The Woman I Wanted to Be (24 page)

Working hands-on in Mr. Lam’s factories, I felt I had gone back in time, except now I was in China eating noodles with the workers for lunch and not in Italy eating spaghetti. It was exhausting going back and forth from Mr. Lam’s office in Hong Kong to the factories in China, accompanied by Patso, his right hand. She worked just as hard, totally committed to what we were trying to do.

Another part of my investment was to write a business memoir to draw a line between the present and future, and introduce myself to new customers. Without hesitation, I went to my friend Linda Bird Francke, who had played such a big part in my life with her articles in
New York
magazine and
Newsweek
, to help me write the book. I would time the publication of
Diane: A Signature Life
to coincide with the launch of my first collection for Federated. The plan was to do personal appearances in their stores across the country, promoting the book and the clothes. I was close to finishing the book in the summer of 1996 when the crushing news came in: the deal with Federated had fallen through.

I got the call in my car on a Friday afternoon, while driving to the country. Allen Questrom, the chairman, had left the company. The collaboration no longer seemed right for them. They were sorry. I’m sure there were other reasons, too, but if they ever told me, I’ve forgotten
them. I was in total shock. I was devastated. I had counted so much on this arrangement. What was I going to do?

That weekend Barry was with me in Cloudwalk. As usual, he reassured me and encouraged me to move on. By Monday morning, I had a new plan. An obvious plan. One that had been under my nose the whole time. The wrap dress. My quintessential symbol of the seventies. I would relaunch the wrap and once again I would do it on my own.

There were many positive signs. The success of QVC had made my name extremely well known again; I was surprised to see how high I ranked in a poll of brand-name recognition published in
Women’s Wear Daily
that year. So there I was, with name recognition, a demand for the dress, and the perfect fabric at my disposal.

I called Rose Marie Bravo and my mother’s adage proved right once again. One door closed. Another door opened. “How exciting,” Rose Marie said. “We would be proud to launch your wrap dresses at Saks.”

I had retired at thirty-six, and here I was beginning again, at fifty. I was nervous but it was unbelievably exciting. Reintroducing my brand successfully in a high-end department store like Saks would prove to the world, and to myself, that the first time hadn’t been an accident. But first I had to make it happen.

I
decided to call the new line “Diane,” the same name I had used, with a label in my handwriting, for my short-lived couture line. That label also became the first new print I designed: an allover “Diane” signature print. The idea had come to me while I was talking on the phone, looking at the label and doodling on a piece of paper. All those intertwined “Dianes” looked very much like the original prints and felt
right. That led me to rework the original twig print by adding more colors. I reissued the original wood print and added a few new ones, all geometric and bold in the style of the seventies.

The announcement of my exclusive arrangement with Saks set off an enormous buzz about the return of the wrap, and me! Newspapers and magazines revisited my marriage to Egon, the children, and the phenomenon of the wrap. The
International Herald Tribune
described the dress as “The Image of an Era,” over the subhead, “The Charmed Lives and Free Spirit of Diane von Furstenberg.” The
New York Times Magazine
saw me as a fairy tale—“Once upon a time, there was a princess with an idea. The idea was a dress”—and
Women’s Wear Daily
really got it right: “Diane’s Wild Ride.”

Beginning again made me feel young and fearless, but, looking back, my diary of that year also reveals many fears. As usual, I did not show my insecurities. I sounded full of confidence in all the interviews I gave, but it was a complicated time for me. On the one hand, I felt excited and rejuvenated, restarting the adventure of the wrap dress, flattered by the reaction of young girls and the excitement of Rose Marie Bravo. On the other hand, I was scared and constantly questioning myself. I did not feel secure. I was going ahead but I was afraid to fail. My rejection by Federated had left me off-balance in my business life and I was also living a major rejection in my private life: Mark Peploe had left me for another woman and I was hurting. What a strange time it was. Part of me felt old and for the first time ever, on a trip to LA, I consulted a few cosmetic surgeons. Those visits made me feel even more scared, insecure, and confused, although I did know that cosmetic surgery was not the solution. I did, however, get my teeth fixed; I’d had problems since a bad fall when I was ten years old, and seven weeks of radiation made the situation much worse.
Alexandra introduced me to her dentist, Dr. Irwin Smigel, and after months of work he left me with two gifts: a beautiful smile for the first time in my life, and the phone number for Tracie Martyn.

