Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  “I remember when we first started, when Bloomingdale’s first bought Diane’s dresses,” recalls Francine Boyar, Diane’s house model in the seventies. The store “took out a full-page ad in the New York Times and told Diane she had to be in the picture in one of her dresses and she had to come to Bloomingdale’s because the customers wanted to meet the princess.”

  The myriad images of Diane in the media reinforced the idea of her as sexy, beautiful, glamorous, and successful. By association, these qualities attached to her clothes. Though the designer herself still suffered bouts of gnawing insecurity, she imparted a veneer of glowing confidence to the public. Diane gave women permission to wear color, prints, and clingy fabrics, which they otherwise might not have had the courage to don.

  “It’s all about archetypes,” says Stefani Greenfield, creative brand director of DVF Studio. Wearing Diane’s clothes made women feel more like their image of Diane, “more powerful and confident,” Greenfield says.

  From the start, Diane was selling much more than clothes. She was selling an idea of womanhood that joined feminist ideals of independence and achievement to old world notions about sex and femininity. In an era when college girls who wore lipstick were stigmatized on some campuses for colluding with male oppressors and professional women were urged to tamp down their sexuality by wearing masculine suits, Diane broke the rules about how a liberated woman should behave. She vamped into meetings in teetering high heels, fishnets, sexy dresses, and full makeup, speaking in a vaguely French accent with a whiff of Euro decadence that gave her the allure of a foreign femme fatale.

  She enjoyed whipping off her shirt for photographers. (WWD ran the full topless picture from Diane’s Town & Country cover shoot, noting that the magazine perhaps “disappointed” readers by printing a cropped version.) To a ball in Dallas around the same time, Diane wore a floor-length Capucci dress with two suspender-like straps that barely covered her breasts. She so entranced the Texas oilman sitting next to her at dinner that his furious wife demanded to talk to Diane in the ladies’ room. “I think she was going to beat me up or something,” Diane told Newsweek. (Today she has no memory of the incident or how she managed to avoid the confrontation.)

  Her disco diva exhibitionism often cast Diane in a frivolous light. Yet her entrepreneurial verve was grounded in a serious feminist conviction: Women should find fulfilling work that enabled them to support themselves.

  That principle has been a cornerstone of feminist thought since Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her groundbreaking study Women and Economics in 1898. “Nothing makes a woman feel more insecure than being trapped, doing something because she has no alternative,” Diane wrote in her 1977 Book of Beauty. “I believe that to be happy with a man you have to know that you could leave him and take care of yourself. To stay with him because he pays the bills and supports you financially and because you don’t feel that you could take care of yourself is a form of slow death.”

  Diane understood that most women wanted it all—career, love, marriage, children—and despite any feminist anger they might have toward the patriarchal forces that held them back, they yearned to look pretty and attractive to the opposite sex. This was the chief tension in Diane’s life—achieving the independence and power of a man while remaining a feminine woman.

  DIANE HAD BEEN IN BUSINESS for barely a year when she realized she’d been operating in an amateurish manner on luck, connections, and Ferretti’s credit. Her business had started to build, but with only twenty accounts, her volume was still too tiny for the big Seventh Avenue firms. What’s more, her shipments from Ferretti were reliably late. No one took her seriously. “They thought I was another one of those social girls who pretends she wants to work,” she recalled.

  She began to think the best thing would be to join a firm as a house designer and leave the business details to others. After being turned down by two manufacturers—Jonathan Logan and David Crystal—whom she’d approached about joining their firms as a division, she talked to Johnny Pomerantz, CEO and son of the founder of Leslie Fay, a major apparel conglomerate.

  Pomerantz, who met with Diane early in 1971, advised her to stay in business for herself but to get a partner who knew the inner workings of Seventh Avenue and could help her develop the infrastructure of a real fashion house. “I liked Diane’s clothes, but mostly I liked her,” says Pomerantz, who met Diane at her makeshift showroom at the Gotham Hotel. “I thought she was a special person. She was exciting. Ambitious.” He also sensed they had much in common. “I saw a book on her shelf about being Jewish, and I’m Jewish.”

