Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  Diane came from a European culture that valued female beauty as a goal every women could accomplish through dressing well and enhancing her assets (or compensating for her defects) with diet, grooming, and makeup. In contrast, America’s strong Puritan tradition regarded fashion and face paint as false masks. There’s always been an anti-fashion prejudice in America. Even people who never miss an episode of Project Runway or an issue of Vogue are likely to complain that fashion is shallow and irrelevant.

  The European concept of beauty, though, was rooted not in popular culture but in classical ideals of harmony and grace. This was not the beauty of face and figure in the fashion magazines and cosmetics ads but rather the inner beauty accessible to every woman, regardless of her age, size, or ethnicity. Harmony and grace were elements of female identity, and they could coexist comfortably in the same woman with such traditionally male ideas of identity as professional success, intellectual achievement, and political and financial power.

  This was Diane’s message as she traveled around the country, hurrying through airports toting a garment bag on her way to catch a plane. The glamorous presence of Diane in stilettoes, fishnet stockings, and a slinky dress was the clinch to many a large sale in Cleveland and Dallas and Miami. She had an uncanny gift for connecting with her customers. They felt—and still feel—that her clothes fulfill the subliminal promise of fashion, to soothe them in their deepest, most private places, where they yearn for freedom and love.

  And yet many of the fashion insiders Diane hoped to impress the most continued to regard her as a dilettante. WWD, the bible of the fashion industry, didn’t take her seriously, dismissing her first Seventh Avenue show in November 1972 as lacking “excitement.” The paper sniped, “Maybe it was all the noise” from the Garment Center rally for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern that kept people away, so that “only two of Diane’s friends, Nan Kempner and Kenny Lane, showed up.” The brief article, which featured pictures of a tank dress, a shirtdress, a long-sleeved V-neck dress, an evening pants outfit, and a caftan, noted that “Diane is thinking dollars. Those simple little print cotton acetate jersey dresses which form the basis of her collection are meant to sell—not make fashion news.”

  Of course, the customer didn’t care about fashion news. The customer cared, as retail executives knew, that Diane made pretty, easy-to-wear clothes that women could afford. One of the most popular styles in that first Seventh Avenue show was “a silk jersey tent dress with a little jeweled neck and a little yoke above the bust line with a lot of fabric,” Conrad recalls. It looked good on a variety of ages and body types. “We sold it for $89.75, which was half of what anyone else could have sold it for because of the way we worked with Ferretti,” Conrad adds.

  Everything in Ferretti’s factory was sewn on a merrowing machine, which made seams by wrapping thread around fabric edges, a cheaper system because it cut out the last steps of finishing and ironing. Merrowing was used mostly on low-cost garments, “not for Liz Claiborne” or other department store-quality clothes, says Feinberg.

  In its review WWD conceded that some of Diane’s prints were pretty, especially a figurative one of pandas, but complained that she “could have done without those Pucci-like prints.” Actually, it was a Gucci-like print that got her in trouble in the summer of 1972. On a trip to Ferretti’s factory, Dick Conrad had given Ferretti three Gucci ties in four colors he’d picked up in Rome. “I told Ferretti to make them into dresses. I said, ‘prints like this.’ I didn’t mean for him to copy them line for line,” says Conrad.

  But that’s exactly what Ferretti did. Diane sold hundreds of dresses in the copied Gucci prints, including the firm’s iconic horse-bit design, sparking an angry letter from a son of the Gucci founder.

  The blunder passed without a lawsuit or any other serious repercussions (as did the borrowing of the Cabochard packaging). Orders continued to pour in, and by the end of 1972, Diane’s business had made $1.2 million, about $8 million in 2014 dollars.

  “EGON ENCOURAGED ME TO WORK, then he was jealous,” says Diane. Her husband attributed much of Diane’s success to her use of his name, not to mention the doors that had been opened to her as his wife. He thought it only fair and proper for them to own the von Furstenberg dress business together, an idea that was anathema to Diane, who craved the independence that came with having something that was hers alone.

