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Diane Von Furstenberg Returns to Wrap a New
Generation
Once acclaimed - and
then ostracized - by the fashion industry, Diane von Furstenberg rolls out
her '04 designs to a market clamoring for them once again
By Anne
Bratskeir - New York
Newsday.
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February 5, 2004
It's just a few weeks before she will present her Fall '04 collection, and
Diane von Furstenberg, casual in black exercise pants and a black sweater
with winged heart emblem, is hammering out details with Nathan
Jenden, 32, her creative director, at her
bustling West 12th Street headquarters.
It's an energized, joyously chaotic, unself-conscious space; '70s Andy
Warhol portraits of the designer in her (first) heyday hang on a fuchsia
wall, bulletin boards are crammed with invitations to charity galas and
knighting ceremonies, an antique desk is flanked, floor to ceiling, with
photo montages of her children, grandchildren, friends, lovers, husband(s).
Von Furstenberg and Jenden, a scruffily handsome
Brit who formerly designed for downtowner label
Daryl K., are mulling over just-arrived perforated pony-hair boots designed
for the show by luxe
shoeman Christian Louboutin. Von
Furstenberg, 57, plops to the floor, pulls a red one over her slim calf and
admires it.
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She and her collection are one of the hot tickets of Fashion Week (which
runs tomorrow through Feb. 13), and will headline top
catwalkers and likely boast a star-studded front row. Her 60-ensemble
line - dubbed the "Glamazone" collection, von
Furstenberg says - incorporates femininity, strength, preparedness and
beauty, and was inspired by strong, iconic women such as Eleanor of
Aquitane and Grace Jones.
And by Diane von Furstenberg, too?
The designer shakes off the question. But Jenden
is definitive. "Diane," he says, "is the original
glamazon."
After all, in
the 30-odd years since she burst onto the fashion stage with her iconic wrap
dress, von Furstenberg has been glamorized and deified, ostracized and
shunned. It's only in the last seven years that her name has slowly begun to
reregister on the fashion Richter scale, and today - right now - she has
once again relaunched herself as a force in the
industry.
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Her personal life, too, has been a crazy-quilt
of high-profile, passionate relationships, passionate breakups and
passionate reunions. A daughter of a Holocaust survivor and herself a
survivor of cancer, she has emerged from it all - boom, bust and now boom
again - with her striking looks, her business and her family intact.
"She has had the ability to be a marvelous tree, bending with the wind and
changing with the time," says Andre Leon Talley, Vogue magazine's editor at
large. "I can't call to mind a brand coming back as big as this. It's a rare
thing, indeed."
People who came of age in the '70s remember the fairy-tale story of the
high-cheekboned, raven- haired beauty - a princess
at 22 when, in 1969, she married Egon von Furstenberg, the Austrian prince
whose mother was heir to the Fiat fortune. With their money, beauty, talent
and magnetism, the couple took New York by storm. They bore beautiful
children, Alexandre and Tatiana (now 34 and 32, respectively), and were the
darlings of New York society.
Von Furstenberg sought early on to establish financial independence and an
individual identity from her new royal family. "For a woman," she says
"independence is financial independence."
Although she had no experience, von Furstenberg's fashion sense led her,
shortly after the wedding, to a three-month apprenticeship to fabric
manufacturer Angelo Ferretti at his factory near Como. When she and her
husband arrived in New York in 1970, she brought a few samples of her
creations to legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. Though the dresses were
anything but crisp - wrinkled and obviously worn - Vreeland saw something
unique about the designs and ran one in the magazine.
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The wrap
dress was born.
"She created the antidote to the rich, bohemian, hippie look of the times,
and also for the newly empowered woman who wore structured pantsuits," says
Talley. "The wrap dress was wearable, accessible, pragmatic and sensual in a
new way."
Indeed, von Furstenberg's original and core concept, introduced in 1971, was
a remarkably simple V-necked design. It tied with a sash at the waist and
was printed with geometrics and, later, with racier snakeskin and leopard
patterns. In fluid fabrics, it hugged the rib cage and
slimmed the silhouette and implied, but did not shout, sexuality.
