Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  As one of the Chosen, Diane went to the head of the line, where the velvet ropes opened for her. Then she was inside, dancing to Donna Summer, flirting with handsome strangers, greeting her friends—Calvin, Andy, Truman, Halston, Diana. “I loved the feeling of walking in alone, like a cowboy walking into a saloon, feeling that I was breaking a taboo,” she wrote in her first autobiography.

  Her feeling of being a cowboy was apt, as the club had a decidedly gay male vibe. “It was all for the boys; there was nothing going on for the girls,” says a Frenchwoman who frequented Studio 54 when she lived in New York in the seventies. “It was so sad. It was boys’ shit: boys with boys, boys dancing with boys—boys, boys, boys. The people who were having the most fun were the gay boys. Their attitude toward the heterosexuals and the women was, ‘You can watch, if you’re good.’ The girls who liked it were fag hags. I just hated it. At the clubs in Paris, even the gay clubs like the Palace, men made a fuss over you, and you wanted to look pretty because people looked at you. But at Studio 54 it was all about guys salivating over the waiters with their shorts and bare chests. The women were superfluous. There wasn’t even a veneer of civilization that says, ‘Let’s have a nice time.’ It was very New York, in that everything in New York is agenda-driven. The agenda at Studio 54 was gays getting laid and getting high.”

  Diane never ventured to the hidden passages and subterranean rooms, the rubber-lined balcony where couples copulated openly. She wasn’t there to join an orgy or blow her mind on drugs. When the tray of quaaludes held by a bare-chested bartender floated past in the blue dimness, she turned away.

  She was there for fun and romance. “The hours between midnight and 2 A.M. belonged to me,” she wrote. The men she picked up at Studio 54 included a onetime teenage runaway from Buffalo who gave her a switchblade and a dog named Roxanne. The switchblade was confiscated at the airport soon afterward, but she had the dog for sixteen years. Another partner was a college boy who lived with his parents in New Jersey.

  She brought her young lovers to her new home, a sixteen-room apartment at 1060 Fifth Avenue that had once been owned by Rodman Rockefeller, Nelson’s son. Flush with new wrap-dress money, she purchased the old WASP-style apartment in December 1976 as a thirtieth birthday present to herself, and moved in in May. The apartment overlooked the Central Park Reservoir and wasn’t far from the home she’d shared with Egon on Park Avenue. But it marked a crucial change from her life as a wife. It was a woman’s apartment, with a mirrored hallway, pink satin upholstery, a lipstick-red phone with push buttons for five lines, floral-patterned carpeting in the public rooms, and leopard carpeting in the bedroom. An emasculated male torso in bronze greeted visitors in the foyer.

  Instead of the hard-edged surrealist and pop art favored by Egon, Diane bought sensual French orientalist paintings. In the living room, a dreamy vision of Fortuna, the goddess of chance and good luck, stared out from above the mantel at Andy Warhol’s sultry silkscreen of Diane on the opposite wall. The master suite had a spa bathroom with a sink big enough for Diane to climb up and sit in, as she often did when she applied her makeup. “The whole apartment had a very opulent, decadent ‘in the harem’ kind of feel,” says Bob Colacello. “It felt like a Parisienne’s version of the Ottoman Empire.”

  One August in the 1970s when he was working in New York, André Leon Talley, then the Paris editor of WWD, lived in Diane’s apartment in a guest room “way in the back, way beyond the kitchen,” he recalls. Diane and Talley were alone with the servants—her children were either at Cloudwalk or in Europe—and every night they went together to Studio 54. Diane loved to dance, but when she was with Talley, they’d mostly “sit on a banquette and look at people and comment. We were there to be part of the scene,” he says. Diane’s boyfriend that summer was a “very young, very hot-looking [boy], who did something like surfing or swimming. He didn’t stay in the apartment, though he came once or twice for dinner.” Once Diane lent him her Mercedes to drive home, and he totaled the car, though he escaped unhurt.

