The Woman I Wanted to Be (23 page)

“Forget the stores,” I said to myself. “Why not go directly to my original, loyal customers who have not forgotten me?” On the wings of that idea, I flew to San Francisco with Barry to visit the powerful catalog house Williams-Sonoma. The catalog industry was booming and I was hoping that Williams-Sonoma would see the value of adding a Diane von Furstenberg catalog to their stable. We had a polite lunch with the chairman but the company was not interested in me, or any designer name. Barry and I left feeling defeated. Now we often laugh and share our fond memories of that day when we felt like two losers with our failed sales pitch.

Still obsessed with direct selling, I had an idea to create a magalog, half magazine, half catalog, and I asked the young graphic artist Fabien Baron to design it for me. He made a beautiful mock-up, but because I did not have the funds or the expertise to make it happen, the ridiculous idea remained on the shelf.

Something just had to happen, and something did, in the summer of 1991 in the Concorde lounge at JFK. I was on my way to join twenty-year-old Tatiana in Venice for a debutante ball given by Count
Giovanni Volpi in his palace. At the airport a man came rushing up to me. “Where have you disappeared to?” he asked me, and introduced himself as Joe Spellman, a marketing executive. “The world of fashion needs you again. You could be a major star of the new century.” I looked at him incredulously but I sure enjoyed the recognition. Joe had been a marketing genius at Elizabeth Arden, and later Estée Lauder, and he was also consulting for retired Bloomingdale’s chairman Marvin Traub. I met them several times when I returned from Venice. Joe came up with a startling idea: “How about selling on television?” he said.

I had never heard of TV shopping, but why not? Clearly it was a way to reach the customer directly. A few weeks later, on a Saturday morning, we all took the Metroliner train to Philadelphia. Then a car to the suburb of West Chester to visit a company called QVC. I had no idea what to expect when we walked into the live TV studio and saw soap opera star Susan Lucci selling hundreds of bottles of shampoos and hair conditioners in a matter of minutes, sales that raced on the computer up to $600,000! I knew in that moment that we had landed in the future, the world of teleshopping.

As I watched Susan talking directly to her customers through the television screens I became very excited. I envisioned myself reviving my cosmetics line on TV, but the QVC people had something else in mind. They wanted me to design dresses for them. I was hesitant, not really understanding how you could sell dresses on TV and, also, in fairness, a bit concerned about the “tackiness” of their presentation at the time. I told them I would have to think about it.

I reported my QVC visit to Barry. Coincidentally, he knew about the shopping network from discussions he had had with Comcast and Liberty, the cable companies that owned the station. The timing was fortuitous. Barry had left Fox and was also looking for a new direction.
Just as we had been two young, successful tycoons at the same very early age, at that moment we were both “unemployed” and looking for our next opportunities. Little did we know that both our next careers would start from the very same spot: QVC.

Back at my design studio, with the help of the young women I had inherited from the moderate dress company, Kathy and Colleen, we designed not dresses, but a concept we called Diane von Furstenberg Silk Assets. It was a line of washable, coordinated, printed silk separates and scarves. The styles were simple and did not need to be tried on: shirts with a generous cut; easy pants with elastic waists. The colors were bright and cheerful, the prints bold and pretty, and the pieces could mix and match in many combinations. Every mini-collection had an inspiration story. “Giverny” was the print story inspired by the palette of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet. “Pietra Dura” was another collection, inspired by Florentine marble. The stories created a narrative that was easy to discuss on air with enthusiasm.

Here I was, back to my roots, creating color palettes and designing prints. Equally exciting was the financial arrangement I made with QVC for them to buy the clothes directly from the manufacturer in Hong Kong. My responsibility would be to design the line, and make sure it was well made and arrived on time. I would then sell it personally on TV and do all the promotions. For that QVC would pay me 25 percent on top of their cost from the factory. It was a great deal for QVC and for the consumers because there was no intermediate wholesaler. It was an even better deal for me: I had no liability of inventory because the clothes would be shipped directly from the factory to QVC. That arrangement was a huge relief. After all, twice I had had to sell my company because I had not managed inventory properly!

