Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  Diane was spending millions on her business, including salaries for a staff of 120, promotional events, and ad campaigns, while the relaunch of her wrap at $180 to $190 a dress brought in less than $1 million wholesale. At one point, she tried to raise $10 million by selling a piece of her business to Gucci, but Tom Ford, Gucci’s creative director, and the company’s CEO, Domenico De Sole, invested in Beatle daughter Stella McCartney’s fashion house instead.

  Barry Diller and her children were equal partners with her in the business, and they “wanted to pull the plug,” as Diller puts it. They’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t smart to continue financing a comeback that might never make money. They’d recently established the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation to support human rights, health, environment, arts, and education projects, and the funds being poured into Diane’s fashion might have been better used for the foundation. “I don’t know by [then] what the investment was, but it could have been between five and ten million, or it was going to be ten million in a few months,” Diller says. “It’s not like you’re a bank or you’ve got partners. We were putting [our] money out.” Some of it was Diller’s and some of it was Diane’s.

  “She had savings,” says Alex. “She’d sold [her apartment] at 1060 Fifth Avenue. She had money. And I said, ‘DVF, you gotta stop investing all your money in this business.’ It’s like actors who invest their money in movies for themselves.”

  Diller decided there was only one solution. “We had a family intervention,” he says. “Alex, Tats, me, and Diane. It was in my office, and we said to Diane, ‘Look, it’s not going well. It’s losing money. It’s not working.’”

  Anger flashed in Diane’s eyes. She glared at her family seated around the table in Diller’s office and slammed her fist down on the table. “Give me six months,” she demanded. “I’ll turn it around. You’ll see.”

  “We tried to talk her out of it,” says Diller. Beyond the money, he was concerned that Diane was unhappy. In fact, he says, the intervention was not really about the money. “It was because it was making her miserable, and who needs it?”

  But Diane was determined to persevere, to prove that her success had not been a fluke the first time around. So Diller and Diane’s children gave in. Diller recalls, “We said, ‘Okay. You can have six months.’”

  IN SEPTEMBER 1999, SEVERAL MONTHS after her family’s ultimatum, Diane showed her spring 2000 collection. WWD pronounced it “a hit.” The collection “sprang to life” with “fresh, whimsical and feminine” fashion. The paper praised her new prints inspired by nature, including “a bold giraffe motif, playful flamingoes, climbing ivy and—the most mischievous idea—a cannabis print.”

  Cathy Horyn, the new chief fashion critic for the New York Times, applauded the “sexy variations on wrap dresses and fluted, ruffled skirts.” After the show, Diane introduced Horyn to a healer named Romeo, who handed out beads “which he said would ward off aggravating people.”

  Perhaps Romeo also brought good luck, because soon after the opening something extraordinary happened. In November Diane showed up at number six on WWD’s list of one hundred favorite brands, a “dramatic new entry,” according to the newspaper. The biennial rankings typically changed little from year to year. Career-clothes workhorse Liz Claiborne held the top spot for the second year. Vera Wang, who’d received a lot of publicity for dressing celebrities for the most recent Academy Awards show, also broke into the Fairchild 100 brand chart.

  Buyers and shoppers loved Diane’s clothes—including a new batch of dresses in solid colors with soft draping—as much as the critics did. Diane’s roster of accounts exploded, reaching more than three hundred by the end of the year. In many stores her brand was a best-seller. In 1997 she’d sold less than one million dollars’ worth of clothes; in 1999 she sold more than twenty times that amount. Though her business had yet to break even, she was on the right track.

  She’d asked Diller and her children for six months to turn the business around, and she succeeded, as if by magic. “I knew I had a great product; I just had to get some traction,” Diane says.

  She credits much of this traction to the savvy management of the company’s new president, Paula Sutter. A young woman and new mother who had been vice president of sales at DKNY’s domestic women’s division, Sutter worked for Diane as a consultant before being appointed president in 1999. Sutter came up with a business plan, including the establishment of monthly deliveries to create a fresh flow of DVF fashion to retailers and better placement of Diane’s clothes in the nation’s stores.

