The Woman I Wanted to Be (14 page)

The models I hired for my second fashion show at the Pierre Hotel all became stars, as did the dress I was introducing for the first time—the wrap dress. The legends were born on an April afternoon, their names a future Who’s Who of superstar models—Jerry Hall, Pat Cleveland, Apollonia. They also became my friends.

Apollonia was skinny, skinny, and tall as a beanstalk when she appeared for a go-see for the show. I’d never seen anyone so narrow and with such long legs. On top of that long body was a tiny head with a smiley, naughty face, and she spoke with a very strong Dutch accent (her last name was van Ravenstein). I liked her immediately. She had an amazing personality, kind and very funny and we became good friends. She worked for me many times on her way to becoming a top model in the seventies.

Pat Cleveland was a striking model, too, already well known by the time I started. She was a favorite of Stephen Burrows and Halston, the queen of the Halstonettes. Part black, part Cherokee, part Irish, Pat was unique and wonderfully flamboyant. She danced down the runway, moving her arms, her legs, and her derriere, living the clothes, embracing the music and taking the audience with her like a snake charmer. Pat also loved to sing, or was it lip-synching? I don’t remember. What I do remember is that I always thought she was meant to play Josephine Baker, the spectacular black American performer who
left America in the 1920s to establish herself as a megastar in France. Like Josephine, Pat was a real woman, bubbling with personality, and they looked very much alike. I tried to convince Barry to make a movie of Josephine Baker’s life starring Pat, but it never went any further than my imagination.

At the same time I met Apollonia and Pat, Jerry Hall appeared on the New York scene and I used her as well for the show that launched the wrap dress. She, too, was very tall and very narrow; her six-foot frame seemed to be all legs. Jerry had huge blue eyes, flawless skin, and a cascade of long golden hair that she threw to one side like Rita Hayworth in the film
Gilda
. She was only seventeen, always accompanied by one of her many sisters. She laughed loudly and spoke with a very exotic Texas accent. She quickly became a major model and appeared on forty magazine covers in no time at all. She seduced the world and Mick Jagger, whom she subsequently married, and together they have four children.

Funny to think that so much stardom started on that April afternoon at the Cotillion Room of the Pierre Hotel . . . Jerry Hall, Pat Cleveland, Apollonia, and last but not least, the wrap dress!

I was doing a personal appearance at Lord & Taylor in New York in 1975 when I first saw this incredible Somali goddess coming up the escalator. “Who are you?” I asked, incredulous at such beauty and grace. She answered with a deep and secure voice: “My name is Iman, I’ve just arrived in New York and I am a model.” When I asked for her phone number, she squatted on the floor to reach into the large basket she was carrying, looking for a pen and paper. Her magnificent body language and elegance were astounding. Squatting like that on the floor of a department store with her legs opened she could have been in a market in Mogadishu or a queen in a palace of a
Thousand and One Nights
. I was entranced.

Like many of the models I used, Iman was, and is, a strong, intelligent woman. She speaks five languages and went on to found a successful cosmetics and fashion company, establishing her own global brand. After one daughter and a divorce, she met and married the rock star David Bowie, with whom she shares another daughter and her life in New York. Iman has never forgotten her roots. She does important work for Raise Hope for Congo, UNICEF, Save the Children, and the Dr. Hawa Abdi Foundation.

N
ot all models have happy endings. I will always love Gia, whom I met at the Mudd Club in 1978. Dressed like a biker in a studded black leather jacket and cowboy boots, with no makeup, she was simply the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. She was seventeen and doing a little modeling, she told me, having just arrived in New York from Pennsylvania. I was with Ara Gallant that night, and we both fell in love with her. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first to use her in an ad.

Gia was sassy and in your face—she loved to act as a bad boy, never wore makeup, and dressed often in men’s clothes. Francesco Scavullo hired her to do
Cosmopolitan
covers, and later she worked with Richard Avedon, Arthur Elgort, and Chris von Wangenheim, the top photographers of the era.

