The Woman I Wanted to Be

by Diane von Furstenberg

“She slipped one on for John Galliano’s Christian Dior couture show in July in Paris, over a bathing suit,” Amy wrote for the Sunday New York Times Magazine. “By the time the sun began blazing through the roof, everyone near her was envying her wrap: She pulled the skirt aside to reveal leg, pushed up the sleeves to reveal arms, and was left with a dress the size of the bathing suit beneath. Actresses Rita Wilson and Kate Capshaw, seated across from her, raved about her look. So did the models backstage. And that was when she knew.” I did know it was happening but it was still unbelievable. “Oh, I’d like a dress like that,” one model after another said to me as they stood in their beautiful ball gowns when I was taken backstage to see John Galliano. There was such enthusiasm for the dress in Paris that I called my office in New York to arrange for more samples to be brought over by a friend so I could wear another wrap to the Chanel couture show. I wore a different print every day.

  Amy was just as enthusiastic back in New York at the first, unconventional fashion show I gave on West Twelfth Street in September. It was only wrap dresses and a few beaded printed shirts over white pants. The models came down the carriage house’s steep, narrow spiral staircase onto a carpet I’d designed for the little runway that was printed with the black-and-white “Diane” signature print. Looking back, I cannot believe that at age fifty I was once again a little do-it-yourself start-up. It was not so different from my first show at the Gotham Hotel. I was following my instinct, determined to make it work. The press loved it, including Amy.

  “Yes, yes, yes, Diane Von Furstenberg’s bold bias-cut wrap dress is back,” she wrote in the Times. “Redesigned for the 90’s, it is sleek and sexy, but still a dress with a sassy mom quality.” I cannot calculate how much I owe to Amy. The influential fashion reporter, who wore the dresses herself, was such an editorial supporter that she became as important to the new line as Diana Vreeland had been to the original wrap. (Sadly, Amy died of cancer in 2004. She was only forty.)

  I needed to find the right image, with the right spirit, for the first ad campaign for Saks. I went to my friend, French photographer Bettina Rheims, who is a master at photographing women, and we chose Danielle Zinaich to be our girl. Danielle was in her late twenties, had great legs and perfect body language. Her brown hair was shoulder length and her face quite long and distinctive, but what we loved most about her was her personality and her huge laugh that revealed her prominent gums shamelessly. Danielle and I flew to Paris and we shot the relaunch of the wrap dress in my Left Bank apartment. Most of the shoot was in vivid color, except for one dress that we photographed in black-and-white. I had no idea how fortuitous that would be.

  The problem arose when I proudly called Rose Marie Bravo to my studio to see the edgy photos that Bettina and I had done in Paris. She and I were accomplices in this venture, relaunching the wrap, but she didn’t like the pictures at all. She found them too hard, too decadent, too reminiscent of a recent controversy: “heroin-chic” images of pale, ill-looking models. I was devastated. All those beautiful photos in vivid colors rejected. Rose Marie must have felt sorry for me because on her way out, she pointed at the black-and-white photos of Danielle, one serious and one laughing, showing her exaggerated gums and declared, “Use these. She looks happy!”

  I stared at those two black-and-white pictures for hours after Rose Marie left. I didn’t know what to do after spending so much time and money with Bettina shooting hundreds of images for the beautiful color ads, but I had to do something. And then it came to me. “I’ll make them speak,” I said to myself, “and give them a reason to be.” I put them next to each other and under the serious shot of Danielle, I wrote “He stared at me all night” and under the laughing one, I wrote “And then he said, ‘Something about you reminds me of my mother.’ ”

  The copy was funny but also risky, leading people at my office to call it ridiculous. “Nobody wants to look like their mother,” they said. But I thought it was provocative and I liked it, and more to the point, so did Rose Marie, who agreed to endorse the campaign, which turned out to be very successful.

  We launched at Saks in New York on September 9 with great fanfare. Television cameras and print photographers crowded around the women standing in line in the dress department, many with their daughters, to buy the new dresses. The demand was so great the dresses quickly sold out and the women who had to go home without one put their names on waiting lists for the next shipment. “It feels like déjà vu,” I kept telling the hordes of press. They saw explosive success that looked familiar, but I meant it also as a cautionary tale.

