Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  The verdict from the fashion critics, though, would not come for two more months. On November 3, the day of Diane’s formal opening, a shiny black ribbon of town cars clogged West Twelfth Street and unloaded a perfumed cavalcade of well-dressed women. At the entrance to the DVF Studio, a tense, tight crowd had gathered. When the doors finally opened, the crowd rushed toward the seats, hundreds of heels spiking the Diane von Furstenberg signature that was endlessly repeated in the black and white carpet.

  Moments before the show started, Ellen DeGeneres appeared at the door. Stocking your fashion show with celebrities is a great branding opportunity, and who better to announce your independence, your relevance and commitment to women, than a TV star who just came out publicly—on the Oprah Winfrey show—as a lesbian. The photographers stampeded DeGeneres, the star of the sitcom Ellen, as if she were the last Famous Person on earth. A fireworks of flashbulbs followed, and DeGeneres glowed so much it seemed one of the flashbulbs had been planted inside her.

  But she did not take her place in the front row among the leggy “it” girls and poker-faced editors. Actually, DeGeneres had shown up at the DVF Studio by mistake. She’d been on her way to Industria SuperStudio across the street, where her girlfriend, actress Anne Heche, was in a photo shoot. She’d gotten confused and ended up at the wrong address. Diane’s staffers urged her to stay, but DeGeneres hurried out, explaining that Heche was waiting.

  Then the lights dimmed and the models made their way down the steep spiral staircase over the rippling pool. Diane stayed invisible behind the scenes, emerging only at the end to loud applause. The critics did not repeat the acclaim.

  The show “was boringly repetitious with seemingly endless variations of the wrap dress and the wrap jump suit in floral prints, leaf prints, wood-grain prints and reptile prints, but not enough to make a formal show worthwhile,” concluded Anne-Marie Schiro in the New York Times.

  “This should be Diane von Furstenberg’s moment,” wrote Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune, “for her 1970s jersey wrap-dresses are now flea-market chic . . . but as identical designs in different prints from batik and wood-grain to reptile prints wound down the spiral staircase, the show was short on variety.”

  More abuse came from WWD: “Everyone was primed for the seventies icon to deliver, in this comeback show, her new signature for the nineties. But Diane played it safe, sending out enough wraps and jumpsuits to outfit Farrah and her sister Angels through years of runs in ‘Nick at Nite.’”

  The reviews were hurtful, but Diane and her staff took them in stride. “You can’t go from a disaster, which is what her brand had become when she lost control of it, to exceptional without traveling a fairly bumpy road,” says Kathy Landau.

  There was a lot of soul searching in the company and within Diane’s family. In the three months after the relaunch, she sold about three thousand wraps at the nine Saks stores where the dress had debuted, and it was a best-seller at Scoop in Manhattan. But this was nothing compared with the fifteen to twenty-five thousand dresses a week she’d sold in the mid-seventies.

  Diane, though, refused to dwell on negative thoughts. With her obsession for turning negatives into positives and little memory for pain, she threw herself into her work. The trouble was, she seemed to be spinning her wheels.

  Diane brought in a series of consultants and sales people who had various ideas on how to turn things around. “They weren’t good, and they didn’t get the business,” says Landau.

  She also tried to “make a major marriage” with a big manufacturer. To this end, she met with executives at Liz Claiborne, the $2.5 billion career clothes company, and John Pomerantz, the CEO of Leslie Fay, the moderately priced dress company. With Pomerantz Diane had come full circle. In 1971 he had first suggested to Diane that she go into business for herself rather than become a division of an established firm like his, and he’d introduced her to Richard Conrad, the fashion executive who became her first partner.

  Nothing came of the talks, however.

  All Diane wanted to do was her own fashion, but she still had to devote time to Avon and HSN because she needed the income from those lines to fuel her own collections. These distractions left her exhausted and drained her creativity. It didn’t help that Diane was restarting her business during a period—they pop up occasionally like peplums, shoulder pads, and, well, wrap dresses—in which fashion was declared to be dead. No less an authority than the New York Times sounded the death knell in a front-page article, citing as evidence that sales of women’s apparel had fallen 12 percent, from a record $84 billion in 1989 to $73 billion in 1995. Women had roundly rejected expensive designer wear, according to the Times, noting that stores that once seemed invulnerable, from trendy boutiques such as Manhattan’s Charivari to the conservative career-clothes chain Casual Corner, were “deeply troubled. . . . Women’s apparel stores had their worst Christmas in nearly a decade last year.”