T
he launch at Saks was set for September 1997, and during the summer countdown there were a few unexpected and very welcome confidence boosters. I went to an elegant wedding of friends of my children, in Virginia, where all the young girls were wearing the “it” Tocca dresses: simple, colorful shifts by the then very popular Dutch designer Marie-Anne Oudejans. However the young hip Marie-Anne herself had asked to borrow a sample of a new DVF wrap in the beige-and-white signature print, and to my delight, she wore it to the wedding. I was extremely flattered. It meant a lot.

I got another boost in July at the Dior couture show in Paris. I’d brought a new wrap dress with me and wore it, a choice that was equally daring and nerve-racking. Here I was in the most sophisticated circumstances, a Dior couture show in an elegant greenhouse, wearing a dress that was basically the same as I would have worn twenty years before. But amazingly, it was that little dress that created a buzz in Paris and caught the attention of Amy Spindler, the talented young fashion editor at the
New York Times.

“She slipped one on for John Galliano’s Christian Dior couture show in July in Paris, over a bathing suit,” Amy wrote for the Sunday
New York Times Magazine
. “By the time the sun began blazing through the roof, everyone near her was envying her wrap: She pulled the skirt aside to reveal leg, pushed up the sleeves to reveal arms, and was left with a dress the size of the bathing suit beneath. Actresses Rita Wilson and Kate Capshaw, seated across from her, raved about
her look. So did the models backstage. And that was when she knew.” I did know it was happening but it was still unbelievable. “Oh, I’d like a dress like that,” one model after another said to me as they stood in their beautiful ball gowns when I was taken backstage to see John Galliano. There was such enthusiasm for the dress in Paris that I called my office in New York to arrange for more samples to be brought over by a friend so I could wear another wrap to the Chanel couture show. I wore a different print every day.

Amy was just as enthusiastic back in New York at the first, unconventional fashion show I gave on West Twelfth Street in September. It was only wrap dresses and a few beaded printed shirts over white pants. The models came down the carriage house’s steep, narrow spiral staircase onto a carpet I’d designed for the little runway that was printed with the black-and-white “Diane” signature print. Looking back, I cannot believe that at age fifty I was once again a little do-it-yourself start-up. It was not so different from my first show at the Gotham Hotel. I was following my instinct, determined to make it work. The press loved it, including Amy.

“Yes, yes, yes, Diane Von Furstenberg’s bold bias-cut wrap dress is back,” she wrote in the
Times
. “Redesigned for the 90’s, it is sleek and sexy, but still a dress with a sassy mom quality.” I cannot calculate how much I owe to Amy. The influential fashion reporter, who wore the dresses herself, was such an editorial supporter that she became as important to the new line as Diana Vreeland had been to the original wrap. (Sadly, Amy died of cancer in 2004. She was only forty.)

I needed to find the right image, with the right spirit, for the first ad campaign for Saks. I went to my friend, French photographer Bettina Rheims, who is a master at photographing women, and we chose Danielle Zinaich to be our girl. Danielle was in her late twenties, had
great legs and perfect body language. Her brown hair was shoulder length and her face quite long and distinctive, but what we loved most about her was her personality and her huge laugh that revealed her prominent gums shamelessly. Danielle and I flew to Paris and we shot the relaunch of the wrap dress in my Left Bank apartment. Most of the shoot was in vivid color, except for one dress that we photographed in black-and-white. I had no idea how fortuitous that would be.