  Diane also hired graphic designer Craig Braun, a former “flirtation” who had designed the cover of the Rolling Stones’ album Sticky Fingers, to redesign her label. Braun used Diane’s signature in a san serif typeface, with a lowercase v in von. To polish her image and dissociate herself from all things uncool, Diane stopped appearing on HSN to hawk her Silk Assets line (she was still relying on the income from Silk Assets to partially fuel her comeback), sending a young employee in her place.

  Diane prided herself on the cabal of women she’d assembled to help her run her business, including Sutter and Kathy Landau, the company’s senior vice president, who’d been with her since 1990. Diane had even allowed Landau to bring her baby and its nanny to work every day. And when Landau had a second child, Diane paid for a baby nurse who accompanied Landau and her infant to the office each morning. “She made it easy for me to come back to work,” says Landau.

  Diane trusted women, believed in them, and wanted to be surrounded by them. Male designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Halston, and Bill Blass might be geniuses of technique, but they would never know what it felt like to actually wear their clothes. Only women understood what other women wanted. Diane loved men, but she believed that women were stronger beings, more evolved. “I never met a woman who wasn’t strong,” she says. In the seventies, she admitted, she’d had “a tendency to hide behind a man in a suit, for the business part” of DVF fashion, “and every time I did that it was a mistake.” The suits had given her disastrous advice, and she’d almost lost everything. Of course, she also had herself to blame for the misguided handling of the business, a fact she acknowledges today.

  A number of her employees and ex-employees say she does take responsibility for her decisions. But—always fighting to keep her confidence up—she has been known to blame others. Once, during a discussion about the demise of one of her company’s most lucrative licensing deals, Diane said to a (female) DVF executive, “You blew that deal.”

  “You wanted out,” the executive shot back. “You’re rewriting history.”

  “If I didn’t, I’d only have myself to blame,” said Diane.

  Seventh Avenue itself was becoming a place for women, and Diane benefited from this sea change in fashion. The millennium saw the rise of young women as the new generation of sales leaders, replacing the old cigar-chomping male garmentos. Dubbed garmentas by WWD, these new women were part of fashion’s exploding focus on brand coherence, the principle that every component of a fashion business—stores, advertising, showrooms, and sales staff—should reflect a singular image. Diane’s chief salesperson was a beautiful, cosmopolitan thirty-two-year-old named Astrid Martheleur. She had studied at the Lycée Français and spoke four languages. At night, dressed in DVF, she went out to stylish clubs and restaurants, such as Halo and Indochine, where she was a living advertisement for her boss.

  As a group, women designers had come into their own. The AIDS epidemic had made investors wary of backing male designers, and in general, women had gained ground across the professions and in business. In the late nineties, these forces helped to usher in the era of the female designer. Recent years had seen the rise of Donna Karan, Jil Sander, Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace, and, at a lower price point, Anna Sui, Cynthia Rowley, Nicole Miller, and Cynthia Steffe.

  With more women in leadership roles on Seventh Avenue and in department stores, the business side of fas
hion was becoming more female-driven. The focus now was on relationships, not fast deal making. Martheleur found herself doing business with young women like herself. The middle-aged men who’d been in control in department stores when Diane had started out in the seventies were gone, replaced increasingly by young women.

  In those pre-9/11 days, there was once again a general exuberance in New York fashion, just half a decade after the New York Times had predicted its death. The economy boomed, which meant more opportunities for more designers and more money being spent on clothes. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s cleanup of Times Square spread to Seventh Avenue, which was looking spiffier than it had in ages. Soon the Garment District would even get its own Hollywood-style Walk of Fame, with designers’ names immortalized in the sidewalk between Thirty-Fourth Street and Times Square in decorative plaques.

  The buoyant mood infused the DVF Studio. Diane’s spring 2001 show had a “hotel life” theme and showcased clothes for “the woman on the go who is ready for anything at a moment’s notice,” according to the program notes. That meant easy, body-conscious dresses and clingy tops with side ruching in packable fabrics such as silk jersey and supple leather. The models paraded down the runway in Diane’s studio with loose hair, their bright pink toenails peeping out from tall, strappy sandals. The show “caught the spirit of girl power in a refined way,” wrote Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune.