  It was almost a professional qualification. Most of the manufacturers who ruled Seventh Avenue were Jewish, the children and grandchildren of immigrants who’d arrived in New York at the end of the nineteenth century. In those days, the nation’s power elites were dominated by New England, Wall Street, and Chicago WASPs. But on Seventh Avenue there were no quotas, no social, religious, or educational barriers to impede smart entrepreneurs.

  Jews were naturals for the rag trade. Because their land had been confiscated over the centuries by the rulers of Europe and Russia, Jews had been pushed into becoming bankers, peddlers, and tailors. Their survival depended on discerning the needs and appetites of the larger culture. An instinct for what would sell accelerated their success on Seventh Avenue, as it would in Hollywood, where Jews also became the captains of the town industry.

  By the turn of the twentieth century, 60 percent of all Jews employed in New York worked in the garment industry. Clothes were a way not only to put food on the table but also to reinvent yourself. Levi Strauss’s blue jeans of 1873 were the first Jewish success story in American fashion, followed by the post–World War II moguls who became spectacularly rich and, a generation later, by the design stars Calvin, Donna, Ralph, and DVF.

  Pomerantz recognized in Diane the kind of coarse strength essential for Seventh Avenue success epitomized by his father, Fred. When Johnny started out as a salesman for Leslie Fay, he handled fifteen styles, and his father forbade him from taking an order unless the buyer bought every style he offered. One day, Pomerantz recalls, “the buyer for Bloomingdale’s came to the showroom and gave me an order for fourteen styles, a bigger order than I’d ever seen in my life. But I told her I couldn’t take it until I checked with my father.”

  “Tell her to go fuck herself,” Fred Pomerantz told his son.

  “You’re not going to like this,” Johnny told the buyer before repeating his father’s words. She ended up taking the fifteenth style—Pomerantz still remembers it was number 2118. “And after that she became my best customer,” he says.

  Diane decided to take Pomerantz’s advice, and to help her set up a new company, Pomerantz introduced her to Richard Conrad, managing director of Laurence Gross Ltd., which made clothes in the “young designer” category. At thirty-nine, the tall, bespectacled Conrad “seemed so old,” Diane recalls, but he knew his way around Seventh Avenue, and she needed his expertise and connections. A graduate of Rutgers University, Conrad had worked his way up in the rag trade, starting as an order picker, and he learned the business from one of its masters, Henry Rosenfeld, who’d made his first million before age thirty-five and was head of an eponymous business on Seventh Avenue.

  On a thoroughfare of slick operators, Rosenfeld was one of the slickest. He’d grown rich by offering copies of expensive dresses—“class” in Seventh Avenue parlance—at “mass” prices. This simple formula earned him a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, a summer house in Atlantic Beach, an airplane, a boat, twenty-five pairs of solid-gold cuff links, and, despite his balding, undistinguished appearance and lack of education—he hadn’t read a book since dropping out of high school—an affair with the world’s most desirable woman, Marilyn Monroe.

  Rosenfeld, who had a wife and two daughters, met Monroe through his racetrack buddy Milton Greene, a Look magazine photographer who became the star’s manager.

  Rosenfeld paid Monroe’s bills at the Wa
ldorf Astoria, where she stayed in New York in the early fifties before her marriage to Arthur Miller.

  The dazzling star often came to Rosenfeld’s showroom, which was decorated like the nightclub El Morocco with zebra-striped upholstery, electric-blue walls, and palm trees with cellophane leaves. While he was working for Rosenfeld, one of Conrad’s jobs was to serve Monroe. “Henry would say, ‘Dick, do me a favor, take Miss Monroe into the stockroom and let her try on anything she wants. But don’t touch her!’”

  Rosenfeld’s most popular model during Conrad’s tenure was a collared Arnel-and-cotton shirtdress with a sash belt that sold wholesale for $8.95. “We had it in four colors. Henry ordered a million yards of fabric, and he told his salesmen on the road to offer the stores just that one item. That important lesson fit very neatly into the Diane situation, when the opportunity arose to have one sensational dress,” says Conrad.

