Russ Togs set up a showroom for Diane in the company’s Seventh Avenue headquarters, and she went to work. She was unhappy designing inexpensive sportswear in cheap fabrics—leggings, catsuits, jackets, and skirts. “I ate a lot of humble pies,” she said. But at least she was working. She’d also begun the process of divesting herself of her remaining licenses and reclaiming her name. “In some cases, I had to buy it back, in some cases, beg it back,” she recalled. By 1992, the only products still produced under a DVF license were eyewear, luggage, children’s wear, and the fragrance Tatiana.
Things improved a bit the next year, when Diane got to design dresses, her sweet spot. “I was marginally happier with the dresses I went on to design in 1991, clever woven wrap tops and stretch woven skirts,” she wrote. “The fabric wasn’t what I wished it could be, but finally there was a product I could somewhat identify with.”
Diane decided to celebrate the new dress line by hosting a press breakfast similar to the ones she’d held in the seventies at her Fifth Avenue office. She had all the furniture cleared out and installed a display with the new clothes. At 7 A.M., a couple of hours before the breakfast was to start, Landau got a call at home with startling news: Russ Togs had declared bankruptcy. (In a short time, the company would go out of business.) She rushed to the office and told Diane. Without missing a beat, Diane said, “In that case, we’ll do it ourselves.”
The press breakfast went ahead as planned, and soon after, Diane moved Landau and the president of the Russ Togs Diane von Furstenberg Sportswear division, Kathy Van Ness, uptown and went back into business. “It was nothing but us and a desk,” recalls Van Ness. “We did everything from finding the factories [in Hong Kong], to setting up the organization, to planning the buys, to figuring out the gross margins, to talking to retail stores, to managing salespeople—everything you do in any other business, but this was a start-up, from zero. It was a huge rush of energy to launch it. I couldn’t have imagined what her brand would become considering where we started, which was with nothing. But Diane was very clear about where she wanted to take it.”
The wrap dress, and the story of the wrap dress, permeated all her ideas about her business, even in planning a separates line. She wanted to make easy, comfortable, affordable clothes that enhanced a woman’s femininity and confidence. “Her customer profile of a strong, confident, independent woman was the same as it had been in the seventies,” says Van Ness.
As in the seventies, Diane’s designs centered on prints. She “would sit in her office sketching ideas—checks, geometrics—very bold and brave designs,” says Landau.
Adds Van Ness, “She was very much about clothes that anyone could wear—if you had a bust or didn’t, if you had a waist or didn’t.”
Diane launched the dresses in March 1992 at Macy’s flagship store in New York’s Herald Square. The store had given her the windows, which Diane decorated to look like her office, with a desk, books, photos, posters, and sketches scattered across the floor.
As a crowd of sixty people gathered outside, Diane stood in the window with a microphone. “I feel like a fool,” she began, her voice echoing outside through a loudspeaker. Then she held up each dress to the perplexed crowd, explaining that “they are designed for women who work.”
Afterward, she met customers on the fourth floor, where fifteen hundred square feet had been devoted to displays and racks of Diane’s dresses. The next day she hosted a reception for fifty of Macy’s best customers in the store café, followed by a fashion show. She also made appearances at Macy’s stores in Tysons Corner, Virginia, and in Cherry Hill and Paramus, both in New Jersey. The dresses sold well enough, though, as Diane later admitted, the fabric wasn’t good, and they were not well made. She stayed with it for a while, but her heart wasn’t in it, and after a few seasons she ended the line.
By then she was on to a new project. It had started in the summer of 1991, when, in the Concorde Lounge at JFK on her way to Paris, she ran into Joe Spellman, a marketing expert for Elizabeth Arden. Diane told Spellman about her frustration—she wanted to rebuild her business but didn’t know how. Spellman put her in touch with Marvin Traub, the former chairman of Bloomingdale’s, and Lester Gribetz, the store’s former vice co-chairman. She considered forming a partnership with the three men, and they began discussions on the best way to relaunch DVF. During one of their talks, Spellman suggested Diane start by selling her clothes on QVC, the home shopping channel.
