The Woman I Wanted to Be (20 page)

My very first print was the chain link print, a black-and-white geometric design made in a button-down shirtdress that I wore sitting on a cube for the first announcement in
Women’s Wear Daily
in 1970. In 2009, Michelle Obama, as the new First Lady, wore that same print I reissued in a slightly larger scale on a wrap dress for the Obamas’ first official White House Christmas card. What a lovely surprise! Decades after I introduced the chain link print, it was still relevant, making it truly timeless. At the time I designed it, however, timeless had a different meaning. During those same first two years of my new business, I also had two babies. To say I was busy is a huge understatement.

It was really getting to be too much to do by myself. I could not keep running the business out of my apartment, so I took a tiny two-room office on West Fifty-Fifth Street that became a showroom, a warehouse, and an office all in one. Olivier, my best friend from Geneva who was now a photographer, would come in and help with buyers. I tried to convince some large Seventh Avenue houses to distribute the dresses. One after another turned me down. “These boutiquey little dresses could never sell in large enough volume” became the constant refrain. That door remained closed to me, but another far more important door opened when I met Johnny Pomerantz, the sympathetic son of one of those Seventh Avenue businessmen, who told me all I needed was a showroom on Seventh Avenue and a salesman.

I was twenty-five, in business alone in a new country, and totally inexperienced in the ways of the garment trade. “I don’t know any salesmen,” I told Johnny. “Call me in a few days,” he replied. And so
Dick Conrad, a thirty-nine-year-old salesman with lots of experience who was searching for a new business to run, came into my life. He took a gamble and agreed to join me if I gave him $300 a week and 25 percent of my company. I could find the weekly amount and 25 percent of nothing is nothing, so we struck a deal. I put $750 into our new company, Dick put $250, and I signed a lease for a showroom on Seventh Avenue. We were in business!

I made a few men’s shirts for Dick to wear in Ferretti’s jersey so that he could experience and understand the uniqueness of the fabric. He did. Dick knew all the best buyers in the specialty stores and better department stores across the country and he called them all. They all came into our new showroom at 530 Seventh Avenue and bought. By the end of 1972, our wholesale revenues were $1.2 million.

Though Ferretti remained very difficult to work with, he generously financed us by allowing a long-term credit of 120 days so we had time to ship and get paid by our customers before paying him. Before we agreed to those terms, at one point we got so far behind I went to a pawnshop across the street from the New York Public Library and pawned the diamond ring Egon and my father had given me when Tatiana was born. (I bought it back four weeks later at enormous interest.)

F
irst there was the simple, perfect T-shirt dress; my favorite, the shirtdress; and a very popular tent dress that came in long and short lengths. Then came a little wrap top, somewhat like the top ballerinas wear to practice, which I designed with a matching skirt. It sold out immediately. The ultimate breakthrough came when I saw Julie Nixon Eisenhower wearing the wrap top and skirt on TV speaking in defense
of her father, President Richard Nixon, during the Watergate scandal. “Why not combine the top and the skirt into a dress?” I mused. And the concept for the wrap dress was born.

It wasn’t easy to figure it out at first. I wanted to keep the wide belt of the top to keep the waist small, I wanted the skirt to be bias cut, the neckline low enough to be sexy but high enough to be proper, and I wanted a strong collar and cuffs, just like the original top. Bruna and I spent many hours at the factory outside Florence standing around the cutting table playing with paper patterns, figuring out the puzzle. Sue Feinberg, an Italian-trained American designer, worked with us, too. I’d hired her to oversee the production and design at Ferretti’s factory. She and I used to spend half of our time naked, wrapping and unwrapping ourselves in dresses as they came off the table to check the fit. Finally, one did.

T/72—that was the number assigned to the first Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress produced in 1974. Forty years later, the dress is still alive. Wrap dresses had existed before, of course. A wrap is a very classical shape: a dress that closes itself without buttons or zippers, like a kimono. But this wrap was different because it was made of jersey. The fabric molded to the body in the most flattering way, and was incredibly soft and comfortable while at the same time tight enough to fit the body like a second skin.