  Once again I was on a runaway train without a business plan or a strategy. I didn’t even have a president to manage the new company. There’d been no time. Our new West Twelfth Street studio was still in disarray. I hadn’t finished renovating it, there weren’t enough phone lines, and the computers kept crashing. I remember feeling distracted and exhausted during the launch at Saks, a state exacerbated by my return to the fitting rooms with the customers and seeing my face twenty years older looking back at me in the mirrors. Still, the return of the wrap was a dream come true.

  Alexandra and I toured the country, making personal appearances at the Saks stores from coast to coast selling the dresses with lots of hype. We got a lot of press—a beautiful new von Furstenberg princess in one wrap, her mother-in-law in another—illustrating the agelessness of the dress. The dresses sold well when we were in the stores, but the excitement, and sales, didn’t hold after we left. The reintroduction of the wrap started like a big soufflé, and the soufflé fell flat. I didn’t know what to do. “Business hard, losing money, no plan,” I wrote in my journal.

  I had been out of the stores for so long that I didn’t know the new reality: Young girls in the nineties rarely shopped in the dress department, and that is where we were placed at Saks. The older generation still shopped there, but Alexandra and her friends bought their clothes at smaller boutiques. And that’s where the wrap dress, newly and more sleekly designed, was truly reborn.

  Scoop. What would we have done without Scoop? Owned by a friend of Alexandra’s, Scoop was a very hip, new little shop on Broadway, way downtown in SoHo, where just about everything they sold was black, including the combat boots. But Scoop’s owner, Stefani Greenfield, loved the colorful new wraps and simply hung them on hangers in her window. They sold out in half an hour. She couldn’t keep them in stock with the huge demand from the downtown girls—and soon from the uptown girls when Scoop opened another shop on Third Avenue in the seventies. Where young people shopped, the dresses sold at meteoric speed, but it was just not the case in the old-fashioned dress departments we were also counting on.

  At the beginning of 1998, I hired Susan Falk, the former president of Henri Bendel, to be my president. We also hired a well-known consulting company to advise us on what distribution channel we should pursue. Susan introduced me to Catherine Malandrino, a talented young French designer with whom she had worked previously. Catherine came to see me at the Carlyle, where I was living at the time. We talked about her journey as a designer and I showed her my newest wrap in a dark-green camouflage leopard print. She loved it and agreed to join us.

  We introduced new wraps, and some simple solid-color dresses with soft drape, to the buyers by staging a presentation that was inspired by the old Paris couture houses. I transformed the studio into a living room, decorating it with the sofa, some paintings, a huge mirror, and a piano from my old Fifth Avenue apartment. Every fifteen minutes or so, models would appear in different designs and strike motionless poses by the piano or around the indoor pool as the pianist played Gershwin or Joplin.

  Catherine brought a lot of value to the fledgling company. I wore one of her designs myself the following year when I sat for my portrait by Francesco Clemente on the day Talita was born. I remember joking about being a sexy grandmother as I posed for Francesco that day. The painting hangs now in the lobby of my studio on Fourteenth Street and will be forever in my memory as the day I be
come a grandmother for the first time. That dress was called Angelina and was cleverly draped and very flattering with all kinds of details from old-fashioned dressmaking. Angelina proved to be very successful.

  Alexandra was getting more and more involved and was a wonderful image for the company. Though she liked the new draped dresses well enough, she was still concerned about our lack of direction. She had a point. Between the wraps and the new drape dresses we clearly had a viable collection but we didn’t have a clear path of how to distribute it and move the business forward. The consultants we had hired advised us to go into the moderate market, but it didn’t match the sophistication of the designs. I was confused and stressed.

  That summer as I was driving to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to meet Barry and fly to Alaska, I took a very bad turn. Having passed the airport turnoff, I swerved, bumped into something, and was spun back onto the highway where I hit an eighteen-wheeler. I had a big, huge pain in my chest and I remember asking the ambulance crew, “Can you live if you have a hole in your heart?” It turned out that in addition to the eighteen stitches I needed in my head, I had broken five or six ribs and punctured a lung. (I also totaled Barry’s BMW.)