  Diane’s nocturnal uniform at the time was a black bodysuit, Norma Kamali ruffled gypsy skirt, black fishnet stockings, and ankle-strapped silk pumps with a closed toe and skinny heel, by Charles Jourdan, the Manolo Blahnik of his day. “Her closet was full of Kamali and Charles Jourdan,” says Talley. Often, she’d wear rock-crystal bracelets and carry one of the minaudières she’d bought for next to nothing from antique jewelry dealer Fred Leighton. Later, Leighton moved uptown and became famous, but at the time he was still selling out of the back room of a downtown vintage shop.

  Diane was often photographed on her evenings out in her Kamali and Jourdan shoes with her legs wound around each other in a double cross known in yoga as eagle pose. “She was very proud of her legs,” says Talley, and crossing them in this serpentine way became “one of her identity moments in her signature look.”

  Fashion people talk a lot about “moments”—their parlance for the instant when an item of clothing or a component of style is elevated to special status in the minds of those who care about such things. Diane had many fabulous “moments”—when Cecil Beaton photographed her in a black taffeta Oscar de la Renta gown at one of the last balls Marie-Hélène de Rothschild hosted at her Paris château; when she posed against a stark white wall with her arm thrown over her head for a Polaroid that became the basis of one of Andy Warhol’s iconic portraits of her; and when she conceived the wrap dress, which was resonating still in the fashion zeitgeist.

  DIANE RELISHED BEING A FEMALE dude, supporting herself in style and sleeping with whomever she liked. “I was playing the games men play,” she wrote. And reversing gender roles “turned out to be fun,” She cultivated the look of elaborate boredom and enjoyed playing that perennial turn-on, the girl who was impossible to get.

  Rumors of lesbian affairs swirled around her. They’d begun with the 1973 New York article about her unconventional marriage and were fueled by rumored spottings of Diane in male disguise at the Anvil, a raunchy gay dive on Fourteenth Street. For a feminist like Diane, who believed that women “are better than men at everything they do,” as she says, and who saw her mission in life as helping other women, it would not be surprising for her to occasionally be attracted to women. Nor would it be surprising for those feelings to spill over from time to time into actual sex. At boarding school in England, Diane had fallen in love with a masculine girl, her friend Deanna, with whom she lived in Spain for a year. The idea of Diane as bisexual fit into her louche public persona and her private conviction that sexuality should be fluid. “My mother doesn’t understand why anyone would define their sexual orientation, because you could fall in love with a person of either gender. If you’re open to everything, if you’re loose,” says Tatiana.

  “Have I slept with women? Yes,” says Diane. But, she adds, “I’m definitely not a lesbian.”

  She rejoiced at the weddings of her friends, including Marisa Berenson’s 1976 marriage to the American industrialist James Randall, a celebrity-studded extravaganza that was filmed by ABC-TV. Diane told herself she was better off being single. She saw too many of her friends submerge their identities to conform to their husbands’ desires, only to be adrift when the marriages ended.

  IN THE MID-SEVENTIES, DIANE SEARCHED for ways to build on the success of the wrap and grow her business. After a manufacturer who made bedspreads for Sears offered Diane what she called a “huge advance” to put her name on his product, she decided to approach Sears directly about designing an entire line for their home furnishings department, which accounted for more than $1 billion a year in sales. One morning she flew to Chicago to meet with a group of executives, including Charles Moran, the general manager of Sears’s catalogue division.

  Diane sashayed into the meeting in the Sears Tower in a clingy, flowered-print dress. “Well, what do you think you could do for us?” asked a dazzled Moran.

  “I’m dressing so many women in America that I would welcome the challenge of designing American
homes,” Diane answered.

  She saw Sears as a chance to make some big money and expand her brand. Today high-low fashion pairings are common—Jason Wu and Target, Karl Lagerfeld and Macy’s, H&M and Lanvin, to name a few—but in the late seventies such match-ups were controversial. Putting one’s name on “cheap stuff,” as Andy Warhol put it, was seen as selling out, and for some designers it became the kiss of death.

  In 1982 when Halston announced he would design clothes for JCPenney in a deal that would guarantee him an estimated sixteen million dollars over the course of six years, Bergdorf Goodman, which had helped him start his career and had sold his clothes for a decade, dropped him completely.

  Diane’s Sears deal, though, did not interfere with her relationship with the upper-tier department stores like Bloomingdale’s and Saks, largely because the Sears products did not compete with her fashion and cosmetics lines. Nor was she defensive about offering her designs to a lower-end retailer. “I am not a snob,” she said.