  Designers, meanwhile, faced global economic turmoil, sinking stock prices, and an overcrowded marketplace. In this unforgiving business climate, several designers had gone out of business, including onetime media darling Isaac Mizrahi. Others, such as Todd Oldham, had dropped their high-end “collection” lines. Designers were hopelessly out of touch with what women really wanted, the Times concluded, as evidenced by the sharp-angled, miniskirted power suit shown by Anne Klein—a style that made women look like pin-striped hookers—which had bombed. The story cited a long list of designers, including Carolyne Roehm and Stephen Sprouse, who’d excited press coverage for their flashy clothes but had been forced out of business because of flat sales. American women, the Times claimed, now wanted to spend their money on things other than fashion, “from vacations to home furnishings to plastic surgery.”

  ONE MORNING IN AUGUST 1998, Diane was speeding along Route 46 at the wheel of Barry Diller’s BMW, talking distractedly on the phone to her office. She was on her way to Teterboro Airport, where Diller’s plane waited to fly her to Alaska for a weekend cruise for two hundred friends of the host, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen. Careening off the exit ramp, she skidded into an eighteen-wheel truck. She woke up in the hospital with eighteen stitches in her head, five broken ribs, and a collapsed lung. (Diller’s car was totaled.) Doctors put her on oxygen—an indication of the gravity of her condition. Diane was lucky to survive the crash and remained hospitalized for a couple of weeks. Still, she made light of her injuries to her friends and went out of her way to call a WWD reporter from her hospital bed to get the word out that she had a strong constitution and would soon be back at work. “Tell everyone I’m fine. I just have a few broken bones.” Thanks to the hydrating effects of the oxygen, she said, her skin was beautiful.

  Since she was already laid up, she thought this might be the time to have a face-lift. Diane had always looked older than she was. At twenty-five she looked thirty-five. Now, at fifty-one, she looked, well, fifty-one, which was old for fashion and old for New York society, filled as it was with so many astonishingly young-looking women, thanks to the wonders of modern dermatology and plastic surgery. Diane had been unhappy with recent pictures of herself, especially those that appeared in the press in connection with her relaunch. “When your identity is very much associated with your physical image, as hers was, time is not your friend,” says Kathy Landau. Aging is difficult for most people, but it’s especially hard, perhaps, for “someone like Diane, who is always photographed and at the same time looking at pictures of themselves in their younger years.”

  When Diane got out of the hospital, she consulted several plastic surgeons in New York and Los Angeles. Ultimately, she decided against a face-lift, worried that it would take too long to heal. “I mean, you swell for about a year. Who has a year?” she said.

  She had a business to run, and it wasn’t going well. “Just as a few years before I thought my tongue cancer symbolized my inability to express myself [while living with Elkann], I saw the accident as a symptom of my lack of a road map f
or my business,” Diane wrote.

  Soon she also had a book to promote. With enough distance from her childhood and early success to understand the forces that had shaped her, she had decided to write a memoir. She was old enough to look back. Also, a memoir was de rigueur for a celebrity with a new venture to promote.

  As her ghost, Diane hired Linda Bird Francke, the veteran journalist who had written both the New York magazine and Newsweek cover stories about her in the 1970s. Diane: A Signature Life was published in 1998 by Simon & Schuster. Diane dedicated the book “to Egon, who gave me the children and the name.” The book hit all the major notes of Diane’s life—her childhood as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, her marriage to a prince and the birth of her children, the start of her business, the collapse of that business, and her recent comeback. But it did not delve deeply into Diane’s life or her personal struggles. Diane had been too distracted and overwhelmed by worry to concentrate on the book. “I didn’t have a game plan, and I was really worried about [the business],” she says. “I was in a fog when I delivered the book.”

