The Woman I Wanted to Be

by Diane von Furstenberg

  Indeed, it became a historic moment, especially when I grabbed Sergey from the audience to take the victory walk. The show was on every evening news broadcast around the world and the film, DVF [through Google Glass] was seen by millions on YouTube. Google Glass saved the day.

  Yvan and I parted soon afterward. What we had to do to get the brand back on track would compromise his creativity. Joel insisted that I step back in to be the creative director and lead the designs back to our DNA. “What better person to do DVF than DVF?” he argued. Easier said than done. It took me more than a year to regain my confidence, find clarity, and slowly and painfully bring us back on brand.

  One morning, my friend François-Marie Banier called me from Paris. He must have felt that I was insecure, and said something enlightening to me: “assume-toi,” a French expression that means own yourself. What he was telling me was “Trust your own talent, learn to respect it.” He was absolutely right. Though I always tell others “Dare to be you,” I wasn’t applying it to myself. “Make me a drawing of it, to remind me,” I told him, laughing. That drawing now hangs on the wall next to my desk.

  As I got much more involved in the creative process, Joel reorganized the company into divisions, with a unified team between design, merchandising, and sales, and a clear, nine-month time frame for design development. He hired a president of retail, a division head of accessories, a chief operating officer, our first chief marketing officer, and several others.

  Joel also took it upon himself to ask each executive to define the DVF woman in one sentence. To his mounting frustration, he got a different answer each time, so he organized a focus session with Trey.

  The goal of the daylong brainstorm was to come up with three words that exemplified DVF. Three words to identify our brand, our customer, and our designs. I was skeptical. We formed different groups and broke down words and sentences. Joel locked us in a room with coffee and pizzas so we wouldn’t lose our momentum. By the end of the day I was surprised to see how many of the different groups came up with the same words: effortless, sexy, and on-the-go. Everyone applauded.

  When the fog lifts, all of a sudden you see the light and everything becomes easier. Those three words brought us clarity. If it isn’t effortless, if it isn’t sexy, if you cannot put it in a little suitcase, it’s not DVF. By the next day Joel was inundated with suggestions about what we had to do next, how to relate this definition to every facet of the business. Design and merchandising went back to edit the next collection with a new lens.

  Joel’s son found some old Ron Galella paparazzi pictures of me in a blur of motion, and Joel declared that’s what DVF’s image should be: on-the-go and caught in the moment. “She’s glamorous, she’s crossing the street, her hair is flying and she looks like somebody you want to be,” he said. We needed to find the right model who was sophisticated and had confident body language—a girl who resembled, in a sense, the woman that I’d always wanted to become.

  I turned to Edward Enninful, the talented fashion director of W magazine, whom I love and respect so much. “Who do you think should be in my ads?” I emailed him. Within the hour he responded with photographs of me as a young woman he’d pulled from the Internet alongside pictures of Daria Werbowy.

  And there she was: a thirty-one-year-old Canadian woman of Ukrainian descent, extraordinarily beautiful and interesting-looking with long legs and wide-set blue eyes. Although she appears on the covers of Vogue worldwide, Daria is not your average supermodel. You never see her at parties, she is a world traveler, a hiker. She is the epitome of cool.

  Daria’s first DVF campaign was evocative and gritty. Night in New York. A beautiful young woman alone, confident, knowing where she is going, glancing behind her. “The images channel seventiesera paparazzi shots,” wrote Women’s Wear Daily, “with a spotlight on DVF’s iconic wrap dresses.” I knew we were on the right track.

  As insurance that we didn’t stray again, Paula brought in Stefani Greenfield, the friend who had originally brought Paula to me. Stefani, who sold Scoop in 2008 and now has her own consulting firm, understands the brand perfectly. Furthermore, she personally has a huge collection of DVF products and I was delighted to have her by our side.

