Signaling her new beginning, she moved to West Twelfth Street in the Meatpacking District, a remote riverfront neighborhood between Washington Street and the gray waters of the Hudson. In the 1930s, the “high line,” the elevated freight tracks that ran along Manhattan’s Lower West Side, had brought animal bodies here from midwestern slaughterhouses to be turned into steaks and chops. In the decades since, the area’s dark, forgotten location made it a hub for gays, transvestites, and prostitutes of all persuasions. In 1997 you could still see men in wigs and stilettoes stepping over pieces of uncooked beef splayed on the cobblestones. But the drag queens and old meat-packing businesses, with their bloody carcasses hanging on hooks under tin sheds, were rapidly dwindling, replaced by hipsters and chic restaurants, galleries and boutiques. Still, the location was so far from the center of New York fashion, it “seemed like the end of the earth,” says Alexandra von Furstenberg, who married Diane’s son, Alexandre, in 1995. “We were all like, ‘What is she thinking?’” It smelled bad. It was gloomy and dangerous.
“Everyone told her, ‘You’ll kill your business; no one will go there,” says Kathy Landau. But Diane found a comforting beauty in the neighborhood’s angled streets, low stoops, and dour old warehouses. They reminded her of Brussels and her childhood home.
She bought two nineteenth-century buildings, one of which had been used as a stable for New York Police Department horses, for four million dollars and spent many millions more renovating them into a dramatic design studio, office, and home. The conjoined buildings housed a great open space on the ground floor with a system of moving walls that could be closed or opened for parties and fashion shows. Upper floors held a design studio, administrative offices, and an apartment for Diane decorated with zebra-patterned chairs, sisal rugs, mounds of pillows, and Balinese carvings acquired during her Paulo period. The renovation kept the buildings’ original brick walls, plank floors, and cast-iron columns while incorporating a huge skylight over a twenty-five-foot atrium, a small pool at the bottom of a spiral staircase, and a roof terrace with a greenhouse.
To help fund the renovation and the rebirth of her fashion business, Diane made a deal with Avon, the door-to-door cosmetics company, which was trying to expand its customer base by offering fashion through its catalogs. Diane was still producing her Silk Assets line for HSN, which brought in some money. But now in addition Avon gave her a guarantee of one million dollars a year plus royalties on anticipated sales of more than forty million to design a moderately priced fashion line for them. She called it the Color Authority, resurrecting the name of her old cosmetics company.
In August 1995, Diane participated in the launch of the Avon catalog, spending an afternoon in the showroom at Avon headquarters in Washington, DC, where her collection was displayed on rolling racks. Sitting at a table with her shoes off, she signed autographs for a long line of sales managers who’d shown up to meet her.
It had been a little over a year since her last radiation treatment, and there was no hint of a cancer recurrence. (Many years later, Diane would give Ralph Lauren one of her father’s gold coins from World War II because Lauren “had saved my life,” she says.) Throughout Diane’s ordeal, Lily never showed her fear. “I’d spy on her to see if she was worried,” Diane recalls.
LILY SEEMED CONFIDENT OF HER daughter’s recovery, and this greatly bolstered Diane. “I thought, ‘If she’s so cool about it, everything will be all right,’” Diane continues. Afterward, though, when Lily knew Diane would survive, all the terror and anguish she’d suppressed burst forth, and “she collapsed.”
Diane felt energetic, ready to get back in the fashion game full steam. Before relaunching a line of clothes on her own, however, she decided to test the waters by becoming a private label for a large retailer. In early 1996, Diane met with executives of Federated Department Stores, the huge consortium that included Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, to discuss Federated producing a fashion line under the label Diane. But at the last minute, in June 1996, as she was on her way to Cloudwalk for the weekend, she got a call on her cell telling her that the deal had fallen through. Federated’s executives, it turned out, were uncomfortable with Diane designing for Avon and HSN, which were both associated with unglamorous products for dowdy housewives. They also were wary because of grumbling from store buyers that Diane was a has-been, at fifty too old to design clothes for the youthful customers they wanted to attract.