  Diane’s Sears line started with sheets—in an uncharacteristically sweet floral pattern—then expanded to towels, curtains, rugs, tableware, and furniture. She hired a team of designers to work on her Sears products, but still met regularly with the Chicago executives, who sometimes traveled to New York to see her. “There she is . . . like Sheena dropped among the dull Midwesterners in their conservative suits,” as Julie Baumgold wrote in New York. Diane “sits at the bathmat lecture taking notes on the marketing analysis of shags and saxonies, whispering asides in French to the head of her studio, Olivier Gelbsman.”

  Diane’s days passed in a blur of meetings, travel, promotional appearances, and more meetings. She recounted her hectic schedule for Bob Colacello in her second sit-down with Interview, in March 1977: “This morning I had breakfast at Bonwit’s for about a hundred women; then after that, I came back here. We’re going to have a product meeting soon; after that . . . from four to six—Tatiana is six today, so she . . . has a birthday party . . . after that I’m working till about eight, and then at eight I’m flying down to Miami . . . yesterday I was in Washington all day; last week I was in Minneapolis and Chicago, the week before in California.”

  This time she graced the cover of Interview in a portrait taken by her friend Ara Gallant, a former hairdresser who’d made a name photographing supermodels such as Twiggy and Veruschka. The photo had been shot late one night with her hair wet.

  For the article, Colacello sat in Diane’s Seventh Avenue office and interviewed her for an hour. Occasionally the conversation would be interrupted by visitors, such as designer Michael Vollbracht and several of her employees. At one point Diane said she liked television, which led Colacello to ask if she found “it difficult at all to design for the masses.” Diane’s reply revealed the uncynical sense of connection to her customers that underpinned her success. “It’s wrong to think that the mass is dumb and stupid, because it isn’t true,” she said.

  Though Diane had reached the top of American life with lavish homes, servants, travel to exotic places, and high-achieving, famous friends, a part of her still identified as an ordinary woman. “Diane understands the person outside the glass, looking in at the magic garden,” Howard Rosenman told the writer Michael Gross.

  A year earlier, on January 28, 1976, Diane had landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in a piece headlined ONCE UPON A TIME A PRINCESS MADE IT WITH THE HOI POLLOI. That morning she was on an early-morning flight to Cleveland and found herself sitting next to a man who leered at her long, slender legs and slinky shirtdress. “What’s a pretty girl like you doing reading The Wall Street Journal?” he asked.

  Diane smiled but said nothing. Even if strangers on airplanes thought her nothing but a flirt-worthy babe, she knew who she was. She was Diane von Furstenberg, head of what the WSJ called a “fashion empire.”

  The story was just a prelude to the wider publicity Diane received two months later when Newsweek magazine put her on the cover of its March 22, 1976, issue in a story titled “Rags & Riches.” The magazine had considered devoting the cover to Gerald Ford, who would soon win the Republican presidential primary, but at the last minute decided to go with Diane. “That [wrap] dress was very popular, and she wasn’t bad looking, so we had her photographed,” recalls Edward Kosner, then Newsweek editor.

  Her notoriety also didn’t hurt. “Part of her reputation at the time was that she was an oddball,” Kosner says. “She was thought of as a little flaky. All that stuff about whether her husband, Egon, was gay, and whether she was a lesbian. She was an outré figure.”

  Newsweek assigned the piece to Linda Bird Francke, who’d written the scandalous 1973 New York story that revealed the von Furstenbergs’ marriage to be a sham. Though her friends had been chagrined by the piece, Diane liked and respected Francke and felt that in the long run the journalist had done her a favor by forcing her to face the unpleasant truth of her marriage.

  For the cover photo by Francesco Scavullo, Diane wore a luxuriant fall and a green and white twig-print shirtdress. It was surprising that she didn’t wear a wrap for the most important magazine cover of her career, but, as she explains, “I was so busy, I just grabbed the first thing” at hand. In the photograph she looks directly and unsmilingly at the viewer with her hands on her hips, the very model of the sexy, liberated woman.

