Diane von Furstenberg (20 page)

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 feminist, 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.”

In the 1970s, feminism was joined at the hip with egalitarianism. Diane’s lifestyle represented the kind of extravagance that made many feminists uncomfortable. They thought it unseemly to live as luxuriously as Diane did when so many women were suffering. She resided in splendor in Manhattan and Connecticut. She employed servants. She entertained lavishly. She wore jewels and fur coats.

Diane’s political convictions, however, were liberal. She followed politics in the news, enjoyed discussing national and world events, and perfected the skills of a political hostess at fund-raisers in her apartment for New York mayor Edward Koch, a Democrat. She relished being close to political power.

On March 17, 1976, Luis Estévez, the California designer who dressed First Lady Betty Ford, invited Diane to be his date at a White
House state dinner in honor of Irish prime minister Liam Cosgrave. While having cocktails in her hotel suite with Estévez before the dinner, Diller called.
He
wanted to be the one to take her to the White House for the first time. “Too bad, I got there first!” says Estévez.

Diane entered the East Room in a black satin strapless dress she’d borrowed from Halston that had ties under the bust holding it up. The ties kept slipping, and Diane struggled to hold the dress in place. The party was in full swing, jammed to a standstill with celebrities and dignitaries, the women in ball gowns, the men in black tie.

Though Diane was not an American citizen and couldn’t vote, she would not be supporting President Gerald Ford in the upcoming election, backing instead his opponent, Jimmy Carter, who had won the Democratic presidential nomination. Still, at the White House dinner she earned a place at the head table, seated on the president’s left. Estévez was seated on Betty Ford’s left, at her table. Diane told Ford that she’d only beaten him out as the
Newsweek
cover at the last minute. “If I had to be beaten by anyone, I’m glad it was you,” he told her.

Then he asked Diane to dance. “It was the fox-trot or some old-fashioned dance like that which I absolutely could not do at all,” she recalled in her first autobiography. The president “was a very good dancer, but all I did was trip over his feet and pray the dance would end before my strapless dress fell off.”

Requiem for a Dress

D
iane’s life had the breakneck quality of a sprint in stilettoes. She was living out a fantasy of money and fame, but she was moving too fast on a base that was nothing more than a teetering spike.

All art forms are subject to trends. But a good novel, painting, or symphony holds its artistic value, whereas fashion reflects the moment, the collective craving for what’s hot now. Worship of the new means it’s only a matter of time before yesterday’s favorite is passé, before something else takes the top spot. Diane feared someday she’d fall, and when she did, her decline was swift and merciless.

One hot Sunday morning in June 1977, while reading the papers in bed, Diane saw a spate of ads that made her freeze with dread. Some of the top department stores in New York, including B. Altman, Saks, Macy’s, and Lord & Taylor, had slashed the price of her dresses. Styles that had been selling for $80 were now going for $64, and those at the high end, at $186, were being offered at $93. The ads avoided spelling out her name but references to “that exciting designer who brought you that famous wrap” left
nothing to speculation. She read and reread the ads in the pink satin plushness of her bedroom, and each time the words and numbers shocked. This was disaster. Her business had grown too big too fast. She’d started with three little outfits and by 1977 was selling twenty-five thousand dresses a week, an explosion that fueled her lucrative licenses.

The papers the next day held more bad news. Bonwit Teller and Bloomingdale’s had also slashed the price of her dresses.
WWD
followed with a front-page story. Under a huge headline,
VON FURSTENBERG LINE MARKED DOWN BY SIX N.Y. STORES
, the story began:

Diane von Furstenberg dresses, not named as such but thinly disguised in advertising copy, went on sale Sunday. . . . Retailers were reluctant to discuss the genesis of the decision to break prices on the same day. . . . But one store official referred to it as “an eyebrow-raising coincidence” which could create a “sticky” situation.

What is behind the slowdown in sales, some believe, is the thought that the classic von Furstenberg wrap dress may have run out of gas. . . . The lack of diversification may have finally come back to haunt the company. Criticism was voiced that von Furstenberg may have stayed on top of this dress too long; retailers had earlier indicated this lack of diversity was a major danger point for the firm, but it evidently may be coming to a head sooner than anticipated.

It was also pointed out that the von Furstenberg lines have been knocked off, imitated (in some cases with the same basic fabric and print styling) but with enough difference to make the dresses a bit more interesting so women wouldn’t see themselves coming and going. This has hurt von Furstenberg sales.

WWD
covered the fashion business, so reporting on sales was no surprise, but what startled Seventh Avenue insiders was the prominent play
the newspaper had given the story. For all the pleasure publisher John Fairchild took in his power to make or break designers, no one could recall when he had singled out one designer for a piece about a season-end clearance, let alone in a banner headline on the front page.

At one time Fairchild had promoted Diane’s career.
WWD
had written about Diane frequently in stories and columns and, aside from an occasional dis, had mostly favorably reviewed her collections. Now she was Fairchild’s latest victim.

And yet Diane couldn’t blame the publisher. The story was accurate. She and Dick Conrad knew that sales had slowed. “The handwriting was on the wall in January,” says Conrad. “For the first time since we’d started the business in April 1972, our bookings were down.”

“I was traveling around the country, and I could see that the stores were [saturated] with wrap dresses. I was worried,” says Diane.

Still, she was unable or unwilling to respond to what was happening. “She was bringing in the bacon, but she wasn’t keeping track of where it was going,” says one observer. “She’s not savvy about money and numbers. It was naïve to think wrap-dress sales would continue at that pace. For someone who supposedly understands women so well, didn’t she realize women wouldn’t need more than one or two wrap dresses? She was spending all her energy on keeping up with demand. She never stepped back and said, ‘How long can this continue?’ Well, the market answered the question for her.”

WWD
’s story killed the wrap as effectively as if Fairchild himself had slashed the dresses with a knife. Within days Diane von Furstenberg dresses went on sale in every city in the nation. Orders for new dresses screeched to a halt. Overnight, Diane found herself stuck with four million dollars in dead inventory. (Conrad says he was not taken by surprise by the sudden markdowns, that he had offered the New York stores discounts, and that he suggested they reduce the price of the dresses 25 percent.) Diane’s company was close to bankruptcy, and she feared she’d lose her apartment and Cloudwalk. She concluded that the men in her
professional life—her accountant, her lawyer, and her business partner—had given her bad advice. When the wrap became an instant sensation in 1974, and money was pouring in from practically every store in America “that had four walls and a ceiling,” as Diane wrote, her advisors embraced the runaway growth. Her instincts had told her to build slowly, cautiously, but she’d been swayed by the men around her. Something in the male ego, she decided, impelled them to charge ahead. Men were such fools, such bumblers—
les pauvres,
her mother had called them.

The terrible paradox, Diane knew, was that women still loved her dresses, still wore them constantly. In desperation, the partners decided to produce some dresses in solid colors, and they turned to the domestic textile firm Burlington. (As brilliant as Ferretti was with printed jersey, “he could not make a clean piece of solid jersey fabric,” says Conrad.) But the line of dresses in solid colors flopped.

Though Diane’s printed wraps were languishing on department store racks, they remained hot sellers on the street. In recent months, Diane’s warehouse had been broken into several times. One gang of thieves backed a truck up to the warehouse in the middle of the night, cut a hole in the wall, and made off with twenty thousand dresses.