Diane was devastated. But as Diller, who suffered through the weekend with her, told Ruth La Ferla of the New York Times, Diane’s “resilience is bred in the genes; it’s in her very bones.”
“Most people would have given up. But Diane? Never,” says Sue Feinberg. “Diane does things, they fail, and she goes on and does something else. And maybe that fails, too, but she keeps going.”
By Monday morning, Diane had decided to produce the Diane fashion line herself.
Around this time, Diane’s old wrap dresses from the seventies started showing up in Manhattan vintage shops. At the Soho store 1909 Company, a black wrap with red and blue flowers had pride of place inside the store’s glass-paneled front door. Another disco-era wrap—in a swirly pink pattern—graced a mannequin prominently displayed in the window. Young women were grabbing the dresses up for two hundred dollars apiece. Celebrities such as actresses Gwyneth Paltrow and Kelly Lynch and MTV News host Serena Altschul were photographed wearing old wraps. Demand became so high that some shops had waiting lists for the dresses.
A nostalgia for the 1970s swept fashion. Tom Ford was reinventing Gucci with velvet hipsters and snug satin shirts inspired by Saturday Night Fever. Late seventies looks were reflected on the runways in slouchy shirts falling off the shoulder, fringed suede jackets, and leg warmers. The designer Todd Oldham invited Diane to a show that he’d planned as an homage to her. As she watched Oldham’s models vamp down the runway in a series of his own wrap dresses, she thought, “I’m not dead yet.”
In July 1996, while in Paris for the couture shows, Diane found herself on the escalator at the Louvre pyramid face-to-face with Rose Marie Bravo, CEO of Saks. “I was going down, and Diane was going up,” recalls Bravo. “I said, ‘Diane, everyone is doing your wrap dress. You should bring it back.’ And I could just see her face change. It was very dramatic.”
Bravo said out loud what Diane had been mulling for weeks. She knew now it was what she should do, and when she got back to New York, she went to work. Diane wanted to keep the integrity of the original wrap while making it relevant for a new generation. To help her in the design process, Diane hired as her creative director (a position that morphed into “image director”), the person tasked with setting the overall tone of the collection, her daughter-in-law, Alexandra Miller von Furstenberg. At twenty-four, Alexandra was the youngest of the storied Miller sisters, the gorgeous blond offspring of duty-free tycoon Robert Miller and his style-icon wife, Chantal. The girls, who had become fixtures of the society pages, had been raised mostly in Hong Kong, where their father’s business was based, but lived part-time in New York, where their parents kept an apartment at the Carlyle Hotel, two floors above Diane’s.
Alexandra had met Alex von Furstenberg in the Carlyle elevator one day when they were teenagers, and they’d dated on and off since then. In October 1995 they married in a three-day extravaganza of a wedding, starting with a million-dollar black-tie ball for nine hundred in immense tents that had been set up in Battery Park overlooking New York Harbor.
Alexandra, who aspired for a while to design costumes for film, had studied art and costume history at Brown University and design at Parsons. She had a strong sense of style, yet her main qualifications for her job were that, in addition to being married to Diane’s son, she was beautiful, hip, and connected to a crowd of cool, moneyed young women, the glamour girls of New York.
These daughters of the rich had gone to private schools and Ivy League colleges, but unlike their socialite, style-obsessed mothers, they wanted to work. They held jobs in
art galleries, auction houses, fashion houses, and the media. They were cultured, well traveled, sophisticated, and multilingual, and their knowledge and polish reflected well on their employers, many of whom dealt regularly with European clients. “You have to know when you see a reference to crayon that it’s French for ‘pencil’ and not a reference to kindergarten,” as one glamour-girl employer noted.
Alexandra brought a youthful sensibility to discussions about what the new wrap should look like. Incredibly, Diane had not saved any of her wraps from the seventies, though “I found some in my mother’s closet,” she says. She bought as many as she could from vintage stores and collectors she found online. Diane told a reporter who interviewed her for the New York Times that she would mail fifty dollars and a bottle of Tatiana to anyone who sent her an original wrap.
