Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  At the end of the Americans’ presentation, the French citizens in the audience jumped to their feet, cheering and throwing their programs into the air. “We killed,” says Burrows.

  The Versailles show has been hailed as a turning point in fashion, the first time in three hundred years that the world stopped looking to France for inspiration. Actually, the shift had been going on since World War II, though Versailles marked a moment of acceleration. The next years would see a different direction in fashion, when New York ready-to-wear would set style standards across the globe. Manhattan became a sequined dreamscape of creativity and ambition, as journalists, hairdressers, photographers, models, makeup artists, designers, and their hangers-on swarmed to the city.

  The stage was set for the rise of DVF.

  No Zip, No Buttons

  The offices of Diane von Furstenberg sat on the fifth floor of 530 Seventh Avenue, a thirty-two-story art deco tower ornamented in brass as rich as the buttons on a Chanel suit. In a block filled with towers of fashion, 530 was the biggest, tallest, and most prestigious, a beacon of commercial optimism for the better dress trade on a street prone to busts. Since its blue-ribbon-and-champagne opening soon after the stock market crash in 1929, there had never been a time when every square foot of the building wasn’t leased.

  It was a lucky building, and luck was what Diane needed most. Of the seven thousand or so firms crowded into the aging buildings of the Garment District, one fifth disappeared each year, casualties of the ruthless competition that has always characterized fashion. Some would be reborn under new names with new partners; others would be gone forever.

  In 1972, Seventh Avenue was still designing more than 90 percent of clothes bought by Americans, and the Garment Center was still New York’s largest employer. It also provided the city’s most promising dream factory, a place where smart, ambitious entrepreneurs could literally go from rags to riches. Get a run of luck and you can make fabulous money, one manufacturer told New Yorker writer Lillian Ross. “All you need in this business is one good dress.”

  But by the early seventies, Garment Center jobs had declined by nearly half, to 160,000 from a peak in 1947 of 350,000. Some of the jobs had been lost to Newark and southern Westchester County, where they were filled by low-wage black and Hispanic workers. Others had moved south, though International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) agreements limited Seventh Avenue firms from relocating to southern states.

  The job decline threatened a complex ecosystem that was a vital cultural force, a breeding ground for innovation and talent. As Diane later told Guy Trebay of the New York Times, the city’s fashion primacy relied on “beehives” of small-scale manufacturing on Seventh Avenue.

  A centralized, compact garment district, as Trebay wrote, made it possible for aspiring unknowns “to design and sew a garment at home, and then, with luck and an initial order from, say, Bergdorf Goodman, to take that sample to [a garment district] building and have a pattern made, graded for size, the fabric rolled in from a nearby wholesaler, the pieces cut and assembled and the finished product shipped without leaving a single block in the center of Midtown.”

  Though Diane’s clothes were made in Italy, she believed her creativity was fed by the hothouse of ideas and energy on Seventh Avenue. Every morning before ten she took a taxi to her office, often dressed in jeans, since she frequently spent part of her day helping out in the shipping room. She loved being in her office in the morning, sharing a grapefruit with Dick Conrad and drinking coffee while the harsh cries of the workers and the clattering of clothes racks rose up from the street. Over the brown walls she’d hung colorful Andy Warhol flower posters, and she’d filled the offices with inexpensive desks and tables from the Door Store. This was where she belonged; everything about it felt right, like coming home to her parents. While Conrad entertained and cajoled buyers in the firm’s little showroom—with Diane sometimes serving coffee incognito and eavesdropping on the conversations—Diane worked the phones in her office, calling socialite friends such as Marion Javits, Nan Kempner, and Mrs. Richard Berlin, wife of the owner of Town & Country, “to create some buzz” for her clothes, Conrad says. Later, she’d drop off dresses at their homes, hoping they’d wear them to prominent social events and be photographed in them.

