans. However the young hip Marie-Anne herself had asked to borrow a sample of a new DVF wrap in the beige-and-white signature print, and to my delight, she wore it to the wedding. I was extremely flattered. It meant a lot.
I got another boost in July at the Dior couture show in Paris. I’d brought a new wrap dress with me and wore it, a choice that was equally daring and nerve-racking. Here I was in the most sophisticated circumstances, a Dior couture show in an elegant greenhouse, wearing a dress that was basically the same as I would have worn twenty years before. But amazingly, it was that little dress that created a buzz in Paris and caught the attention of Amy Spindler, the talented young fashion editor at the New York Times.
The Woman I Wanted to Be Page 18