Diane had saved swatches of fabric, however, and she had an extensive archive of her beloved prints. But where to manufacture the new wraps? Ferretti had died; his factories were closed. “A certain Mr. Lam in Hong Kong,” Diane wrote, had produced the dresses Carl Rosen and Puritan sold under Diane’s name. So now she traveled to Hong Kong to visit Mr. Lam’s factories.
Diane convinced Mr. Lam to upgrade his operation for printing fabric. In return, she agreed to transfer production of her Silk Assets line to Lam. She also spent hours with the Chinese workers, instructing them through an interpreter on the fine points of hand-printing fabric, an art she’d absorbed from her long association with Ferretti. “Together we developed the perfect jersey fabric, as tight as the original Italian one but this time one hundred percent silk,” Diane wrote in her second memoir.
Actually, the fabric was not as snug as Ferretti’s cotton jersey, though like the Italian cloth, it felt lush, draped well, and didn’t wrinkle.
Back in New York, Alexandra acted as a kind of house model, trying on myriad prototypes to see what worked best. In the end, Diane modernized the wrap dress by making the collar small and round, rather than large and pointed, and shortening it so it hit at the knee. She also added variations on the classic wrap, including one with no collar or cuffs and one with a more generously cut A-line skirt for older women with spreading hips. Some of the original prints from the seventies were revived, but many new prints were added, including one made up of repetitions of Diane’s signature. “She got the idea while talking on the phone one day and absentmindedly doodling her signature,” says Kathy Landau. She gave it to one of the two painters she employed who did nothing but paint prints for her design studio.
Diane relied heavily on Alexandra to be the ambassador for the new wrap. (Her own daughter, Tatiana, had no interest in fashion.) “Diane was a little nervous, putting herself out there again, starting her brand anew and not knowing if it was going to work or if she would get buyers to believe in her,” Alexandra says. She and her friends played a key promotional role by wearing the wrap to prominent social events where they were photographed by the press.
To get fashion insiders intrigued by her new wrap, Diane wore one to John Galliano’s Christian Dior couture show in Paris that July. Hollywood wives Rita Wilson (Tom Hanks) and Kate Capshaw (Steven Spielberg), sitting nearby, raved about it, and for the next day’s show at Chanel, Diane had another wrap overnighted to her by Frenchway, the Manhattan travel agency that specialized in such fashion emergencies.
She also advertised in the September issues of Interview, Vanity Fair, and W and in the fall fashion supplement to the New York Times. Her ad campaign, the first she’d done in nearly a decade, featured black-and-white portraits of model Danielle Zinaich, a dark-haired, sultry DVF look-alike, shot by the renowned French photographer Bettina Rheims and captioned “He stared at me all night. Then he said . . . Something about you reminds me of my mother.”
Not wishing to repeat her mistakes of the seventies, when she’d expanded too quickly, she decided to introduce the new wrap in only ten “doors”—the Manhattan boutique Scoop and in nine Saks Fifth Avenue stores in nine cities. Saks CEO Rose Marie Bravo, who’d sparked Diane’s decision to bring back the dress in the first place, “wanted to roll out the wrap dress big, in far more stores than we were comfortable with,” says Kathy Landau. Diane believed it was crucial for her to visit every branch of Saks involved in the relaunch, “and if we were in forty stores, she couldn’t do that, and then we wouldn’t learn enough” about what was resonating “with the customers and what was not,” Landau says.
In the end, Diane and her team decided that the wrap would debut in New York, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, Cleveland, Saint Louis, Houston, Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta. The official launch was in Manhattan at Saks’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue. As the day of reckoning approached, Diane grew increasingly nervous. Though the wrap had been tweaked for the nineties, basically it was the same dress from the seventies. Bringing it back would no doubt recall fond memories among fashion insiders and women who’d worn the dress in its earlier form. But it would also give Diane’s critics a chance to weigh in. When the wrap showed up in an “American Ingenuity” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute soon after its relaunch, design critic Herbert Muschamp decried it as “the winding cloth of the counter culture” and lamented its reappearance as “the rebirth of . . . label snob appeal and other connotations that people hoped the sixties had killed off for good.” The return of the once famous didn’t always signal inherent value. As Muschamp grumped, “Godzilla, too, is making a comeback.”