  Through all these transitions, many drawing from the strengths of the past and streamlining them for the future, was the unbelievable reality that in 2014 the wrap dress was turning forty! Joel called a meeting to discuss ideas for its birthday. Focusing on the wrap dress seemed a déjà vu for Paula and me. We needed to be convinced, but the young girls in marketing, and Stefani, were excited. Ideas were brought to the table: an exhibition, some collaborations.

  As I started to think more and more about the dress I had created decades ago, and that was still selling, I realized I had always taken it for granted. Sometimes I even resented it when people talked about it as if it were the only thing I had ever done. Slowly but surely I began to look at it with fresh eyes and appreciated not only what it had done for me but also the value of the design itself. Effortless, sexy, and on-the-go, that little dress was very much the spirit of the brand! I decided to design a new one as an anniversary present to the original that had paid all my bills and had become part of fashion history.

  In our line, we had a fit-and-flare dress that was very popular with young women, the Jeannie, named for our superstar head of production. Sleeveless, fitted stretch knit top, a flared skirt. It is simple and comfortable, sexy and effortless, easy to dress up or dress down. It quickly became a bestseller. When Victoria Beckham came to lunch at my office one day, she noticed it on a girl in the elevator and, after touching the easy stretch fabric, ordered one for herself on the spot.

  If that flared skirt is so popular, I thought, I should turn it into a wrap dress. So I went to the sample room and called in Emily, the talented young woman I had discovered at the Savannah College of Art and Design when I spoke there at graduation years ago. I had noticed the simple but clever long jersey dress she had designed to wear for the occasion and offered her an internship. Emily has been working with us ever since. I told her that we would do this new wrap dress together. I explained that the top had to feel like a ballerina cover-up: tight jersey to flatter the bust and pinch the waist. For the circle skirt we chose a woven fabric that holds its shape well, but is still light.

  We set to work building it and we fit it until it was perfect, just as I’d done with the first wrap dress in the factory outside Florence forty years before. I wanted to name the dress Emily, but along the way it became Amelia instead. We reissued the original snake print, the one that had danced down the runway at the Cotillion Room of the Pierre Hotel, and used it to make the new Amelia wrap. At first, our sales department did not even notice the dress; it had come so late that they barely showed it to buyers. In spite of my insecurity at the time, I forced our retail stores to buy it. I was right, Amelia was a hit, got a full page in Vogue, and became a bestseller! Reliving the magic with the birth of a new wrap, I became convinced. We would celebrate her fortieth birthday with pride. I was totally on board and excited when we all met again.

  It was more or less at that time, as I started to regain my confidence and excitement, that Paula came to me and hinted that she wanted to leave. She was tired and felt it was time for her to look for a new horizon and new challenges. At first I refused to believe it; I always thought we were joined at the hip, that she was my partner in crime. We had built the new company. We were the Comeback Kids. “I can’t imagine you not being here,” I said. As she continued to discuss our separation with Joel, I slowly started to accept that she would leave.

  Plans for the anniversary were accelerating. We decided to mount an exhibition and this time it would really earn its name: Journey of a Dress. It would be only about wraps: vintage wraps from the archives, current wraps, and we would create some anniversary wraps. A collaboration with Andy Warhol immediately came to my mind. What would be more DVF, more seventies yet modern than a Warhol wrap dress?

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p; The first big decision was where to mount the exhibition. Los Angeles was my choice . . . not only is it a city I love and where both my children live, but it has the right mixture of edginess, style, and pop culture. I love the light in LA, that very light that attracted the movie industry in the 1930s, a light that reinforces colors and boldness.

  I made an appointment to see Michael Govan, the dynamic leader of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and husband of the equally dynamic Katharine Ross, the superstar of fashion communications—art, fashion, and culture in one couple. In the museum parking lot, I got cold feet. “What am I going to tell him? Let’s cancel,” I told Grace Cha, my trusted VP of global communications. “We’re already here,” she said, incredulous. “Let’s go in.” And so in we went.

  Of course as soon I began talking to Michael my adrenaline started racing. I relived the success of the exhibition in Beijing and how I had commissioned Chinese artists for it. I could feel his excitement and, with nothing to lose, I asked him, “How can I make this happen within your world? Do you know of any space near LACMA that I could use?” “Maybe,” he said smiling.