  It all looked fresh and youthful, even to the hypercritical eye of the New York Times chief fashion writer. “Ms. von Furstenberg is not a great designer,” wrote Cathy Horyn. “But she is good at doing what great designers do, which is to exploit a look, so that year by year, it becomes her own.”

  Diane was not an innovator in the art of dressmaking. Her clothes weren’t marvels of technique and decoration. Still, her Hotel Life collection expressed a coherent and clearly defined aesthetic, one that had informed her fashion from the start and reached its apotheosis with the wrap. Diane had created a sensation with that dress, and when the sensation ended, when she couldn’t repeat its success, she got busy extracting its essence. The DNA of the wrap—its ease, sexiness, brightness, and sass—was now revealed in an array of new models. Diane had left the arena of trendiness and entered the kingdom of style.

  DIANE BECAME A GRANDMOTHER FOR the second time on June 1, 2000, when Tatiana gave birth in California to a daughter, Antonia, by her boyfriend, actor Russell Steinberg. (Alexandra and Alexandre von Furstenberg’s daughter, Talita, had been born in May 1999.) Through her health was failing, Lily, accompanied by her nurse, made the trip to Los Angeles from New York, where she’d been staying in Diller’s apartment at the Carlyle while being treated for a respiratory ailment.

  In recent years, Lily had lived mostly in a house on Harbor Island in the Bahamas, tended to by caregivers arranged by Diane. Lily and Hans Muller had broken up, and Muller had married someone else, though Martin Muller says his father “was still in love with [Lily]. She was absolutely the love of his life.” Lily’s health was failing, and she was more comfortable living in a warm climate.

  Before making the trip to California, Lily “had rested deeply—as in almost a coma,” recalls Tatiana. Lily stayed at Diller’s house in Malibu, and she and Tatiana “spent a lot of time together,” says Tatiana. Lily promised Tatiana that she would live to meet the baby, and she kept her word. “She stood up and walked into my hospital room in Santa Monica. Her body was failing her, but her will and her mind were still powerful. She felt so accomplished and full of pride that we could all be together”—mother, child, the baby’s maternal great-grandmother, grandmother, and grandfather. Diane and Egon had also both arrived, staying at Diller’s house to be on hand to welcome their grandchild. Egon had brought a ridiculously grand present for the baby—a pair of diamond earrings and matching necklace that had been in his family for generations.

  When Tatiana brought Antonia home to Silver Lake, Lily spent a few hours with them, then flew back to New York. She would soon fly with her nurse to Brussels to be with Philippe and his wife, Greta. “You cannot imagine my grief watching Lily leave, knowing I would never see her again,” says Tatiana.

  Lily died a few weeks later at Philippe’s and Greta’s home. She was seventy-eight. Before the body was removed to the mortuary, her nurse, Lorna MacDonald, wrapped Lily’s head in a green and blue DVF scarf with Diane’s signature in bold black at the edge. Lily was buried in the scarf in Brussels, next to her husband, Leon. “They fought a lot, and now they are together at peace,” says Philippe.

  BACK IN NEW YORK, DIANE buried her grief in work. In the first year of the new millennium she had myriad new projects. She launched an Internet site, dvf.com, that allowed web surfers to email her directly, continuing the conversation she’d been having with her customers since the start of her career. She would still travel the department store circuit making public appearances, but now she could also communicate with women electronically and in this way reach many more of them. Each week fans sent dozens of emails, and every month Diane posted an online diary in which she regularly shared details about her travels and work. She also embarked on constructing her first freestanding boutique in a large space adjacent to her West Twelfth Street studio.

  The Manhattan Meatpacking District had changed dramatically since Diane first moved there in 1997. The old marketplace was still home to about thirty meat-packing companies, but an influx of designer showrooms, hip restaurants, and boutiques was rapidly taking over the twelve-block neighborhood as the meat packers moved to the Bronx.