  I spent the next two painful but peaceful weeks in a small hospital in Hackensack, New Jersey, with great doctors and such tight security that I was convinced there was a mob boss on my floor. Barry and the children wanted desperately for me to be transferred to a hospital in New York, but I refused. I loved that little hospital and I loved the time alone, as Hackensack was far enough from Manhattan to discourage visitors. I needed a break. I knew I was exhausted and confused, and so did Alexandre. “You had the accident because you don’t know what you’re doing,” he said, not as a reproach but out of concern. That was perhaps a harsh comment, but I think he was totally right. Just as a few years before I’d thought my tongue cancer symbolized my inability to express myself, I saw the accident as a symptom of my lack of a road map for my business.

  The nights were long and painful in the hospital, despite my wonderful nurse with whom I became friends. I have few memories of those two weeks in a no-man’s-land, as I never wrote about it in my diaries. All I know is that I had a tube in my lung, did not read or watch television, and waited motionless for my body to heal. It did. Slowly and steadily I sweated out all the bad.

  I knew I had to make a change and the catalyst presented itself the moment I arrived back at my apartment in the Carlyle—and discovered water pouring into the bedroom from a leak in the ceiling. “That’s it,” I said to myself. “I’m moving downtown.”

  And another new life began.

  I created a wonderful living space next to my private office on the top floor of the West Twelfth Street studio carriage house. I decorated the living area with Balinese artifacts and put an iron canopy bed against the exposed brick wall. I made a large dressing room that was also a yoga studio. I loved the décor of my new bohemian lifestyle, so different from the Carlyle. In the morning I would make a cup of coffee and cross the highway practically in my pajamas to walk along the river. I had a small guest room where my mother stayed when she visited me. She was never really comfortable there; years later it occurred to me that the exposed brick may have reminded her of the camps.

  On the other hand, Christian Louboutin loved staying in that guest room and practically lived there as he showed his early collections of shoes on my dining room table. At the time he had just begun selling his sexy, red-soled heels to Barneys, Jeffrey, and Neiman Marcus. As I watched him develop new, spectacular shoes every season, selling only a few styles at a time, I suggested he build a core line he could offer every season, and was proud that I was able to help him build his talent into a huge global brand. We became the best of friends, going on to share personal appearances across the country, and began taking lots of holidays together. We’ve walked and driven the dusty Silk Road in Uzbekistan all the way from Tashkent to Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, and Fergana, to end up on the border of Afghanistan. Christian and I are both Capricorns, and like two little goats we love to climb. We’ve hiked up and down the hills of Egypt and the steep mountains of Bhutan.

  What I loved most of all about my West Twelfth Street carriage house was the feeling that I belonged there. My personal style and designs were one and the same again—simple, happy, sexy—and everything in my life was beginning to feel coherent for the first time in years. All of this, including the creative characters in my vibrant neighborhood, made me feel like a young new me. Once again I was giving lots of fun parties, including one for the publication of Signature Life. Tatiana asked a friend of a friend to organize the music, and that is when we all met Russell Steinberg, who soon after became father of my second grandchild, Antonia.

  The business was still limping along, but little by little we were gaining traction and I was certainly happier than I’d been in a while. I was very touched and proud when the CFDA asked me to join its board of directors in 1999. It was very reassuring to be recognized by my colleagues. For the first time in many years, I no longer felt like an outsider. I was back in the world of fashion.

  What I didn’t anticipate was a run-in I had with Alexandre in what has become known as the “family intervention.” The whole family was gathered in Barry’s office in New York where we were discussing the creation of the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation for charitable donations. After that discussion, Alexandre, who manages our family money, confronted me. “You’ve got to refocus your energies on making a plan for what you want to do with the company and stop hemorrhaging money,” he said. “Or else pull the plug.”