It did shout von Furstenberg, however, and catapulted her to fashion's main
stage. In March 1976, wearing a bamboo-patterned wrap dress, the 29-
year-old von Furstenberg brazenly stared out from the cover of Newsweek,
which called her "The most influential woman in fashion since Coco
Chanel." (To date, she is the only fashion
designer to ever grace the cover of the U.S. edition of the magazine, though
in '01 Giorgio Armani appeared on the international edition). Von
Furstenberg says at her peak, she was selling 25,000 dresses a week, and
Newsweek reported that in the first 10 months of 1975 her basic dress style
made "more than $14 million in wholesale sales." |
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Kalman Ruttenstein,
Bloomingdale's senior vice president of fashion direction, remembers the day
in the early '70s when, working at Lord & Taylor
as a buyer of dresses and suits, he was summoned by his boss to come and
meet "the princess in my office. And there was Diane with one wrap dress.
The dress looked cute, and she was gorgeous and the first princess I ever
met. We bought it and did very well with it."
It would become a uniform for both career girls and high-powered women. The
late Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham favored them, as did Mary
Tyler Moore and Candice Bergen. Cybill Shepherd
immortalized one in the 1976 movie classic "Taxi Driver."
The dresses soon helped spawn an empire. By the time she was 30, von
Furstenberg had 17 licenses, her name emblazoned on makeup, glasses, furs,
scarves, umbrellas, jewelry, wallpaper and even nurses' uniforms.
But it was too much, too fast. Oversaturated and overexposed, the brand lost
its famous cachet. "It was the hardest period," says von Furstenberg, who
had turned over her name, but not her creative input, to a slew of
licensees. "I had lost control. The mistake early on was that the company
grew too fast and I associated with the wrong people. My name lost its
integrity," she says.
Rather than being sought after, the brand was shunned. At the same time, von
Furstenberg was finalizing her divorce from her husband, from whom she had
been separated since the mid-'70s. In 1983, von Furstenberg dropped off the
fashion radar screen and ended up in France, where she worked for a
publisher of English books translated into French.
When she returned to New York in 1989, her name had no market value. "People
would look at me and say, 'She's a has-been.' It
was very hard, and my work was so tied up in my identity," she recalls. "I
knew the first time around I had created a brand that was real, my heart was
in it, my passion was in it."
She did not fold, but instead began to fight her way back into the business.
Her first foray back into fashion was TV in 1992 - selling caftan-like,
washable dresses called Silk Assets, on QVC. She says she sold $1.2 million
worth in two hours.
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Then, in 1994, von Furstenberg was diagnosed with tongue cancer. "I know
this sounds silly," she says "but I think that all of [the turmoil] was part
of the reason I got sick." Eight weeks of treatment and she was deemed
disease-free, although she says, "I think about death every day."
In the mid-'90s came an underground rumble that thrilled
her. From daughter Tatiana, whom she says, "is cool before cool. She
knows everything, she is always the first one," and from daughter-in-law
Alexandra, who is now legally separated from her son - she heard that the
current rage at flea markets, vintage stores and thrift shops were her
original wrap dresses from the '70s. The people seeking them out were the
trendsetters - the young and the hip.
"Imagine! The idea that I am hip and hot even for
teenagers. It is a fantastic compliment," she says. "There wasn't a
retailer who thought of me as a contemporary line, and then here is one of
my dresses hanging in Scoop [a trendy chain boutique]. Big stores began
calling and saying, 'Diane, we need your dresses.'" |
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By all accounts, her new surge into the fashion spotlight is remarkable -
some might say lucky. But von Furstenberg lays her renewed success to
something more elemental: survival instincts instilled by her mother.
"My mother has been the greatest influence in my life," says von
Furstenberg, who was born Diana Halfin to
middle-class Jewish parents in Brussels. "Early on, she told me that fear
was not an option, and that has been a huge asset in my life."
Her mother, Lily, who died three years ago, was 19, living with her family
in Brussels and engaged to be married, when she was taken to what would
eventually be a series of concentration camps, including Auschwitz. In her
last moments of freedom, Lily dashed off a note to her parents, which von
Furstenberg found only a year and a half ago, tucked away in a diary. It
said, "I want you both to be very brave because don't forget that you must
be healthy for my marriage. I intend more than ever to have a beautiful
wedding. I leave with a smile."
Says von Furstenberg, "I am the daughter of a woman who
smiled when she went to a concentration camp." When she was released
in 1945 after 14 months, Lily weighed 64 pounds and was told that the
chances that she could ever have a child were nil.