  He had been following Diane’s progress in WWD. He was curious about her and her clothes, and he agreed to meet her at her suite in the Gotham Hotel. During their meeting, Diane pulled off her shirt and, braless, tried on a couple of sweaters for Conrad’s reaction. Then she gave him two shirts she’d had made for him in Ferretti’s fabric, so he could experience how wonderful it felt against the skin. “I wore them on the weekends, and I felt a little funny because they weren’t exactly manly prints. But I got her message about the importance of the relationship between fabric and body,” Conrad says.

  Before Diane would sign a contract with Conrad, she insisted he meet Egon. Throughout her career, she kept the practice up—having family members vet key employees. “He took me to a fondue restaurant on Fifty-Sixth Street to check me out,” says Conrad. “He was very good-looking, very pleasant.”

  Having passed the Egon test, Conrad signed a contract with Diane at the end of December 1971. Soon afterward, Diane went to Italy to oversee production of her next collection. “I’m making beautiful things and rushing around, doing 1,000 things at once,” she wrote her new partner. “So happy we are going to be the best team on Seventh Avenue.”

  Diane could pay Conrad only a modest salary—according to her, $300 a week, but she offered him a 25 percent stake in her company. “We put together an operating plan of what the first line was going to be. We were going to make or break it on the first line because we didn’t have the capital to get to the second line,” Conrad recalls.

  Diane’s father had given her eighty thousand dollars as a wedding present, but she’d spent it. She had only Ferretti’s credit and ten thousand dollars from a diamond ring she had pawned. (The ring had been a present from her father and Egon to celebrate Tatiana’s birth, and she later bought it back, paying a huge interest.) The new partners started work on April 1, 1972. “The first thing we did,” Conrad says, “was get the hell out of Fifty-Sixth Street and onto Seventh Avenue.”

  Since the early 1800s, Manhattan’s Lower East Side had been the center of clothing manufacturing, providing garments for workers on farms in the North and slaves on southern plantations and, later, uniforms for soldiers of both sides fighting the Civil War.

  As the demand for ready-to-wear apparel surged with industrialization, the Garment District was pushed toward Midtown, settling into a neighborhood bordered by Forty-Second Street on the north, Thirty-Fourth Street on the south, Fifth Avenue on the east, and Ninth Avenue on the west. Seventh Avenue ran through the center of the district, “a place of Dreiserian amounts of soot and lint, crammed with hamburger dives, cigar shops, dress rack operators, models, and fabric salesmen, and controlled by manufacturers who’d arrive in their chauffeured Packards and Cadillacs,” Bill Blass wrote.

  The luxury showrooms of these rich manufacturers symbolized the power of fashion in New York’s economy. Still, the inspiration, the lifeblood of Seventh Avenue remained Paris. In France, designers were Leonardo da Vincis of cloth and thread, whose reputations were built on vision and tradition. At the Burgundian court of Philippe Le Bel, the king of France from 1285 to his death in 1314, for the first time in history women began changing their clothes to showcase their status, taste, and wealth, not because the weather changed or their garments wore out. In the seventeenth century, Louis XIV created a standard of luxury dressing that demanded rules and endless reinvention. In response, a fashion industry bloomed in Paris to satisfy the lust for the latest finery worn at Louis’s court. The craving soon spread throughout Europe and beyond.

  In the nineteenth century, during France’s Second Empire, Charles Frederick Worth set up shop on the rue de la Paix and ushered in haute couture with its rigid hierarchies and elite cabals. In the twentieth century, Paris designers became world-famous celebrities, the names Chanel, Lanvin, Balenciaga, Patou, and Dior heralded from the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and the women’s pages of US newspapers.

  In contrast to France, American fashion had always been aligned more with commerce than with art. With a few exceptions, labels on even the highest-end fashion contained only the names of the manufacturers. For years, the New York Times had a strictly enforced policy of not publishing the names of designers, instead only mentioning those of the companies for which they worked. In the American fashion magazines Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, neither the editorial features nor the ads provided the names of American designers. These local fashion leaders labored in obscurity in the back rooms of Seventh Avenue, keeping their heads down, “grateful” to be given a chance to knock off seventy-nine-dollar copies of Dior dresses, as Bill Blass noted.