QVC, for “Quality, Value and Convenience,” had been founded four years earlier, in 1986, by a restless entrepreneur named Joseph M. Segel. After watching a videotape of the Florida-based Home Shopping Network, the broadcast cable TV network, Segel decided he could do a better job. Operating out of a huge, windowless brick hangar in a bland suburban corporate park in West Chester, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles west of Philadelphia, QVC first broadcast on November 24, 1986, from 7:30 PM to midnight, and reached an audience of 7.6 million.
In a few years, the network was broadcasting 24/7 and had established itself as the world’s foremost purveyor of such products as fake jewels, macramé sweaters, frozen crab cakes, and inflatable mattresses. QVC was piped into cable networks that went to 45 million US homes, as well as hospital waiting rooms and auto repair shops, where it flashed nonstop on TV screens. In 1992, sales were $1 billion a year.
From its start, QVC was a landing pad for celebrities sliding down the trash chute of pop culture. This was where Annette Funicello hawked her mohair Teddy bears, Victoria Principal pitched her makeup line, and Marie Osmond sold her doll collectibles. But no one epitomized the huckster vibe of QVC more than comedian Joan Rivers, who at fifty-nine was already a plastic-surgery cautionary tale and whose eponymous costume jewelry line provided her a comfortable “annuity,” as she put it. “God bless QVC,” she told Novid Parsi of Time Out Chicago. “They came to me when nobody was doing it, when it was a dirty thing to do, and it’s been my rock.”
On the last Saturday in February 1992, Diane took the Metroliner to West Chester with her would-be partners—Gribetz, Traub, and Spellman. The moment she walked into the QVC studio, she saw her future—it looked like money. As she followed the three men down the hall, she found herself thinking out loud, “I want to own this place.”
At that moment the soap opera actress Susan Lucci was on the air pitching hair products. Operators sitting at tables keyed in phone orders on computer screens from customers watching on television, charged each order to a credit card, and then pressed the Send key, which transmitted the order to a warehouse. QVC was able to slash costs by cutting out the middlemen. The company bought all the merchandise sold on the channel directly from manufacturers and shipped it from the company’s immense loading dock in West Chester. Delivery was promised in a week.
Diane watched in amazement as the phones lit up. At the end of her hourlong segment, Lucci had sold around a half million dollars’ worth of shampoo and conditioner. Diane saw Lucci’s pitch as an extension of what she herself had always done—talking directly to customers during her countless personal appearances at boutiques and department stores. But on QVC, Lucci reached more people at one time than Diane could have imagined.
As soon as she got back to New York, Diane called Diller. “Barry, you’ve got to go there,” she said. At the time, he was just as much at sea as Diane. He’d recently resigned from Fox, the network he’d started six years earlier, after Rupert Murdoch refused to make him an equity partner. He had no idea what he would do next. He was restless, newly fifty, and eager for a fresh challenge. No one had been more sharply cognizant of the changing cultural zeitgeist than Diller. But media and entertainment had grown far more complex since the start of his career. He decided he should at least look at QVC, for Diane’s sake, if nothing else.
Home shopping seemed a small thing for Diller’s huge ambition. What’s more, he was put off by the schlocky merchandise QVC offered. That could be changed, Diane told him. Indeed, Darlene Daggett, the brains behin
d QVC’s fashion merchandising, was trying to attract a more sophisticated audience with higher-caliber products pitched by higher-caliber celebrities. Recently, socialite C. Z. Guest had been hawking garden tools, and Diane’s friend Kenny Lane had sold a lower-priced line of his upscale costume jewelry.
After his first trip to the QVC studios in West Chester, Diller came away impressed. “It was the first time I’d seen screens used for something besides telling stories,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting.’”
Still, he wasn’t convinced. At the time, Diane had signed a partnership agreement with Gribetz, Spellman, and Traub to produce a fashion line for QVC. Traub often met with Diane and Diller for Sunday dinner at the Carlyle Hotel—where they had separate apartments—and he recalled Diller complaining, “Why are we bothering with this? This is minor league stuff. Let’s go buy NBC, and we’ll put Diane’s [clothes] on NBC.”