The wrap dress made its debut in 1974 at a fashion show Egon and I, who had separated by this time, shared at the Pierre Hotel. (Egon had left the bank wanting to be a menswear designer and was showing a line of shirts he had designed also out of Ferretti’s material.) For the wrap dresses I had chosen two animal prints: snakeskin and leopard. I wanted women to feel sexy, slinky, and feline in the dress and they obviously did. The wrap dresses and the animal prints took
off like a stampede, and soon could be seen on the streets of cities all over America. Thanks to the little wrap dress, the business multiplied sevenfold.

Ferretti was very happy, of course; by the end of 1975, production had escalated to over fifteen thousand dresses per week. His factory near Florence was working for us in full capacity. Ferretti had believed in me and I had more than fulfilled his expectations. Over five years, I gave him $35 million in orders.

All of this without a business plan, without any market analysis, without a focus group, without a publicist, without an advertising or branding agency. What I did have was a very good idea, a talented manufacturer who was passionate about his product, and an ambitious salesman who believed in me and sent me all over the country to make personal appearances at different department stores. The stores loved promoting the arrival of a real, live, young princess who was designing easy, sexy dresses that most women could afford. I plunged into the fitting rooms to show the women how to tie the wrap and feel confident about their bodies and themselves.

But it went further. As I was watching women become more confident and beautiful thanks to these new dresses, I was personally becoming more and more confident and, therefore, feeling more beautiful myself. I was projecting what I was selling—ease and confidence. I was becoming one with the dresses and what they stood for. I did not know it then, but I had become a brand.

The pace of growth was dizzying. Suddenly I had close to a hundred people on the payroll, including the staff at the warehouse I’d had to rent on Tenth Avenue to house all the thousands of dresses arriving from Italy. That one little wrap dress had taken the world by storm and I was running behind it as fast as I could. Opportunities were coming in left and right, and as I was young, inexperienced, and
not equipped to assess them all, I had very little way to discriminate and decide what offers to choose and for what purpose.

When various entrepreneurs started approaching me as early as 1973 to “license” my name and use my designs to put on their products, I didn’t even know what that word meant. They were varied: a mom-and-pop silk scarf company, a Seventh Avenue veteran who wanted to sell shirts made out of Ferretti’s fabric, a small luggage company owner who wanted to put my name on a new line of totes, a clever entrepreneur who decided to get into eyewear. I signed contract after contract until my name was on seventeen product categories. By the end of 1976, the licenses were worth more than $100 million in sales. I was twenty-nine.

Everything I touched seemed to turn to gold, including a cosmetics line I started with a friend simply because I loved cosmetics. The idea began to form after I lost all my makeup on one of my trips and went to replace it in an emergency, only to find that makeup lines in department stores looked and smelled old. They were very serious and not fun or relevant to the new, playful fashion mood. “If I dress women so successfully,” I said to myself, “why could I not create colorful makeup they could play with that would make them even more beautiful?”

The makeup I was personally using and loved was the professional stage makeup sold at the Make-Up-Center a block from my first office. The little pots of reds, lavenders, turquoises, and purples were irresistible to me and I used to buy all the colors they had. I loved sitting on the big square sink in my bathroom with my feet in the basin to be close to the mirror and play with my face. I had a good face for makeup: lots of eyelid and strong cheekbones. I loved applying the makeup on others, too, and I got good at it.

The idea of turning that passion into a business was solidified
in an unexpected way. I was in Los Angeles, staying at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. At the time I was having a mini fling with the movie star Ryan O’Neal. He had come to my room to pick me up for dinner and he teased me about the quantity of makeup I had in my bathroom. “Why do you need all this stuff?” he asked. He may have been a big movie star and I a starstruck young girl, but I could not let his condescension go unanswered. “I don’t need it. I just like it,” I replied. But when he persisted in patronizing me in that arrogant way, I came up with a boastful reaction. “I’m thinking of buying the company,” I said. It was a bluff, of course, but right at that moment I decided to create my own makeup line and go into the beauty business.