  I was very angry at being confronted like that—or being confronted at all, for that matter. It was my money after all, and there was progress. I did understand Alex’s concern, but in my mind, this time it was less about money and more about me. When I’d first started out in business, my goal had been financial independence and I had achieved it. This time my goal was to prove to myself and the world that the first time around hadn’t been a fluke. My pride was more important than the cost of achieving that goal. It was also about the wrap dress, the style that was mine and had a place in women’s closets again. Pull the plug? Now?

  I slammed my fist down hard on the table. “Give me six months!” I said. “I’ll turn it around. You’ll see.” Alex backed off and we all agreed to the six months.

  He was right, of course. I couldn’t just keep spending money without a plan. But I felt I might be on my way with the enthusiasm of young women for my dresses again, and that’s what I wanted to work on. I did, however, need professional sales help.

  And that’s when Paula Sutter came into my life.

  Stefani from Scoop introduced me to Paula, her young friend and former colleague, over lunch at Balthazar, the French downtown bistro. Paula, who was then greatly pregnant, had been the vice president of sales and marketing for DKNY. She and Stefani had both been part of Donna Karan’s dream team that was so successful in the eighties launching DKNY. Many of the women on that team went on to have spectacular careers. “You should hire her,” Stefani said. It was I who had to do the convincing when Paula visited me in my office. She didn’t want to commit to a full-time job because of her impending motherhood, but I managed to persuade her to come on as a part-time consultant. That was 1998. When Susan Falk, who wanted to return to corporate life, left the following year, Paula became president of Diane von Furstenberg Studio. She remained the company’s invaluable president for fourteen years.

  It was a struggle for her at first, accentuated when Alexandre came to see Paula to reissue his now familiar ultimatum. “You’ve got six months to turn a profit or close it down,” he told her. Not a great welcome. Paula, however, was on my side.

  With her credentials she could have gone to bigger, more successful names at the time, but she saw that our company had really good DNA and really good bones but needed “Windexing,” as she put it, to get rid of the messiness. She was as excited as I was about the po
ssibilities that lay in the young, not in the middle-aged dress department. The demographic model had been wrong from the start, so we changed course.

  The retail experience was trending toward a new, more modern approach. Department stores were beginning to establish contemporary or “affordable luxury” divisions and that’s where Paula thought we belonged. It would be a great opportunity for us to go after the younger consumer and pretty much retell our story in a new and modern way, but to get there, we first we had to reposition the brand as universally cool.

  Paula was enthusiastic and determined. She had such energy talking to the luxury stores like Bergdorf Goodman, but it was difficult. My name was “polluted” they claimed because we were still selling on television, and some buyers still thought of me as an old brand even though by that time we had an enviable track record with contemporary girls. The signature label, Diane, was also problematic. They thought it old-fashioned. Luckily an old boyfriend, Craig Brown, the graphic designer who made the Rolling Stone logo of Mick Jagger’s tongue, reappeared in my life at that moment and he redesigned the label as a typeface “Diane von Furstenberg.”

  We took other steps as well. “Diane von Furstenberg Silk Assets” became “Silk Assets.” I eased myself out of the HSN broadcasts and Alicia, a young woman from the office, replaced me.

  Paula established monthly deliveries to create an ongoing fresh flow of merchandise in the stores. For our next press day I had the idea of creating evocative tableaux vivants around the studio’s pool illustrating the themes of those monthly deliveries: the plants, the flowers, the sea. The models were ravishing in the small, focused collection of featherweight chiffon and jersey dresses in trademark prints and matching colors. The buyers and press walked into a living painting. It was colorful, sexy, edgy, and different from what anyone else was doing at the time.

  We continued our show-and-tell in Paris. We packed up and took a booth at Tranoï, an international fashion trade fair for young designers at the Carrousel du Louvre during French Market Week. The best specialty stores from around the world go there. These shops set the taste for everyone else. We were hoping to be a presence in those stores and it happened when Colette, one of the coolest shops, ordered our sexy, printed dresses for its store in Paris. It was at that time that Betsee Isenberg, the hot showroom rep in LA, also took the line on to sell on the West Coast.