Six months later, she was married, and a year later Diane was born. "My life
was a miracle, I was her victory and revenge, and I am so happy I made her
proud."
By all appearances, she's not done yet.
Today, her clothing is sold in about 700 stores and her business had annual
sales last year of $70 million, according to figures from her company. Her
line has transcended the wrap dress, branching out to sportswear and evening
wear, though Jenden, who takes bows with von
Furstenberg at the end of the shows, says, "every collection starts and ends
with the wrap dress."
Three years ago, she married her soul mate ("Oh, I hate that word, but I
guess it's true," she says) - media powerhouse Barry
Diller, 62, formerly head of Paramount Pictures, who today owns Home
Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Hotels.com,
Match.com, Expedia and Lending Tree. They met in 1975, and for her 29th
birthday, Diller's legendary gift was 29 loose
diamonds in a Band-Aid box.
At their wedding, a quiet affair in Manhattan at City Hall with only family
in attendance, Diller gave his bride 26 diamond
rings, one for every year they were not married. Two years ago, she became
an American citizen.
Von Furstenberg has opened three new retail shops: in New York City (April
'01), Miami (January '03) and London (in September), with a fourth slated to
open in Paris in April. Groovy girls like Jennifer Aniston and grandmas like
von Furstenberg herself still wear the wraps because they look good on most
body types.
"When she brought back the wrap dress in the mid '90s, she started on the
public journey again," says Jaqui
Lividini, senior vice president, fashion
merchandising at Saks Fifth Avenue. "A whole generation, who missed the
dress in the '70s, embraced it. It became an icon."
Her line, instead of being sold on the Manhattan store's haute third floor,
is up on the more affordable fifth floor. Von Furstenberg's clothing designs
- aspirational in terms of chic and attainable
because of reasonable price - range from about $110 for a skirt to $800 for
evening wear.
And being connected with young people has been a tonic for her, she says.
She looks happy, fresh and fit, though she is surprisingly petite for a
woman with such a big image. She notes that of her 30 employees the oldest
is 32. "I am not spending time looking in my mirror; I am surrounded by
youth, and that keeps you young," she says. "It's great to work with them -
you give them your experience and they give you their energy." |
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There also are licensing agreements, but this time around, she is deeply
involved. For example, in September, von Furstenberg launched a beauty line
featuring makeup kits divided into four color "families." When the licensee
created a compact that closed with a quiet clicking sound, "she insisted
that they change it and it snapped closed, because that sound is sexy," says
Talley.
Her new perfume, D, is, according to the company, a favorite of Sarah
Jessica Parker. There are sunglasses and, next spring, a line of licensed
handbags will debut.
Von Furstenberg last year reached a deal with Reebok to design tennis
dresses - one standout, the corset dress - for superstar Venus Williams,
hitching the newly relevant designer's name to two high-wattage brands.
"I've studied fashion and always have been an admirer of her work," said
Williams.During the couture collections in Paris last month,
Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair magazine's editor,
threw an exclusive bash in her honor at the Caviar
Caspia on the Place de Madeleine that was attended by top designers,
actors and politicians, and, according to a partygoer, "was so fabulous that
caviar was flowing and one French cabinet member who attended got flak the
next day for cavorting with all these rich Americans."
Says Carter of the designer's comeback, "She has the uncanny knack for
hitting things at the right time. She's got a great feeler for the
zeitgeist." |
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These days, von Furstenberg literally lives above the store in her
23,000-square-foot building in the Meatpacking District that houses her
offices, store and presentation space. Upstairs is her personal space, which
is tailored to her modern life and includes a yoga studio, where she
practices every day with a personal instructor.
Her respite is Cloudwalk, a 58-acre farm in
Connecticut that she bought for herself 30 years ago. Other homes include a
Paris pied-a-terre, a
Harbour Island, Bahamas, beach house and a
Diller yacht.
And how does it feel to be fashion's comeback kid? Von Furstenberg is
philosophical, and happy. "The first time around it was really
extraordinary. I was lucky, but I was never able to slow down. I was
learning as I was doing." She continues: "It's much more pleasant now, it's
so sweet and such a nice time in my life because, basically, I can see that
the seeds that I planted have turned into trees. And ... I can walk in my
garden."
Copyright © 2004,
Newsday, Inc. |
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