  The seven-page article was lavishly illustrated with color photographs of Diane in her office, with her children, with Barry Diller, and on the phone in bed. Diane is quoted saying, “For someone who never learned how to sew, I didn’t do too bad, did I?” Francke interviewed Egon, who noted that “Diane is a good friend, an excellent mother and a terrible wife.” Diana Vreeland also weighed in: “Diane is a wildly clever merchandiser. It is a lesson to some of the great designers that you don’t have to keep coming out with something new. Do one thing very, very well.”

  Newsweek’s editors did not believe Diane was twenty-nine, as she claimed, so they insisted she produce her birth certificate from Brussels, which she did. With her hollow cheeks and world-weary eyes, she looked older. But mostly she seemed older because few women her age had become so rich and successful.

  The Newsweek cover exploded Diane’s fame with reverberations far beyond fashion. She became a household star, her name and face recognizable to millions of people. Sales of all things DVF accelerated, and she found herself in even higher demand than before for interviews and public appearances. For a while she conducted a daily five-minute radio show on CBS in which she gave advice to other female executives.

  At the time, feminists were searching for role models, and Diane was eager to serve. “I gave up the princess title so I could use the Ms. title,” she says. Still, Ms. magazine, the first periodical to be created, run, and owned solely by women, ignored her. The brainchild of Gloria Steinem, who’d become famous in 1963 for her exposé in Show magazine about working undercover as a Playboy Bunny, Ms. first appeared as an insert in New York in 1971, and then in January 1972 as a monthly stand-alone publication.

  Though Gloria Steinem today says, “I haven’t worn a dress in thirty years,” in the early seventies she wore the wrap. Later she and Diane became friendly through their shared commitment to global issues involving women, including the Women in the World Summit, a three-day conference held annually since 2010 in New York. Over the years, each also dated real estate and media mogul Mort Zuckerman. But Ms. did not get around to writing about Diane until 1986, and then in a group profile of four women designers, including Donna Karan, Liz Claiborne, and Katharine Hamnett, an Englishwoman best known for her political T-shirts, notably one emblazoned with the slogan NO MORE FASHION VICTIMS.

  The lack of interest by Ms. probably says as much about a lingering conflict within feminism as it does about the magazine. Many feminists considered a focus on fashion and beauty as retrograde and demeaning to women. Diane, of course, disagreed, and she insisted that her eroticized image and the femininity of her clothes was not antifeminist. Being a fem
inist, doesn’t mean “you have to look like a truck driver,” she said.

  Yet in popular culture that idea persisted. Gloria Steinem recalls how the stereotype affected impressions of her. “Before feminism, in college, I was a quote-unquote attractive, pretty girl. Then, because people were convinced feminists were ugly, I became a great beauty. Like an overnight sensation. It was quite amazing.”

  As the feminist debate grew more heated, Fashion came under fire for holding out impossible standards of perfection and for manipulating women into becoming objects of male desire. It didn’t help that Vogue, still under the editorship of Diana Vreeland, ran articles that sneered at such brilliant but plainly garbed women as Susan Sontag, calling her “a tomboy who suffers from a bad Electra complex, has mysteriously produced a son, and tends to look upon men as intellectual wrestling opponents.”

  Perhaps as an antidote to such silliness and to the fact that historically, women journalists had been relegated to writing about little else but clothes, food, and society, Ms. went to the opposite extreme. “We rarely covered anyone in the fashion industry,” says Ms. cofounder Letty Pogrebin. “Ms. was a serious newsmagazine. It had a limited number of pages each month and hundreds of underpublicized women’s issues to cover both nationally and internationally. You wouldn’t expect The New Republic or the National Review to cover fashion, would you?”

  Steinem says, “We regarded ourselves as a remedial magazine. So we were striving to cover that which was not covered. Diane already was quite well known in the fashion world and quite well known in the social world, so I don’t think it would have occurred to us. We were diligently engaged in covering what wasn’t covered.”

  On the rare occasions when Ms. did write about fashion, the tone was earnest and defensive. Joanne Edgar, a founding editor of the magazine, remembers one article “in the early days that focused on cost per wear—how it made sense to spend a lot of money on one outfit if you wore it enough. This did not please advertisers who wanted us to buy a lot of clothes.”