  Diane and Conrad started with just two employees—a Haitian receptionist and a Trinidadian woman named Olive who sent out orders from the stockroom. Olive would sometimes work with Conrad until 1 A.M. to get all the orders out to the stores. The labels on the clothes read “Diane Von Furstenberg, Made in Italy.” (She didn’t lowercase the V in her name until 1999.) The initialism “DVF” would not appear on anything designed by Diane until 1975 when she first stamped it on sunglasses marketed under her name. (She’d used it earlier on her personal stationery.) “DVF” became her trademark, though it would not be widely employed in Diane’s publicity, either by her or those writing about her, until her comeback in the late nineties. The launch of her website, dvf.com, in 1999 accelerated the media’s adoption of “DVF” when referring to Diane and her fashion business.

  However, the idea of DVF and, specifically, the DVF Woman—strong, independent, on-the-go, and sexy—had existed in Diane’s mind since she’d first dreamed of a career. “That woman stayed with her through all her design years, and continued to grow up with Diane,” says Kathy Van Ness, a fashion and luxury executive who worked for Diane in the eighties. The DVF Woman was Diane’s self-image and her customer profile. “She was someone who would look great and be confident all the time, anywhere,” continues Van Ness. “As time went on,” and the place of women in American culture became more assured, “Diane’s customers became more sophisticated and more powerful and the DVF Woman evolved.”

  Diane’s first shipment of clothes under her partnership with Conrad arrived from Ferretti’s factory in June 1972. A fifteen-thousand-dollar duty tax was owed, “but we didn’t have the money to pay it,” Conrad recalls. He took the Pan Am freight agent out to lunch and asked him if he’d release the dresses on credit, something that had never been done before. “I promised to pay him in forty-five days when the stores paid us, and he went for it,” says Conrad. “But that’s how close we were to being on the edge.”

  To the immense relief of the new partners, the clothes sold well. Soon they were able to hire a secretary, three saleswomen, and a house model. Diane also hired a young designer, Sue Feinberg, to oversee production at Ferretti’s Montevarchi factory. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Feinberg had studied couture technique at the L’Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale in Paris. During college summers she’d interned for Bill Blass, and while working for the Italian couturierè Simonetta and her husband, Fabiani, Feinberg had become fluent in French and Italian. Back in New York (she’d grown up in the town of Rye) in 1972, she’d heard about Diane and went to see her. Diane looked at Feinberg’s portfolio, then asked her astrological sign. “Libra,” answered Feinberg.

  “Oh, that’s good. I have a close friend who’s a Libra,” said Diane.

  Her faith in astrology and her New Age flirtation with parapsychology often exposed Diane to ridicule. In the early seventies it reinforced perceptions of her as a flaky dilettante. Diane’s attitude, though, echoed beliefs held by many designers—a professional group whose success depended on a seer-like talent for divining the desires of women. Paul Poiret hired a clairvoyant to advise him on lucky and unlucky colors. Christian Dior filled his pockets with lucky charms, frequently consulted fortune-tellers, and until his death regularly employed an astrologer who charted his horoscope. Coco Chanel considered 5 her lucky number. She always scheduled her fashion openings on the fifth day of February and August, and in 1921 she named her signature perfume Chanel No. 5.

  Diane’s mother also was in the habit of consulting psychics and fortune-tellers. Long before the war and her own marriage, a psychic told Lily that someday “she’d have a famous daughter,” says Diane.

  The designer on
ce told an interviewer that in an earlier life she’d been a slave girl in Brazil and in another, the son of a powerful army general. She also believed she had powers of extrasensory perception (ESP). Certain days were good for her. She liked to sign contracts on Fridays, for example.

  Asked today about the reports of her belief in psychic phenomena, Diane shrugs. “When you’re young, you want to know what’s going to happen in the future,” she says.

  What Diane was talking about when she talked about ESP was her intuition, her talent for sensing what would play in the marketplace. This is a gift, like perfect pitch—you were either born with it or not. She also had style, an innate flair, which is also a gift.