It was a ridiculous caper, for sure. As much as I loved cosmetics, I knew nothing about the business. Neither did my friend Sylvie Chantecaille, who had just moved from Paris with her husband, Olivier, and a newborn baby, and was looking for something to do. Sylvie, too, loved cosmetics (she now has a very successful line of her own with her daughter, the grown-up baby Olivia, who I remember learning to walk amongst pots of makeup and creams), so we set out to learn what we needed to do, visiting laboratories and talking to experienced product developers. “You have to create a fragrance,” we kept hearing. “That’s where the money is.”

I had no idea how to do that, so I hired someone who did, Bob Loeb, a beauty business consultant, and the three of us developed my first scent, a light, lovely fragrance named Tatiana after my four-year-old daughter. Tatiana’s scent was a wonderful bouquet of white flowers . . . gardenia, honeysuckle, and jasmine. To introduce it, we sent out thousands of free samples by attaching a packet of the scent to the hangtag of the dresses I was shipping all over the country. Tatiana not only quickly became very popular when we officially launched it in 1975,
but inspired a generation of new floral fragrances such as Revlon’s Charlie, among others.

In the midst of perfecting Tatiana and developing a cosmetics line, I started researching and writing my first book:
Diane von Furstenberg’s Book of Beauty: How to Become a More Attractive, Confident and Sensual Woman.
It was bold of me to feel I could dispense that advice at the age of twenty-eight, but wherever I went people wanted to know how I lived, what I ate, what I did for exercise, what makeup I wore. They wanted to know my secrets, so I decided to write the book. I didn’t really think I had any secrets, but those questions made me think about the subject of beauty.

I had an ulterior motive as well. I wanted to learn all I could about the business of beauty. Researching for the book, I talked to many experts about nutrition, hair treatment, skin cleansing, exercise, cosmetics—everything to do with beauty. Evelyn Portrait, Bob Loeb’s lovely wife, helped me with the research and the book did very well when it was published in 1976.

We officially launched our cosmetics line at the end of 1975 at a small salon I opened on Madison Avenue. I wanted women to have the same fun I did sitting on my bathroom sink and playing with makeup, so in my little store on Madison Avenue (real estate was cheap at the time), I installed four little bars and stools in the front room where women could experiment with testers. The boutique was my version of the Make-Up-Center, and I loved it. So did the women who came in unsure how best to use makeup, and left with lots of products and a personalized chart after a session with Nicholas, our professional makeup artist. Women wore a lot of makeup in the seventies, so our timing was just right.

I was happy with my tiny makeup venture—Sylvie and I did
it on a small budget, using stock packaging and working out of my apartment—and was a bit reticent to grow it beyond my shop on Madison Avenue. I was finally persuaded by the legendary Marvin Traub at Bloomingdale’s to open my own cosmetics counter there and to go national. I was very involved with the dresses and my licenses and committing to Bloomingdale’s would mean more salespeople, advertising costs, and a lot of my time, of which I had none. But I had fantasized about joining the ranks of such pioneers as Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, and Estée Lauder, and did it anyway. It was a blast.

I went on the road with Gigi Williams, a makeup artist and hilarious travel companion, to promote the cosmetics and the dresses, as well as the publication of my beauty book. Gigi was hip and cute, a true downtown little girl with early piercings who was married to artist Ronnie Cutrone, Andy Warhol’s favorite assistant. Gigi and I felt like rock stars touring the country, doing interviews at local news stations and visiting all the stores where long lines of women were patiently waiting for makeup applications. We loved doing those makeovers and making women feel more secure with a little eye shadow, a little highlight on the cheekbones, and, equally as important, a little pep talk (and of course a spray of Tatiana perfume).

More and more I was realizing from my conversations with women how many had insecurities. By listening to their insecurities and sharing my own, we all felt stronger. It was an authentic dialogue, a very even give and get. The stronger I became, the stronger I wanted others to be. I realize now that it was at that time, as I was feeling stronger, that my desire to empower women started, a desire that exists to this day, more and more.