  Twice a year, with almost religious devotion, American buyers, manufacturers, designers, and journalists made the pilgrimage to Paris to witness the city’s couture openings. What they saw determined the silhouette, colors, skirt lengths, and accessories for the next season. American women, too, were hooked on French clothes, either the real things or knockoffs.

  That began to change during World War II and the Nazi occupation of Paris, when suddenly America was totally cut off from France. New York’s garment unions, clothing manufacturers, and department store executives feared that the US business would collapse. To stave off disaster, they formed the New York Dress Institute and made a historic agreement to launch a national promotional campaign. They set up a contract stipulating that one half of 1 percent of the cost of every union dress would go into a fund that would be used for advertising American clothes. They also hired the public relations maven Eleanor Lambert, the daughter of an advance man for Barnum & Bailey’s circus, who thought New York designers could be promoted like French couturiers.

  Lambert told New York’s manufacturing and store executives to figure out who were their most creative designers. The business executives chose eleven, including Norman Norell, Hattie Carnegie, Bonnie Cashin, Claire McCardell, and Mainbocher, the Chicago-born French couturier who’d recently fled Paris for New York. Lambert called them the Couture Group, and to publicize them she came up with three ideas that became fashion traditions: the Best Dressed List, which endures today under the auspices of Vanity Fair; Press Week, the forerunner of today’s biannual Fashion Weeks; and the Coty Awards, the precursor of awards now handed out by the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

  Paris couture never fully recovered its status and luster after World War II. The old French way of structuring clothes had definitely ended. Fashion now depended on the gracefulness and fitness of the body moving beneath the fabric, rather than couture’s way of correcting, buttressing, and harnessing the female form. Fashion also was becoming more democratic. Modern life chipped away at the idea of “perfect” dressing, of one standard, one ideal, and Paris was losing its grip as the be-all of style. Fashion no longer was seen as a rare luxury conferred by a few stars like Coco Chanel. In 1970, the eighty-seven-year-old designer was still going to work in her Paris atelier. But Chanel was dying and so was the couture she represented—though even if Tim Gunn of Project Runway fame put a stake through its heart, couture wouldn’t disappear entirely.

  Meanwhile, New York design
ers were perfecting a style of dressing that would soon define how the world wanted to look: casual, comfortable, and easily stylish. The milestone marking the American ascendance came at a legendary fashion show at Versailles on November 28, 1973. Cooked up by Eleanor Lambert, the show was held as a fund-raiser for the palace of Versailles, but Lambert’s intent was more mercenary—to bring attention to American designers. The organizers staged the event in the extravagantly gilded Opéra, where in 1770 the future King Louis XVI had married Marie-Antoinette, history’s enduring symbol of the calamity that can befall a fashionista who spends too lavishly on her wardrobe.

  The event was staged as a fashion show preceded by entertainments, with Liza Minnelli performing for the Americans and Josephine Baker performing for the French. The fashion segments pitted five Parisian couturiers—Marc Bohan of Christian Dior, Hubert Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent, and Emanuel Ungaro—against five stars of New York ready-to-wear—Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Anne Klein, Halston, and Oscar de la Renta. Until then, the idea of American designers showing in Paris “had been completely unheard-of because the French scoffed at anything we did. They thought all we were good for was copying them,” says Burrows.

  The show also broke ground by showcasing Burrows, an African American designer, and by featuring eleven gorgeous African American models, the first time black models had been paraded so prominently on a Paris runway.

  Though there was no official scoring, by all accounts the New Yorkers won. The American clothes dazzled with freshness and vitality: Halston’s cashmere sweater dresses, Burrows’s brightly colored lettuce-hemmed skirts, Blass’s sophisticated flannel pants, Klein’s easy, go-to-work separates, de la Renta’s flowing chiffon gowns. Such clothes proved that great style didn’t have to be couture. This was the essence of American fashion—simple, informal separates that could be mixed according to the wearer’s own style and not the dictates of some imperious designer. In contrast, the elaborate gowns, fitted suits, and structured day dresses shown by the French looked stiff and old. The poker-faced French models, walking carefully and erectly across the stage in the manner of a traditional defilé, as classical music played, looked rigid and dull, compared with the American girls, who, smiling broadly, vogued to tunes by pop artists such as Barry White.