  Historically, designers have been reticent in discussing who contributed to the creation of their clothes. They’re reluctant to alter the public perception that a single individual designs a fashion collection, the way a single artist creates the images on a painted canvas. Fashion, though, is a highly collaborative process. The head designer is like the conductor of an orchestra with myriad sections. Each employee of the design house plays a specific role—scouting fabrics, sketching prints, designing collars or sleeves, making patterns, sewing samples—all contributing to the collection’s symphony of style.

  As Diane became increasingly occupied with promotion and marketing in the United States, she relied on Feinberg to translate her ideas into three dimensions. Feinberg moved to Italy soon after Diane hired her, and in recognition of the young woman’s contribution to Diane Von Furstenberg Limited, Diane gave her a percentage interest in the company and twenty-five cents for every item of clothing produced. Diane traveled to Italy for a brief stay once a month. In her absence, Feinberg oversaw all matters of production: pattern making, cutting, assembly, and fitting of the clothes. “I had a lot of things made and sent to New York, and Diane and Dick would edit them based on what they thought would sell,” says Feinberg.

  “Diane’s greatest talent was her eye for selecting,” says DeBare Saunders, who designed jewelry for Diane’s company in the seventies. “She was a brilliant editor. She’d look at ten things and pick out the most fabulous, the most saleable.”

  From the start, Diane’s whimsical, colorful prints were key elements of her style. Her design process often started with prints, and ideas for prints could come from anywhere. “Diane would arrive in the morning with a picture of anything that looked interesting—a photo, a cigar band, a box top. Somehow, she found the damn things, they became her inspiration,” says Conrad.

  The idea for Diane’s popular twig print, for example, came from the packaging of the French perfume Cabochard, which Feinberg spotted in a store in Europe. She sent the package to Ferretti’s factory with instructions to make the print larger. Feinberg then worked with the print makers to get the colors and proportions right. The original twig print was in green and white, but eventually Diane would offer it in fifteen colors. Feinberg also designed prints herself—including an inkblot print that she created by throwing ink on paper laid out on her terrace. Sometimes Feinberg purchased designs from print artists in Paris. She also collected objects, lingerie, and bits of fabric in colors she liked and organized them in boxes according to hue: reds, greens, blues. In the case of the twig pattern taken from the Cabochard box, she showed items to the colorist in Como, and they worked together to arrive at the right shades. Next, the print was transferred to fabric using a silkscreen process. Ferretti’s jersey had an elasticity to it “that took the color very well,” Feinberg says. “It felt like cashmere,” adds Dick Conrad.

  After a roll of cotton jersey produced in Como arrived at the Montevarchi factory, it would be unfurled across the worktables, and the pattern maker, a woman named Bruna, would get to work creating the template for a garment conceived by Diane. Next, a seamstress would make a prototype of the item, and Feinberg, acting as the fit model, would try it on. She was a perfect size ten. (She used two other women to fit sizes eight and six.) In couture, prototypes are made in muslin and adjusted before being cut in fine fabric. But Ferretti’s fabric was inexpensive, and Feinberg didn’t think twice about using it for samples.

  By the time Diane arrived in Italy in July 1972 for her monthly trip, her next collection had gone into production. Looking at the soft mounds of garments piled up, she grew concerned. “I’m very worried because of the quantity of merchandise, but I hope we will sell it all!!!” she wrote Conrad.

  One day while working in the factory, Diane saw a fetching wrap top that Ferretti had done for Louis Féraud. “It had dolman sleeves, but also a collar and cuffs, and it gave me an idea,” she recalls. She refined the garment into a top that resembled the type of cover-up ballerinas wore over their leotards. Then she created pants and A-line skirts, some with pleats, to be worn with it.

  The wrap top was part of a collection that included around ten styles—flowing caftans, a pantsuit, a flannel tent dress, tops, skirts, pants, and jersey shirtdresses “with no zip, no buttons,” as Egon described them.

  In the New York stockroom the clothes piled up floor to ceiling, the garments organized by color and style and folded neatly in plastic bags. Buyers loaded their choices into grocery shopping carts. There were only two “dogs,” fashion parlance for flops, says Conrad. A group of angora dresses failed “because they itched,” and the pantsuit was cut so small no one could get into it, “not even Diane.”