  The old May Company department store building sits on the LACMA campus and they had been using it for storage. They had begun clearing it out as it was going to be rebuilt by mega architect Renzo Piano into the spectacular Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. “You should meet with the Academy people and ask them,” Michael suggested. “The timing may very well work for you.”

  An old famous department store on the LACMA campus that will become the museum of the film Academy? Was I dreaming? It sounded perfect!

  When I entered the movie poster–lined hallways of the Academy to meet Dawn Hudson, the CEO, and Bill Kramer, director of development for their future museum, I was determined to seduce them. I guess Dawn felt the same way. She was wearing a DVF top, which I considered a good omen. She suggested we see the space, and if we liked it, she would ask the board.

  The big, gloomy storage building was divided into endless large rooms packed with crates of art. It wasn’t a pretty sight but I knew my friend interior designer Bill Katz could turn this gloom into glamour. It was full speed ahead.

  What I did not know is that the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where I’d never been, was also planning an anniversary, its twentieth. When Eric Shiner, the director, called to invite me to participate, he mentioned that there were lots of photos of me in their archives, and it tickled my curiosity. The next night, I ran into my good friend Bob Colacello, who had been Interview magazine’s editor in the Warhol years, and as close to Andy as anyone could be. Stars were lining up and I decided to organize a field trip to Pittsburgh with Bill Katz, his assistant Kol, and Bob so that ideas for the exhibition would start to gel. But before that, I wanted Bob to take me on a day trip to Brooklyn to visit some young local artists. He planned the day guided by Vito Schnabel, Julian Schnabel’s son, who is a successful independent art curator. As we visited the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Rashid Johnson’s studio, I explained Journey of a Dress, and how I wanted to incorporate young artists in it. I invited Vito to come to Pittsburgh, too.

  We took off early in the morning to fit in a visit to Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s beautiful nature-intensive house that I had always wanted to see, have a picnic on the way, and end up at Andy Warhol’s museum in downtown Pittsburgh. We toured the museum, marveled at the paintings, watched the movies, and ended up in the private archive rooms where Eric had pulled out all of the photos Andy had taken of me over the years. Bob and I felt as if we were back at Warhol’s Factory.

  For a few weeks I continued to visit artists’ studios with Vito. I commissioned Dustin Yellin to make me a sculpture the minute I entered his studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He had never heard of the wrap dress, so I gave him a wrap for his girlfriend. Apparently he wore it around his studio instead, seeking inspiration from my early motto: “Feel like a woman, wear a dress!” I guess it worked, because he created a stunning 3D collage of the wrap frozen midmotion without a body inside. The “dress” is made up of hundreds, probably thousands of tiny, scanned black-and-white paper images of prints and newspaper articles cut into the shape of my first link print and laminated on multiple layers of glass inside a glass case. The dress floated in what looked like an aquarium to me and was the perfect blend of art and the wrap. Finding similar concepts with other artists, however, was getting very cerebral and confusing.

  “Don’t make it too complicated,” Bill scolded me. “This exhibition has to be about the dress and about you. The art should only be from artists who have known you, painted you, worked with you . . . it is your journey and the journey of the dress. That is what this show has to be about. Use your bold prints, honor them, paste them on the walls, on the floors! Don’t be shy!” Bill is the most visually secure person I know . . . no wonder Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, and Francesco Clemente don’t hang a painting without his advice. I was convinced. I kissed him.

  Next, we met with Stefan Beckman, who designs the magnificent sets for Marc Jacobs’s runway shows, and that was when the exhibit started to find its shape: we would have a time line, an art room, and one big room with an army of mannequins. I had always said I wanted an army of wraps, like the terra-cotta army of warriors I had seen in Xi’an, China; a huge army of mannequins wearing the wraps. We’d started that idea with a group of thirty-six in Beijing, but I wanted many more for LA. I took Stefan to the mannequin manufacturer Ralph Pucci, whose in-house sculptor proceeded to design a mannequin by studying old photos of my face. He brought them to life with high cheekbones and, at my request, strong noses. I also wanted the mannequins to have a powerful pose, and so they did, inspired by the contrapposto of Michelangelo’s David. I went many times to check on how those mannequins were evolving, and when I was satisfied that they looked strong and fearless, I ordered 225 of them.