She and I had a wonderful time together in 1979, when I hired her to do a campaign called “On the Eve of a New Decade.” It incorporated all my products—clothes, perfume, intimate apparel, jeans. Chris von Wangenheim and I directed the whole shoot and I felt on top of the world. My business was booming. Gia was gorgeous. We laughed a lot and I adored her.

One weekend I invited her to come and join me in the Pines on Fire Island where Calvin Klein had loaned me his beach house with a
striking black swimming pool. I was excited to see Gia. I had a girl’s crush on her. She arrived, late, on a Saturday afternoon. I remember coming home after a long walk on the beach to find her inexplicably sitting on the floor of the bedroom closet. She became agitated and embarrassed when she saw me. I did not understand what was going on then, but looking back, I think she was probably shooting up; I found out later she had become a serious heroin addict.

A few months after that weekend, Gia came to my office in dirty clothes looking gaunt. She needed cash. Even though I knew what she “needed” it for, I could not refuse her and gave her what was in my wallet. I never saw her again. It was probably from a dirty needle that she contracted AIDS and died in 1986 at the age of twenty-six.

A very young Angelina Jolie starred in the HBO film of Gia’s troubled life. For years I couldn’t watch it. Recently I did and was astounded by how accurate and real the movie was.

Years after Gia’s death, I was asked to be part of a documentary about her. I went to some studio on the West Side to do the interview. It was important to me that people know what a lovely, generous woman Gia was. As I was about to leave the studio, I met Gia’s mother, herself a very beautiful woman, who had also come to be interviewed. I hugged her and felt close to her. She surprised me by telling me that after her daughter’s death, she had found a sealed letter from Gia addressed to me. When I smiled, she immediately added, “I opened it, read it, but will never give it to you.” I was hurt and confused by that comment, and I wish I knew what Gia had written.

There were so many other wonderful models that I worked with along the way. Cindy Crawford, who looked like Gia, though she turned her beauty into a happy, healthy family life. Patti Hansen, the rock ’n’ roll girl who ended up marrying bad boy genius Keith Richards
and had two hip, rock ’n’ roll daughters with him; French beauty Inès de la Fressange whom I used in 1982 before she became a muse for Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel; Rene Russo, who became a movie star. I then stopped working for a while, and never used any of the supermodels who appeared on the scene and who I admired from afar . . . Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington, Stella Tennant, and Stephanie Seymour.

Though I did not have a runway for her to walk down at the time, I couldn’t resist meeting Naomi Campbell. By then Barry had taken over QVC, the TV home shopping network, and I was acting as a talent recruiter. I wanted Naomi to go on it. I remember inviting her to lunch at the Four Seasons in New York. Everyone stared at her as she walked into the front, “power” room. She looked like a goddess. We talked about everything but TV shopping. I never brought it up. She was too fresh, too good for it. We stayed friends and worked together a few times and she showed up for me big time with her powerful Russian then fiancé when I had my first exhibition in Moscow years later. She came through again, a huge surprise, on the runway for my Spring 2014 collection. The crowd burst into cheers as the incomparable supermodel appeared to close the show.

I never worked with the biggest model of the decade, Kate Moss, but she is my kind of girl: true to herself, independent, and in charge of her own life. When I met her at a photography opening in London, she told me, “I want to grow up to be you.” I answered promptly, “You already are, my dear!” We were both flattered.

Natalia Vodianova caught my attention immediately when she first came to New York in 2001 at the age of nineteen. I was drawn to her freshness and determination and felt her strength and her character as soon as I met her. She opened and closed my show. It
was her first, I think, in New York. Soon after that she became a top international model and a close friend. Her strength, I learned, had been born out of hardship. Her father had left her mother when she was a toddler, and they were impoverished. She was only nine when she started selling fruit with her mother on the street in Gorky to help support her two half sisters, one of whom was born with cerebral palsy and deeply autistic.

I was in my office in September 2004 when Natalia came to me in tears. Masked terrorists had taken an entire school in Beslan, Russia, and held everyone hostage. Three hundred and thirty-four people were killed, among them at least 186 children. The children who survived suffered emotional trauma, burns, and other injuries.