  She urged Egon to create his own, separate success. “You always push others. Why don’t you push yourself?” Diane told him. But Egon lacked Diane’s drive and ambition. She “was so much smarter than Egon, but she tried to keep him from seeing who was wearing the pants,” said her friend Berry Berenson.

  In November 1972, after flirting briefly with the idea of opening a restaurant, Egon started a menswear business based in an office in the Empire State Building. He offered a few sports jackets made in Italy and caftans for men, copying Diane, whose caftans for women had sold well.

  Diane tried to help Egon’s fledgling operation by presenting a joint his-and-her collection in May 1973 that WWD reported “made a strong simple statement.” Egon showed sweaters and shirts, some in the same geometric, matchstick, and broken-circle prints as Diane’s dresses; she showed a variety of shirtdresses and an evening tank dress with a shirt jacket. “I cannot imagine a dress that isn’t a shirtdress,” she told WWD a month before the wrap dress bloomed in her mind.

  When she wasn’t in her office, Diane was traveling to stores around the country, once visiting fourteen cities in thirteen days. She also traveled with Egon for social events. In the midst of her business start-up in 1971, for example, she and Egon went to Egypt, where Diane bought a diaphanous silver antique caftan, and afterward flew to France for that year’s most important social event—the Bal Proust that Marie-Hélène de Rothschild threw at the Rothschild family château of Ferrières to celebrate the centenary of the writer’s birth. It was one of the last grand balls in the old tradition of the European aristocracy. Diane looked the picture of a princess in a billowing black taffeta gown by Oscar de la Renta.

  Her life was extraordinarily hectic. She struggled to balance the demands of her business, her children, her employees, her social life, and Egon. “I was just trying to catch the train. It was crazy. But I never lost my mind. I never lost control. I took some drugs, but I never lost control there either,” says Diane.

  Nevertheless, the stress took its toll. Her hair, which she had blown out and styled twice a week, started to fall out. Luckily, she had masses of it, so the loss was noticeable only to her. It was a depressing sign, though, that all was not right in her life.

  Chief among the things that were wrong was her marriage. “Egon had a lot of lovers,” Diane says with deadpanned understatement. She retaliated by having a few herself. As long as Egon was not emotionally involved with the men he slept with, Diane reasoned, they were no threat to her marriage. Then Egon fell in love, or at least into serious infatuation, according to Francine Boyar, Diane’s house model at the time. The young man was a handsome architect, and Boyar says Diane enlisted her to seduce him away. “Diane came to me one day and said, ‘Oh, I’m so worried because Egon’s really in love with this guy,” recalls Boyar. (Diane, however, has no memory of this and says that among Egon’s lovers, this particular young man “wasn’t special.”)

  Diane invited Boyar to a party at her house so she could meet the man, who, like Egon, was bisexual, says Boyar. He “was gorgeous in a Jewish math-teacher kind of way, with curly hair and glasses,” adds Boyar, who was smitten. The young man was just as attracted to the tall, shapely model, and they quickly became involved.

  “We ended up having this unbelievable relationship,” says Boyar. The young man, who has since died, “loved me, and I almost married him. Egon was furious because I’d stolen his boyfriend. He wanted Diane to fire me. But Diane couldn’t have been more thrilled.”

  IN FEBRUARY 1973, NEW YORK magazine profiled Diane and Egon in a now famous cover story headlin
ed “The Couple That Has Everything. Is Everything Enough?” It was an embarrassing portrait, featuring details about their sex life and provocative pictures, including one of Egon in nothing but a towel and one of Diane with her naked back to the camera in a Manhattan boutique where she was trying on shirts. Reporter Linda Bird Francke did little more than record the couple’s remarks, and Diane and Egon revealed themselves as decadents whose marriage was a sham. “You just live once, and I am getting the most out of it,” said Egon. “After a while, passion—you know—cools. So a little here, a little there at three in the afternoon. What harm?”

  “We don’t take anything very seriously,” Diane added. “The only way for a relationship to survive, I think, is to have no sex at all. After all, you marry for friendship, for companionship—and passion after a while . . . pfffft. I mean, does it excite you when your left hand touches your right?”