The day I was to have my first Diane von Furstenberg Silk Assets show, in November 1992, I arrived in my hotel room at the Sheraton
Great Valley, next door to the TV studio, and found beautiful flowers with a note: “Welcome home and good luck! I love you, Barry.” The “Welcome home” referred to Barry’s secret and successful negotiations to take over control of QVC, launching him into the new world of interactive, a move he continued to build on to reach where he is today.

In two hours I sold $1.3 million of Silk Assets while Barry (who surprised me at the show) and the management of QVC watched the galloping sales figures on a computer. They were all cheering! Kate Betts, a young editor at
Vogue,
had come along to witness the first show and documented it with wonderment. “Show and Sell,” her article began. “
Vogue
witnesses a fashion phenomenon in the making.” Overnight, I went from a has-been to a pioneer once again.

It is not inappropriate to say that Barry and I put the teleshopping industry on the map. Barry’s involvement in the new retail phenomenon legitimized it and my participation as a designer glamorized it. A steady stream of people started showing up in West Chester to witness the retail revolution. There were many, many stories about us and QVC in magazines and newspapers.

It just got better and better. Viewers couldn’t get enough of Diane von Furstenberg Silk Assets. On one show in 1993, I sold twenty-two hundred pairs of silk pants in less than two minutes!

Success is not only glamorous, it’s also a lot of work. Being on live television, often in the middle of the night, was exhausting, and driving back and forth on the New Jersey Turnpike made me feel like Willy Loman in
Death of a Salesman.
But the exhaustion was worth it; in very little time, Silk Assets generated $40 million in sales.

Barry sold his stake in QVC in 1996 and bought controlling interest in the Home Shopping Network. I followed him there with my business and sales continued to grow. The success of Diane von Furstenberg Silk Assets gave me confidence again, but on television I
could not sell the simple, body-hugging, more sophisticated dresses that were my own style. I missed that.

What I desperately wanted was to revitalize my signature brand and return to high-end stores. There were glimmers that it might just be possible. There was a growing nostalgia in the nineties for the fashion of the seventies, spearheaded by Tom Ford, who had revitalized Gucci and put the mood of that legendary decade back into motion.

“You should bring back your dresses,” Ralph Lauren told me when I was pitching TV shopping to him, trying to persuade other designers to join me. Karl Lagerfeld and Gianni Versace said the same: “We love your original dresses. You should bring them back.” Rose Marie Bravo, then president of Saks Fifth Avenue, agreed, asking me time and again to relaunch the little jersey dresses. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was some kind of icon of the seventies. In the new nostalgia, hip, young designers seemed excited to see me. I remember one day walking past Bar Pitti in the West Village where the edgy new grunge designers Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui were having dinner. They waved enthusiastically. I was surprised, to say the least, and very flattered that such hot young talents would notice me. Another young designer, Todd Oldham, named his fashion show “Homage to Diane von Furstenberg.” Again, I was flattered though a little taken aback. “I’m not dead yet,” I remember thinking.

T
he nostalgia for the seventies and my first designs kept growing. In New York, young girls, contemporaries of my cool daughter, Tatiana, were scouring vintage shops and thrift shops in pursuit of original DVF wraps. All the signs were there for a comeback. The question was how. The answer, it seemed at the time, was Federated Department Stores, which, after many mergers and acquisitions, had become
one of the largest better retailers in America, owning Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, among others. I had breakfast with Allen Questrom, the chairman, whom I had known from the old days, and I proposed designing a private label brand exclusive to his stores. It could start with dresses, and over time expand to an array of products including accessories, intimate apparel, and home furnishings. It was a bit audacious to try and sell myself to Federated considering I hadn’t been in the retail world for ten years, but the idea of striking an exclusive agreement with a designer appealed to Allen.

He introduced me to his management and we discussed both the merchandising aspect and the financial side. I wanted to use the same formula as the TV shopping: I would design, and they would buy from the manufacturer and own the liability of the inventory. Since it would require a large commitment and investment on their part, I felt I should show my commitment, too. I would invest in setting up a professional design studio with experienced and talented designers. It sounded like a plan.