  One day, as her mother lay dying, Diane told her she would probably marry Barry Diller “sooner or later.” From time to time over the years, Diller and Diane had discussed marriage, “but not really a lot,” says Diller. It wasn’t something they were burning to do, yet their deep involvement in each other’s lives and emotions made marriage a logical possibility. They were already living together “in the way we live together,” says Diller—that is, in separate residences, though within a short limo ride of each other.

  Then, in late January 2001, a week before Diller’s fifty-ninth birthday, it “just seemed like the right time,” says Diller. Friends say that Diane’s cancer and her mother’s death led her to think deeply about her legacy, about what she would leave behind for her children and grandchildren. Diller was like a father and grandfather to them. Alex and Tatiana would be his heirs; he’d already deeded his Malibu house to Alex.

  Diane told Oprah Winfrey in 2014 that she proposed to Diller. “I called him and said, ‘You know, if you want, for your birthday I’ll marry you. And he said, ‘Let me see if I can arrange it.’”

  In any case, no sooner had Diane decided to marry Diller than she began to have doubts and called her children and close friends for reassurance. “Am I betraying myself?” she asked Tatiana. “Am I going from being a free woman to a kept woman, a trophy wife?” Tatiana told her she was doing the right thing. André Leon Talley also reassured Diane. “I told her, ‘You need to marry this man who’s proved he loves you,’” says Talley. Diane called Egon, whose advice was “Make sure you are always happy. In any case, you will always be Diane von Furstenberg.”

  Still, Diane wavered until the last moment. When WWD heard about the possible marriage, a reporter from the paper called Diane for a comment. She was evasive. “Maybe one of us will still change our mind,” she said. “And neither would take it badly if the other said, ‘Let’s not do it.’ Neither of us would be offended. That’s how large the thing we have is—it’s hard to explain.”

  Nonetheless, she had a dress sewn up—a champagne-colored, dolman-sleeved model that she would be showing at her fall opening the following week. She also planned a party, though not as a wedding reception but as a birthday celebration for “the three Aquarians” in her life—Diller and her children, Alex and Tatiana, who all celebrated birthdays around this time.

  On February 2, a glitteringly cold, blue day, Diane and Diller took his limo to City Hall in Manhattan
. Diane wore a sable vest over her dress and alligator boots, and she carried a bouquet of sweet peas and lily of the valley in honor of her mother. They were married at one thirty in a civil ceremony attended by her children; her daughter-in-law, Alexandra; Tatiana’s boyfriend, Russell Steinberg; Tatiana’s best friend, Francesca Gregorini; her baby granddaughters; and her brother, Philippe, and his wife, Greta, who’d flown in from Brussels. Annie Leibovitz took the official wedding photo. Diller’s wedding present to Diane was a collection of twenty-six diamond studded bands for the twenty-six years they hadn’t been married. Her present to him was “myself,” she said.

  Later, they celebrated with 350 of their friends. The guest list included Diane’s fellow fashion powerhouses Calvin Klein and Carolina Herrera; celebrities such as Diane Sawyer and disco-era pal Ian Schrager, the former owner of Studio 54 who’d reinvented himself as a successful hotelier; and Egon. Guests dined on a buffet of chicken curry, pasta, eggplant parmigiana, and assorted salads. Afterward, they danced to a Cuban band. There were three birthday cakes (in honor of Tatiana, Alex, and Barry) and many toasts. Diane gave one “that was all about me,” said Egon. “I was embarrassed for Barry.”

  And yet Barry had won. “My pattern” for thirty-five years had been serial lovers, with “one man kicking the other one out,” says Diane. Jas ousted Egon; Barry ousted Jas; Paulo ousted Barry; Alain ousted Paulo; Mort ousted Alain, Roffredo ousted Mort; Mark ousted Roffredo. Now Diane’s long string of flirtations and relationships, of seductions and secret trysts, was over.

  IN A HEADLINE THE NEXT day, the New York Times called the wedding “a merger.” “The marriage came after years of speculation about a relationship widely assumed to be platonic,” the paper wrote. “Ms. Von Furstenberg characterized the romance as ‘very intimate’ and would offer nothing more.”

  WWD also weighed in, calling the von Furstenberg-Diller nuptials “a bit too Cole Porter for the unsophisticated.”