  On the eve of the book’s publication, Diane suggested to the New York Times that she be interviewed about Life Is Beautiful, the new Italian World War II movie. In an Oscar-winning performance, actor Roberto Benigni portrays a father who protects his little son from the horrors of Auschwitz by convincing the child that the Nazis are only playing games.

  The Times took the bait, though the editors suspected what Diane, a “consummate image maker,” really had in mind in suggesting the interview: a desire to downplay the popular perception of her as a jet-setting glamazon and “highlight ‘Diane,’ the woman of substance and soul.” For her interview with Times reporter Ruth La Ferla in Diane’s West Twelfth Street loft, the designer wore a somber black dress and understated makeup.

  Diane might have been eager to remind potential book buyers of her connection to the Holocaust and thus her bona fides as a soulful sufferer. But La Ferla’s piece did not even mention Diane’s mother, Lily. It did, however, describe Diane “smiling through a glaze of tears” as she discussed the movie’s theme of “the triumph not just of love, but of will” in the face of Nazi cruelty.

  Earlier an excerpt of Diane had appeared in Vogue. “Diane is wonderfully gifted and resilient,” wrote Anna Wintour in her “Letter from the Editor” column at the front of the magazine. “She has had great success and great disappointments, but she always recovers.”

  Diane and Wintour had known and liked each other since the seventies, when Diane was the toast of fashion and Wintour was a young fashion journalist. Vogue has frequently featured Diane and her clothes. Wintour regularly sits in the front row of Diane’s shows, and in recent years the two have collaborated on projects to benefit the fashion industry and to promote Democratic political candidates.

  Diane has a talent for forging relationships with prominent, powerful people, and in the fashion world, that included two editors of Vogue—Diana Vreeland, who had fashion’s top job from 1963 to 1971, and Anna Wintour, who’s held the post since 1988. (She was not close to Grace Mirabella, the editor from 1971 to 1988.)

  The magazine’s prestige and influence exploded under Wintour. The editor herself became a celebrity, her chilliness, discipline, and inscrutability as legendary as her oversized sunglasses and Buster Brown bob. Wintour didn’t flinch when an antifur protester threw a dead raccoon on her plate one day in the nineties during lunch at the Four Seasons in New York. Nor did she betray her true feelings about The Devil Wears Prada, the 2003 roman à clef by her former assistant Lauren Weisberger, who portrayed the boss as a conniving monster. As if to announce that she was above anything so ordinary as hurt feelings, Wintour showed up in 2006 at the Manhattan premiere of the movie based on the book. She sat through it poker-faced and said nothing as she left the theater.

  Wintour’s power derives in large part from her ability to make or break designers’ careers. Over the years she’s avidly supported a long roster of talent, including Karl Lagerfeld, Azzedine Alaia, Miuccia Prada, Marc Jacobs, Zac Posen, Tom Ford, and in the new millennium, Jason Wu and Thakoon. Meanwhile, she’s famously shunned others, including Ralph Rucci.

  Rucci is known for his exquisite, astronomically priced creations produced under his label, Chado Ralph Rucci. But for reasons that remain mysterious, he is not among the favored at Vogue. Wintour has never gone to a show of Rucci’s, nor has she featured any of his clothes in her magazine. (Rucci left his label in November 2014.)

  “Either Anna Wintour likes you or she doesn’t, and if she doesn’t, you’re nowhere,” says one longtime fashion observer.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, DIANE’S friendship with Wintour and the Vogue excerpt did little to boost the reception of her book, which sold modestly and garnered mediocre reviews. The New York Times critic deplored the book’s “bouts of superficiality,” while conceding that it “persuasively illustrates how her hugely successful clothing and cosmetics businesses were nurtured by endless hours of hard work and hundreds of personal appearances.”

  Suzy Menkes, writing in the International Herald Tribune, criticized the book’s “bathetic” tone. Menkes cited as examples Diane’s complaint that while attending a White House dinner celebrating the 1979 Egypt-Israeli peace accord, she ruined her new Manolo Blahniks on the wet presidential lawn, and the mention of how Diane shared with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis not only a recent battle against cancer but also the same hairdresser, Edgar Montalvo.