  Stefan designed the display of the mannequins, which would be divided into five diamond-shaped pyramids: a large one in the middle and four smaller ones around it. On the floor around the diamonds would be wide stripes of six “hero” prints chosen from the archives that we now call the six sisters: the nature-inspired Twigs, the geometric Cubes and Chain Link, the Leopard and Python, and the graphic print of my Signature. They would be greatly enlarged, printed on vinyl, and run across the floor and up the walls, making the whole thing look like a flag. I was thrilled. I had always wanted us to have a flag!

  Now that Bill and Kol were designing the rooms, Stefan the sets, and Pucci the mannequins, Franca Dantes, our valuable archivist, was pulling images for the time line: Diana Vreeland’s 1970 letter of encouragement, early advertisements, and memorable photos of women in wraps—everyone from Madonna to Ingrid Betancourt to Michelle Obama to Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver, Penélope Cruz in Broken Embraces, and Amy Adams in American Hustle. For the art room we would send all the works by Warhol, Francesco Clemente, Anh Duong, a new work by Barbara Kruger, photos by Helmut Newton, Chuck Close, Mario Testino, Horst, Annie Leibovitz, and the contemporary works we had commissioned for China. Luisella, once my assistant and now our VP of global events and philanthropy, was working on the logistics with Jeffrey Hatfield, our production person who had done Moscow, São Paulo, and Beijing. We were almost set except I did not have the most important link: Who was going to curate the dresses? Who was going to look at our huge archives, make sense of it all, and put it in a clear presentation? I certainly could not do that nor could anyone at DVF. For us they were just a bunch of old dresses!

  Serendipity presented the answer. In June 2013 I went to England with my granddaughter Antonia to her boarding school orientation day, and to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Bob Miller, the founder of Duty Free shops and my cograndparent of Talita and Tassilo. When I go to London, I often take the opportunity to meet designers, to evaluate the pool of talent available. One of them was Michael Herz, creative director for Bally Switzerland.

  We had met many years before when he was still a
student and had a conversation sitting outside the Victoria & Albert Museum. This time, we had tea and a pleasant chat at Claridge’s. He confessed that I always appeared on his inspiration boards. I liked his humorous take on things and I loved his description of women. There was poetry in everything he said and I was intrigued. He told me he was finishing his contract and would be taking time off. “It would be fun to do a project together,” I said, having no idea what the project could be.

  The moment I landed back in New York, I called Michael. “I may have a project for you,” I said, and I invited him to Cloudwalk for the following weekend. Maybe he could curate the exhibition.

  When Michael walked into my archive room and started putting the dresses on himself, I smiled. I left him to work alone for two days, to absorb it all. His first selection was very interesting. He had pulled out dresses I hadn’t seen in years. He had spent hours in the old press books, taking photos, making notes, and sketching. By the end of his stay, I knew he should curate the show. “You have three months, three months to divide the dresses into groups and make sense of it all. I want you to mix them, old ones, new ones, and show the timelessness and the relevancy of the dress. You are allowed to reissue old prints, play with scales, and design new dresses . . . but it has to be seamless and effortless.” He worked for one month alone and then we took two long days to go over it together.

  Michael showed me the groups he wanted to do. The huge central diamond would be black-and-white dresses. “Black-and-white is perfect, but only if you mix it with colors. Black-and-white mixed with bright color, that is very DVF,” I insisted. The other groups’ themes were Nature, Animal, Geometric, and Pop. We rearranged them many times and he showed me sketches and the fabrics he wanted to reissue. I loved his choices. He disappeared into the sample rooms and factories for weeks. I let him do his thing, thinking I always had time to edit later.