  Egon admitted that the couple had engaged in a threesome with a woman in Paris. “But you know what?” he told Francke. “It was just twice as much work for me.” He hinted at his own bisexuality, “that were he to meet an attractive man, he would not be loath to experiment.” Diane said she wasn’t homosexual, though she, too, obliquely admitted to experimentation. “What is the point of being a woman if you have to drop yourself two stages to act like a man? Butch dykes upset me. A pretty, attractive woman? That’s different.”

  (Diane says today, “Our sex life wasn’t unusual. It was the seventies!”)

  Soon after the article appeared, Egon called Francke to complain. “You destroyed my marriage,” he said. He protested that the magazine had taken the couple’s comments out of context. It annoyed him that Francke had repaid their generous availability by poking fun at them. They’d invited her into their home, talked to her, and let her observe them over the course of a week. Egon’s father, Tassilo, who was in town, also talked to Francke. As if to confirm that Egon had inherited his louche manner, Tassilo tried to grope Francke as they rode together in a taxi. “He treated me like I was just some disposable piece of American meat,” says Francke. The journalist, who later worked with Diane on both of her memoirs, was appalled by Tassilo’s “sense of entitlement as this European prince.” He also thought it necessary to bring up Diane’s religion, noting, as Francke wrote in her article, that her children represented “the first time in nine centuries that we have Jewish blood.”

  Many of the von Furstenbergs’ friends were horrified by the story—the result, they thought, of allowing your private life to become too public. “Egon was more upset about it than I was,” says Diane. In fact, for her the article was a revelation. “I read it and thought, ‘That’s not me. I don’t want to be part of that couple. I’d rather be on my own.’” Diane knew that Franke, with her shrewd reporter’s eye, had seen deeply into the truth of the von Furstenbergs’ marriage, a reality that until that moment Diane had been unwilling or unable to see. On some deep level she didn’t want to be a couple with anyone. She didn’t want to make the compromises and adjustments required to be part of a marriage. She couldn’t stand to give up any of herself. (Later, when she found herself doing exactly that with another man, she would be profoundly unhappy.)

  Diane didn’t smoke, but one morning soon after the New York article appeared, she arrived at her office and immediately asked Conrad for a cigarette. “She said, ‘Egon’s leaving, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do,’” Conrad recalls. “It was one of the very few times I ever saw Diane ruffled. The separation was a change at a time when she was moving very far, very fast, and in those circumstances you don’t want any impediments. And her kids were young. Egon was their father. She was thinking as she was talking, which was her style. She wasn’t sure what her next move should be.”

  Blowing a sibilant jet of smoke toward the ceiling, Diane asked Conrad how he thought the breakup would affect business. “I don’t know about your personal life,” he told her, “but it’s good for business.”

  Conrad felt that Egon was a drag on Diane’s rise. He was around, and he was an annoyance. Once when Diane was away, Egon was hanging out in her showroom as Conrad was trying to close a deal with the buyer Charlotte Kramer from Saks, who Conrad says “had the biggest pencil in the business,” retail parlance for buying clout. “Egon says to Charlotte, ‘I’d love to sit with you and tell you what you should buy.’ He’s saying this while I’m working with her, and he’s messing up my act.”

  At first Egon didn’t understand why he and Diane couldn’t continue as they had before the New York article. He held the typical European aristocrat’s attitude toward marriage—it was for preserving bloodlines and fortunes; wives held a secondary status to their husbands. In a way, Egon believed, Diane’s success belonged to him. “Either you give me your business, or we separate,” he told her.

  “Okay, we separate,” she said.

  Once the decision to break up was made, Diane and Egon tried not to listen to outside parties and kept discussions about the dissolution of their union between themselves. “We shared a lawyer and had one meeting with him when we formulated our separation. There was no alimony,” says Diane.

  Egon moved out and got his own apartment at Eighty-Second Street and Park. Diane remained at 1050 Park. Soon the two were friends again. “He still came over every day at six. We still spent holidays together and remained very close,” Diane says.