  Menkes found the book’s descriptions of famous social events “frustratingly feeble,” including an account of the Proust ball held by Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, where all Diane had to say was that the “people had made a big effort to dress up.” Menkes speculated that Diane was perhaps “just too nice (at least in print) to be a pertinent diarist or even a colorful gossip. . . . Anxious not to hurt anyone, there is barely a breath of criticism of friends and colleagues.”

  Diane wasted no time bemoaning her book’s reviews and got busy on what really mattered—fashion. For a dose of fresh blood, in May 1998 she hired Catherine Malandrino, a Frenchwoman seventeen years her junior. Malandrino had graduated from the French fashion school ESMOD and trained at a series of Parisian couture houses, including Emanuel Ungaro, before becoming the head designer at Et Vous, a French company that made chic, affordable clothes for young working women. Recently, she’d left that job and moved to New York to be with her boyfriend, businessman Bernard Aidan. Diane first interviewed Malandrino at the Carlyle Hotel, where Diane continued living during the renovation of her West Twelfth Street property. “Diane was so sensual, the way she sat on the sofa and moved her legs and arms,” recalls Malandrino. “I thought, Diane is the wrap dress.”

  They had long talks about the DVF woman and what she represented and about the state of fashion in general. The era of the masculine power suit—with its oversized jackets and big shoulders—had finally waned, only to be replaced by hard-edged looks that were difficult to wear. At the extreme were British designer Alexander McQueen’s “bumster” pants, which were cut so low on the hips that they revealed the buttocks. “Diane and I talked a lot about how to reinvent femininity in fashion,” Malandrino says.

  When it came to style, they found that they shared many of the same ideas, flowing from their common European heritage, including a reverence for the work of Yves Saint Laurent, whose clothes they both wore.

  Diane and Malandrino studied the designer’s old dresses together, until the Frenchwoman began to understand the “codes” of DVF. “I dove into her life and her archive,” says Malandrino, who pored over Diane’s files of old prints and ad campaigns. By the time she actually sat down to design Diane’s dresses, Malandrino understood Diane and her aesthetic so completely, she says, “it was easy for me to design the dress, and soon I was in the studio draping and cutting.”

  By spring 1998, Diane had expanded her retail distribution to 118 stores, representing 30 accounts, including Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and Bloomin
gdale’s. But the dresses arrived in a dizzying array of prints, including snakeskin, bamboo, chain-link, diamonds, and Diane’s signature. On the racks, the swirl of prints “looked very schizophrenic,” Diane conceded. Women were overwhelmed with choices, and the stores were left with racks of unsold dresses.

  For Diane it was scarily reminiscent of the seventies, when she’d saturated the market with wraps and had nothing with which to replace them when the style ran its course.

  Through it all, she still had a knack for grabbing attention. In a nod to the Y2K scare that global computer systems around the world would cease to function on January 1, 2000, she wore a “Diane life vest” at her February 1999 fashion opening. Described by the designer as a command center “for the wired woman,” and created by Diane in conjunction with Sony, the silver silk vest had pockets and pouches to hold a cell phone and other high-tech gear.

  Diane was the only live model in the show. To save money, she dispensed with hiring models and instead presented her collection on an installation of mannequins in her West Twelfth Street studio. “If there’s no woman, there’s no dress,” Coco Chanel famously said. It’s difficult to take the full measure of clothes without seeing them move on live bodies, and that’s why designers have been showing their collections on real women since the belle époque. The first couturier, Charles Frederick Worth, employed house models to parade through his salon for customers, a practice that continued for decades and evolved into more elaborate “fashion parades” at Paris couture houses and Seventh Avenue showrooms.

  By the nineties, when the Council of Fashion Designers of America consolidated the New York shows in big white tents in the east and west plazas of Bryant Park, runway presentations had grown so lavish that they could cost from $250,000 to $400,000, including models’ fees, tent rental, and production costs. “It’s an enormous amount of energy for fifteen or twenty minutes,” Diane told WWD.