“We’ve got to do something for the children,” Natalia said. “Help me to raise money.” We gave a fund-raising party in my studio on West Twelfth Street. She was so young then, so inexperienced, yet within days she had orchestrated the entire event: an ice palace décor, a vodka sponsorship, celebrities and paparazzi and a full charity auction that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.

She created her own foundation, Naked Heart, that has built over a hundred play parks in areas of Russia where there were none so children can have a place to be safe. Now her organization has expanded its work to provide support to families raising children with special needs throughout Russia.

In February 2008, I had the wild idea to put her together with my longtime friend, French writer, photographer, and artist François-Marie Banier, to create an ad campaign. I had always admired François-Marie, first for his novels and plays in the seventies, and recently for his extraordinary photographs. I called him in Paris and arranged for him to meet Natalia. A few weeks later they came to New York.
“Make magic,” I told them, and magic happened. They walked the streets of the Meatpacking District and he photographed her with wet hair and no makeup in front of walls covered with colorful graffiti, then painted on the photos and decorated them with endless stream-of-consciousness writings. It was quite a rebellious campaign. You could not see the clothes at all, just a beautiful woman tattooed with splashes of color and writings. It was art and the only thing that indicated they were ads was the logo, DVF. I’m not sure those images were commercially understood, but I was thrilled when, at a party in Paris, Karl Lagerfeld congratulated me on the boldness of the campaign. I was very proud that the “magic” collaboration I’d thought of was later published by Steidl in a beautiful art book.

Because I know how to bring out a woman’s strength and make her feel confident, and because I have become skilled at photography, I have, along the way, taken memorable photos of women. I photographed the ravishing, exotic, French/Italian/Egyptian Elisa Sednaoui for
V
magazine; the Colombian politician, activist, and FARC prisoner of seven years, Ingrid Betancourt, for the art magazine
Egoïste
; and did a full fashion story for the French magazine
CRASH
. I enjoyed making those women feel the strongest and the most desirable they had ever felt. Last but not least, I loved that process with our family’s own gorgeous Alison Kay, mother of my fourth grandchild, Leon. We did two DVF advertising campaigns together. She is as beautiful outside as I know her to be inside.

C
asting for a fashion show is very different from choosing a model to advertise your brand. Each time we cast a show, we hire a stylist and a casting agent. They know all the best girls and call a “go-see.” I am
often amazed how plain and unassuming some of the new top girls look in real life, and how you need a special eye to recognize a strange face that can become beautiful, an unusual bone structure that catches the light, an oddness that becomes magical. Every casting takes me back to an episode decades ago, in Geneva, Switzerland, when I was briefly a receptionist at IOS, the “Fund of Funds” company created by financier Bernard Cornfeld.

Bernie was a friend of Jerry Ford, the founder, with his wife, Eileen, of the Ford model agency in New York, and Jerry was visiting the IOS office. As he was waiting in the reception area, he went by the desk of the other receptionist and handed her his card. “If you ever want to model,” he said, “let me know. You have potential.” I was shocked and offended. Why her and not me? I certainly thought I was more interesting than that pale, tall, very plain skinny girl, but it turned out that it was precisely because she was that white canvas of a woman that he thought she could make an interesting model. I have thought about it at every one of my castings since.

Runway models don’t move the way they used to. Unlike Pat Cleveland who danced down the runway, they are taught to march like soldiers without a smile. I always surprise my own models when just before the show I tell them, “Smile, seduce, and be you. Be the woman you want to be!” I believe I am one of the very few designers who ask their models to smile. Joie de vivre is very much on brand at DVF.

M
y definition of beauty is strength and personality. Strength is captivating: the women I’ve seen in India working the fields in their orange saris, their arms covered with colorful glass bangles; the women working in construction in Indonesia, carrying heavy bricks on their heads; the women carrying their children to bush hospitals in Africa.
The dignity of these women with their innate elegance is a true inspiration of beauty.

Some of the strongest women I know are the women of Vital Voices, a global nonprofit originally founded by Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady, on whose board I sit. Vital Voices identifies women leaders from around the world and helps them to increase their leadership potential. I’ve been both humbled and inspired by these women who not only have survived their own misery, but are committed to helping others in their communities.