“You may be right,” Traub answered. “But [QVC] is like starting in the minor leagues in baseball” or opening a play outside New York to test the waters. “Let’s see if we can make it work with QVC” first.
In the end Diller agreed, but he advised Diane to go forward on her own, so she could control her fashion line 100 percent. Diller bought out Traub, Spellman, and Gribetz for a nominal amount and negotiated Diane’s deal with QVC himself. (Diane’s first memoir relates a differing narrative. According to A Signature Life, Diane’s partners had declined to take part in the apparel line at all.)
Diane would design a small collection of silk garments called Silk Assets. The collection would include three dresses priced from $105 to $120; a blazer at $105; a kimono-style jacket at $98, oversized shirts from $78 to $88, two pants styles at $48 and $58, a wrap skirt at $48, T-shirts from $38 to $49, and two scarves at $40 and $48. Depending on the success of Diane’s first appearance, a new collection would be produced every two months or so and would include pieces that would coordinate with earlier collections so shoppers could build a complete wardrobe.
At 8 AM on November 7, 1992, Diane strode onto a triangular slice of stage that had swiveled into place on the revolving QVC set, wearing a purple Silk Assets wrap dress and black Manolo Blahnik pumps, as Katherine Betts wrote in Vogue. Squinting into a bank of hot lights, she regarded the set, which had been decorated like a living room, with a sofa, a fireplace, and a stark white backdrop, to which an assistant was tacking up one of her colorful scarves. “Please, let’s not have scarves tacked up on the wall!” Diane said.
Her segment had been set up like a talk show, with a host, Jane Rudolph Treacy, a pretty, ebullient young woman, interviewing Diane at a desk. One of the network’s most popular hosts, Treacy had logged close to ten thousand hours hawking Breezies underwear, budget shoes, and gemstones on a show called Rock Stars.
“I’m not familiar with this buying and selling on television,” Diane admitted, as two models twirled in Silk Assets outfits. Her sophisticated, European face looked hard next to the über perky Treacy, a former local TV reporter. Also, Diane kept pursing her lips and running her fingers through her hair, fashiony mannerisms that looked unfriendly on TV. As the morning progressed, though, she grew more relaxed, telling the audience that “building a wardrobe is like building a circle of friends your whole life.”
The screens of viewers watching at home were dominated by the QVC phone number in bold white next to the words “Diane von Furstenberg Fashions.” A column on the left described the item being shown, for example, a “Silk Jewel Neck Floral Blouse, Retail Value $70.00; QVC PRICE $47.00”—though the retail price was just a hypothetical, reflecting the price at which a traditional retailer might have sold the item.
The first caller, a woman named Anne-Marie, confessed that she was an extra-large, who avoided bright colors. She bought Diane’s palazzo pants in black. “Well, black is perfect then. You can never have enough black,” Diane said. “Wear it in good health.”
When Anne-Marie mentioned that she lived in Brewster, New York, Diane, whose Cloudwalk was nearby, said they were neighbors. “You must know the Texas Taco where I buy my Mexican. Maybe I’ll see you there in your new silk pants!”
At one point, Diane changed from her purple dress—which at $90 had sold out—into a print shirt and pants. A caller from Baltimore was interested in the shirt, which had a purple background, but wondered if it would go with her hair. “Are you blonde or brunette?” asked Diane. When the woman said she was a redhead, Diane exclaimed, “Even better!” She told the caller that the print was copied from a piece of sixteenth-century Florentine inlaid furniture in her Connecticut house. “Don’t be afraid of bright colors. The basic silk thing you need is black, but bright colors and prints can give you a great lift.”
Barry Diller watched the show from the greenroom backstage, his eyes glued to the computer screen monitoring call-ins. No sooner had Diane glided onto the set than 407 calls came in. Diller began to think this wasn’t such a small thing after all.