  Everything else flew out of the building, and the reorder books filled up. The wrap top and skirt was a huge hit, as were the caftans and shirtdresses. These were clothes whose time had come. Diane had opened her business at the height of an American sportswear revolution that had begun in the fifties. Halston, Stephen Burrows, Calvin Klein, and other young designers, aided by new fabrics and technologies, were refining the idea of fashion for the active life of a modern woman, creating light, easy clothes that were true to the contours and movement of the body.

  Upheavals in fashion typically coincide with seismic cultural and political shifts. During the French Revolution, Marie-Antoinette lost her influence on style along with her head, and afterward les citoyennes rejected the queen’s corsets, wide pannier skirts, and towering pouf hairdos for a style of undress—fluid, lingerie-like frocks and loose curls—that embodied the spirit of liberation.

  In the burst of modernism following the horrors of World War I, hemlines went up, waistlines and bosoms disappeared, and black, previously the color of mourning, morphed into the standard of chic. Three decades later, in 1947, Christian Dior set the clock back fifty years when he introduced his New Look—full skirts, cinched waists, and boned bodices. Actually, the look was anything but new. It was a regression to the belle époque and a time when women had no status, when the ornate femininity of their clothes signaled their subservience and dependence. In the United States the end of World War II coincided with a yearning to return women to domesticity. Dior’s New Look comported perfectly with the 1950s American glorification of the Wife.

  The next dramatic change came in the 1970s. The woman’s movement, the pill, jet travel, and an explosion of youth—by 1970, one half of the American population was under thirty—fed a new ideal of individual autonomy in all things, including clothes. There were no rules anymore, except to do your own thing. In fashion that meant a crazy mishmash of styles—from flowered maxis, floppy hats, and bell-bottoms to fringed leather jackets, pantsuits, space age jumpsuits, and vinyl boots. The dresses offered in department stores and boutiques tended to be either fussy, Frenchified confections or extremely expensive high-end fashion from the likes of Halston, Bill Blass, and Oscar de la Renta. No one was doing a simple, affordable little dress.

  As a designer, Diane has always been more interested in the feelings inspired by clothes than in the technicalities of cut and fit. She knows that the true subject of fashion is romance—women in alluring outfits and the emotions they evoke. Sex was a big part of Diane’s life, and the force of her style came from the heat of sex flowing through it. “Feel like a wo
man, wear a dress,” the slogan she wrote on a photo Roger Prigent took of her in his studio for a 1972 WWD ad, would be frequently invoked by Diane and the media as an expression of her enduring fashion philosophy.

  The slogan happened by accident. Prigent, a Frenchman and a friend of Diane’s, had posed her on a big white cube, “but when I saw the photo the cube took too much real estate and looked like a huge white spot,” says Diane. “So I took my dark navy fountain pen and wrote the phrase offhandedly” to fill up the white space. She never dreamed it would stick.

  Helping women feel good about themselves, urging them to enjoy being women, became her mission as she traveled around America to department stores and boutiques. It didn’t matter if you were chubby or skinny, old or young, pretty or plain. It was how you carried yourself, how you used what you had, that mattered.

  At the time, feminists were fighting against being judged on their appearance, a problem men didn’t have, noted Gloria Steinem, “since men’s bodies are valued more as instruments of power than of attraction.”

  Feminists such as Steinem abhorred society’s emphasis on a woman’s physical allure. They objected to the fashion industry encouraging girls and women to focus on beauty as their highest calling, and they argued that the industry set impossible—even unhealthy—standards.

  Diane, though, believed that beauty was empowering in itself, an idea that should not have been lost on Steinem, whose flowing tresses, slim, miniskirted figure, and sexy legs made her the media’s favorite feminist spokesperson. Once Steinem hit the activist scene in the late sixties, she completely overshadowed Betty Friedan, the dowdy, middle-aged author of The Feminine Mystique, the 1963 book that is widely credited with igniting second-wave feminism.