Without further ado, I gave up my office at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, where I had been since 1979. It had shrunk from a full floor to a small corner that was outdated, inadequate, and too expensive for what it was. I needed a larger, new space that would inspire creativity—something that could be both a design studio and a showroom where we would make presentations to buyers and press.

At thirty, I had wanted a very grown-up, glamorous space uptown. Approaching fifty, I wanted something more bohemian and my own. I looked downtown and found an 1858 brick carriage house in the Meatpacking District, way, way west on Twelfth Street, very close to the Hudson River. The fifteen-thousand-square-foot space was both charming and open, with a small pool inside the entrance, exposed
beams, and redbrick walls. The building had had many lives—a stable for police horses, a studio for the painter Lowell Nesbitt, and most recently the headquarters of an advertising agency.

I fell in love with it immediately, to the deep concern of Alexandre, who could not understand why I would buy a house in the smelly neighborhood of butchers, meatpackers, and prostitutes. He was so horrified that he called my mother to get her to try and talk me out of it. They failed, though there was some truth to their objections. It was smelly, and in the morning pretty bad to step around the condoms and the trash in the street. Yet I loved it. In a weird way the cobblestone streets reminded me of Belgium, and I paid no attention to the naysayers. I bought myself the carriage house for my fiftieth birthday.

In the West Village there was a lot of energy, diversity, and a sense of community I never felt on Fifty-Seventh Street. I was in a real neighborhood and quickly established relationships with my colorful neighbors. The first was Florent Morellet, the flamboyant son of the famous French painter François Morellet. Florent had a diner nearby on Gansevoort Street that was open twenty-four hours a day where local artists, workers, and drag queens ate. He often dressed in drag himself and was so upfront about being HIV positive that he posted his T-cell count next to the menu over the counter. Florent was really the godfather of the community and determined to preserve the old, low-brick surrounding buildings. Would I help his campaign to turn the neighborhood into a historic district by holding a fund-raiser? “Of course.”

The fund-raiser, the first of many I had in the second little building I bought next to my studio, was like a fair, with a lot of local restaurants participating. It was a great success, and in 2003, Florent managed to get local legislation through to declare the neighborhood
the Gansevoort Market Historic District. It was a huge accomplishment and saved the wonderful old brick buildings from the wreckers’ ball. Florent turned a dream into reality. Alexandre began to appreciate the colorful eclecticism of the neighborhood and soon moved his office there into my space.

Everything seemed new and vital on West Twelfth Street, including my fledgling business. From the moment we moved in, everything seemed to go faster and grow larger—the pressure and stress along with it.

The team was small. Kathy and Colleen handled all of the Silk Assets business I still had with HSN. The design team for my new project with Federated was international: Christian from Holland, Evelyn from Puerto Rico, and Sergio from Colombia. Alexandra, my son’s new bride, who had studied fashion at the Parsons School of Design, joined us. Her first role was to go through the prints. Just as I had done decades ago at Ferretti’s factory, she came quietly into the studio and began sorting through the archived prints from my early years. Together, we created the first designs during the months we were still negotiating with Federated.

I felt the need to recreate the jersey I had used for my dresses in the seventies. Ferretti had died and his factories were closed, but I had kept swatches of the fabrics. After Ferretti and I parted ways in 1979, a certain Mr. Lam in Hong Kong produced my dresses for Carl Rosen and Puritan Fashions.

I hadn’t see Mr. Lam in almost fifteen years when I visited him in Hong Kong to talk to him about re-creating my Italian jersey from the seventies. His factory had been small when I’d last seen him. Now his factories were very large and my business very small, yet he welcomed me with open arms. In return for the investment he would
have to make to develop my signature fabric and set up better printing facilities, I moved the production of Silk Assets to his factories. He put his technical people at my disposal and together we developed the perfect jersey fabric, as tight as the original Italian one but this time 100 percent silk and more luxurious. I also shared my knowledge about hand printing, and spent long hours with their technicians. The process took a lot of patience and determination, but it was worth it for sure. The results were astounding.