  To the end of Egon’s life, Diane continued to rely on his emotional support during her frequent bouts of insecurity and often called him late at night for reassurance. “Do you love me?” she’d ask.

  “Of course, I do,” Egon would say. “Now go to sleep.”

  The Wrap

  One evening in 1973, soon after Egon moved out and at the height of the Watergate scandal, Diane turned on the TV in the bedroom of her Park Avenue apartment and saw an image that changed her life. Julie Nixon Eisenhower, President Nixon’s daughter, was wearing one of the designer’s popular wrap tops and A-line skirts while being questioned at a news conference. As Julie defended her embattled father against charges that he’d covered up the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex, Diane noted the flattering contours of her top, how the snug fit and V neck enhanced Julie’s curves without being too provocative. Diane had little sympathy for Nixon, but his younger daughter impressed her. Julie looked confident and forceful, so different from the guileless girl in pictures at Nixon’s inauguration. It was as if Julie had absorbed the spirit of her clothes to become a new woman, a woman more like Diane—bold, independent, alluring.

  Diane had seen this happen before—on her trips around the country when she watched women of all shapes and ages try on her clothes—she had seen how they’d go into the dressing rooms as frumps and come out, well, not exactly sirens, but feeling better about their bodies and themselves because Diane’s brightly colored clothes in printed jersey with no zippers or other clunky hardware were so easy and hopeful. Like all good fashion, Diane’s designs caught the spirit of the moment, of what was at the heart of women’s lives: their need for love and romance as well as equality at work.

  The clothes were like living things to her—like her two small children sleeping nearby with their nanny. When she held the soft, graceful garments in her hands, she felt she was holding her own sunny future.

  That evening Diane flung the vicuña comforter aside and leapt out of bed. Standing in front of the black and white screen, she stared at Julie Nixon Eisenhower and suddenly realized: If a simple little top could do so much for a woman, what if she extended it to the knee and turned it into a dress?

  RICHARD CONRAD AND SUE FEINBERG tell a different wrap-dress creation story. They say Conrad came up with the idea after seeing Diane’s wrap top and skirt ensemble. “I knew we could cut our costs in half if we sewed the wrap top to the skirt,” because a one-piece garment is cheaper to manufacture than a two-piece outfit, says Conrad. “I suggested that to Diane, and the first one-piece wrap dress” was born.
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br />   Feinberg says she happened to be in New York that day and heard Dick Conrad say, ‘Let’s make it into a dress.’”

  Among others who’ve taken credit for the wrap dress over the years is Clovis Ruffin, a designer who was known for creating clingy T-shirt dresses. After Ruffin died in 1992, Diane recalls, “his mother called me and said I’d stolen the dress from her son. The poor woman had lost her son, but I had to tell her, I did the dress before he became a designer.”

  IT TOOK A GREAT DEAL of trial and error to get the proportions of the wrap dress exactly right. In Italy, Bruna, Ferretti’s pattern maker, spent hours cutting different patterns and pinning them together. Diane and Feinberg tried on a series of prototypes, “testing and trying” to get it to work, says Diane. “It was like a puzzle, to make all the pieces fit.”

  The first wrap—in a wood grain print—was seen by buyers in September 1973. In April 1974 Diane launched the style, number T/72, in snakeskin and leopard prints. “It was nothing really—just a few yards of fabric with two sleeves and a wide wrap sash,” Diane later wrote, describing its allure. At a time of schizophrenic skirt lengths—from microminis to midis to maxis—the wrap was an elegant, flattering knee length. It didn’t have a zipper or buttons, so you could slip it on quickly and slink out of a bedroom “without waking a sleeping man,” as Diane often says. It wrapped around the body like a kimono and molded to the individual woman’s shape. The movement of the print enhanced a woman’s curves. You could wash it.

  “We shipped it out, and the retailers went crazy,” says Conrad. The country was in the middle of a recession, and most other clothing lines were not selling well. “But salesgirls were literally fighting over who got to sell Diane’s dresses,” adds Conrad.