By 9:30 AM the on-air calls had soared to 721—a considerably higher number than typical for a QVC show—and the computer cash register had rung up a quarter of a million dollars in sales. After a short break, Diane returned at ten thirty, dressed in a Silk Assets blouse and pants. She’d now sold one million dollars’ worth of merchandise, and 1,166 callers waited on line. A woman from West Virginia gushed about how much she loved Diane’s wrap dresses, the new Silk Assets style and the original.
Diane demonstrated how to wear the last item offered, a silk scarf emblazoned with her signature. “I’m giving it to all my friends for Christmas,” she told viewers. The pitch failed, however; the scarf didn’t sell well. Still, when the show ended at 11 AM, Diane had sold out twelve of the seventeen Silk Assets styles featured and run up $1.2 million in sales.
As she headed home, speeding north toward the tall, lighted city in her green Jaguar—a present from Diller—leaving behind the rolling hills and drab corporate park, Diane’s spirit soared. QVC made her feel confident again.
DILLER’S TALKS WITH NBC HAD continued through the summer of 1992, but as he studied the state of information technology, owning a network began to seem less attractive than it had when he’d first left Fox. What’s more, seeing Diane’s success on QVC hit home to Diller that cable, with its myriad viewer choices, would continue to leach customers from the networks. There was only one thing for him to do—buy into QVC himself. His new partners were Brian L. Roberts, the president of Comcast Corporation, the nation’s fourth-largest cable company, and John Malone, the CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc., the largest. Diller became head of QVC, and because Diane had introduced him to the channel, Diller gave her 10 percent of his share in the company.
Taking over QVC, Diller says, “was my transition from pure entertainment to pure interactivity. That was a big leap! And I did it as I do all things, without an understanding of risk, without anything except being driven by curiosity and serendipity.”
And foolishness, some people believed. “Diners passing Diller at his regular table in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons had almost embarrassed expressions as, uncharacteristically, [Diller] kept looking around, as if for applause,” Ken Auletta wrote in his 1993 New Yorker profile of Diller. “Those who knew Diller waved a greeting, but they seemed to be thinking, Barry Diller’s going to run what? A home-shopping network? You’ve got to be kidding!”
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ON HIS FIRST DAY AS the head of QVC, Diller called Diane and moaned, “Could you please tell me what I’m doing here?”
Soon, though, he stopped whining and started doing what he did best—deal making. What he’d had in mind all along was to use QVC as a platform to grow beyond the small world of channels into a limitless, interactive universe. He wanted to be as big as Murdoch and Turner. To this end, Diller began a battle to acquire Paramount, the studio he’d once run. Owning Paramount would allow him to start building new cable services and even perhaps create a fifth network. Eventually, though, he lost out to Viac
om’s Sumner Redstone. Undaunted, he next tried to buy CBS, but Comcast, which had a majority interest in QVC, killed the deal when Comcast president Brian Roberts realized the cable company would have no say in the network’s programming.
Diller’s frustrations mounted as his ambitions were thwarted. But Diane thrived. She appeared on QVC once a week and experienced some of the exhilaration she’d felt in the seventies from having an unstoppable success. “I’m having fun with this vulgar little thing,” she told her friend Fred Seidel.
“She wasn’t afraid to look like a fool,” Seidel recalls.
On one QVC show broadcast at midnight, Diane sold $750,000 worth of Silk Assets clothes in fifteen minutes, including twelve thousand shirts. On another night, she sold twenty-two hundred pairs of trousers with elasticized waistbands in less than two minutes. They might have been, like Carl Rosen’s dresses, trousers “for the masses with fat asses,” but “sitting in the greenroom and watching all the numbers come up on the computer screen was like being at a horse race,” she recalled.
Through it all, says Diller, he and Diane were “getting back together.” They were photographed by Annie Leibovitz in Diller’s suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Towers for Vanity Fair’s 1993 Hall of Fame. The magazine called them “a power couple that have doubled their power. Together, they stroll hand-in-hand down the information superhighway.” Leibovitz snapped them lounging on a couch, Diller in a tuxedo and Diane in a black Valentino couture slip dress with spaghetti straps and jet embroidery. With the money she earned putting QVC viewers into Silk Assets pants with elasticized waists and oversized shirts, she had plenty to spend on French couture.
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