THE OFFICIAL WRAP RELAUNCH CAME on the afternoon of September 9, 1997. Beyond the Saks elevators on the seventh floor, hundreds of dresses hung in neat formation on chrome racks, colorful regiments of style, ready to do battle with the dark forces of frumpiness.
Television cameras from CBS and ABC whirred, and reporters from the New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily, and Vogue scribbled notes as swarms of women flipped through the hangers with violent snaps of their wrists. Long lines formed at the cash register. Many of the women holding two and three wraps were young, too young to remember Diane’s first triumph in 1974.
“It’s great to be back,” Diane repeated into the microphones shoved into her face. She’d worried and worked herself to death. But now her moment had arrived. Why didn’t she feel elated? She was exhausted and not looking her best. Catching glimpses of herself in the mirrors that seemed to be everywhere, she felt unattractive and old, unsure if she had the energy and stamina for the grueling job ahead.
Her new wrap was only the beginning, the means to the end of building a global fashion brand. Yet she did not have a business plan or even a company president. She and Barry Diller were pouring millions of dollars into the DVF Studio. He estimates that they “were probably approaching twenty million as an investment” to fuel Diane’s start-up and “build it up.” Diller says he doesn’t know how much of it was Diane’s money and how much of it was his because “it was our money by then.”
They considered themselves a couple and, with Diane’s children—and eventually grandchildren—a family. Diane often said that Diller’s presence in her life made it difficult for her boyfriends. “They feel small next to him,” she told WWD in 1998. And to me she said, “No one could compete with the way he loved me unconditionally. They were all jealous of Barry.”
Part of Diane’s malaise at the time of her relaunch was that Mark Peploe, the handsome filmmaker she’d recently been involved with—quietly and not very publicly because he was living in London with the mother of his child—had broken up with her. “He’s the only man who ever left me,” says Diane.
He’d left her for another woman (though not the one with whom he was living). “With Mark it was all about stolen moments. I love stolen moments, secret affairs. I would have loved to have been a courtesan. That’s a very European attitude. No American woman would ever say that,” Diane says.
There would be no more exotic trips with Mark to Sri Lanka and the deserts of Cappadocia in Turkey. The poignant symmetry in this was not lost on Diane. She’d la
unched the wrap in 1974 in the wake of her breakup with Egon; now she was relaunching it during another period of heartbreak.
She coped, as she always had, by throwing herself into work. Over the next months, Diane traveled around the nation with Alexandra, often on Diller’s plane, in a whirlwind of appearances at Saks stores. There were visits to morning TV shows, followed by press interviews, breakfast meetings, and talks to the Saks sales staff before the stores opened, then meet-and-greets with customers, more interviews, cocktail receptions, and dinners. “We were on the road together for six months,” recalls Alexandra. “People always asked me, ‘What’s it like working for your mother-in-law?’ But our relationship was more like a friendship than anything else. We got along very well.”
The dresses were selling well at Saks and at hip boutiques—in Paris at Colette, in London at Brown’s, and in New York at Scoop. “The wrap dress had such buzz,” says Stefani Greenfield, the brand consultant who started her career as a retail entrepreneur. Greenfield opened her first Scoop store at 475 Broadway in Soho in 1996 and a second store at Seventy-Third and Third Avenue the next year. “We always had wrap dresses in the window, and people would stand outside looking at them and talking about them, and then they’d go inside and buy them,” she says. “We were changing the windows every five minutes because women wanted the dress in the size on display. We were selling them hand over fist.”
Uptown girls wore their wraps with heels and pearls, and downtown girls wore theirs with tights and boots. Greenfield’s customers were reading in the press “that every cool girl is wearing the wrap,” she continues. “So, wearing the wrap became a way to register, ‘I’m cool, too.’”
Among the coolest girls in New York who wore the wrap was Gywneth Paltrow, the star of Emma and the upcoming Shakespeare in Love. As Greenfield notes, a powerful subliminal message pulsed from photos of Paltrow and other celebrities wearing the dress: “Maybe you can’t be in my movie, but you can wear what I’m wearing. You’re part of my club.”
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