The problem arose when I proudly called Rose Marie Bravo to my studio to see the edgy photos that Bettina and I had done in Paris. She and I were accomplices in this venture, relaunching the wrap, but she didn’t like the pictures at all. She found them too hard, too decadent, too reminiscent of a recent controversy: “heroin-chic” images of pale, ill-looking models. I was devastated. All those beautiful photos in vivid colors rejected. Rose Marie must have felt sorry for me because on her way out, she pointed at the black-and-white photos of Danielle, one serious and one laughing, showing her exaggerated gums and declared, “Use these. She looks happy!”

I stared at those two black-and-white pictures for hours after Rose Marie left. I didn’t know what to do after spending so much time and money with Bettina shooting hundreds of images for the beautiful color ads, but I had to do something. And then it came to me. “I’ll make them speak,” I said to myself, “and give them a reason to be.” I put them next to each other and under the serious shot of Danielle, I wrote “He stared at me all night” and under the laughing one, I wrote “And then he said, ‘Something about you reminds me of my mother.’ ”

The copy was funny but also risky, leading people at my office to call it ridiculous. “Nobody wants to look like their mother,” they said. But I thought it was provocative and I liked it, and more to the point, so did Rose Marie, who agreed to endorse the campaign, which turned out to be very successful.

We launched at Saks in New York on September 9 with great fanfare. Television cameras and print photographers crowded around the women standing in line in the dress department, many with their daughters, to buy the new dresses. The demand was so great the dresses quickly sold out and the women who had to go home without one put their names on waiting lists for the next shipment. “It feels like déjà vu,” I kept telling the hordes of press. They saw explosive success that looked familiar, but I meant it also as a cautionary tale.

Once again I was on a runaway train without a business plan or a strategy. I didn’t even have a president to manage the new company. There’d been no time. Our new West Twelfth Street studio was still in disarray. I hadn’t finished renovating it, there weren’t enough phone lines, and the computers kept crashing. I remember feeling distracted and exhausted during the launch at Saks, a state exacerbated by my return to the fitting rooms with the customers and seeing my face twenty years older looking back at me in the mirrors. Still, the return of the wrap was a dream come true.

Alexandra and I toured the country, making personal appearances at the Saks stores from coast to coast selling the dresses with lots of hype. We got a lot of press—a beautiful new von Furstenberg princess in one wrap, her mother-in-law in another—illustrating the agelessness of the dress. The dresses sold well when we were in the stores, but the excitement, and sales, didn’t hold after we left. The reintroduction of the wrap started like a big soufflé, and the soufflé fell flat. I didn’t know what to do. “Business hard, losing money, no plan,” I wrote in my journal.

I had been out of the stores for so long that I didn’t know the new reality: Young girls in the nineties rarely shopped in the dress department, and that is where we were placed at Saks. The older generation still shopped there, but Alexandra and her friends bought their clothes
at smaller boutiques. And that’s where the wrap dress, newly and more sleekly designed, was truly reborn.

S
coop. What would we have done without Scoop? Owned by a friend of Alexandra’s, Scoop was a very hip, new little shop on Broadway, way downtown in SoHo, where just about everything they sold was black, including the combat boots. But Scoop’s owner, Stefani Greenfield, loved the colorful new wraps and simply hung them on hangers in her window. They sold out in half an hour. She couldn’t keep them in stock with the huge demand from the downtown girls—and soon from the uptown girls when Scoop opened another shop on Third Avenue in the seventies. Where young people shopped, the dresses sold at meteoric speed, but it was just not the case in the old-fashioned dress departments we were also counting on.

At the beginning of 1998, I hired Susan Falk, the former president of Henri Bendel, to be my president. We also hired a well-known consulting company to advise us on what distribution channel we should pursue. Susan introduced me to Catherine Malandrino, a talented young French designer with whom she had worked previously. Catherine came to see me at the Carlyle, where I was living at the time. We talked about her journey as a designer and I showed her my newest wrap in a dark-green camouflage leopard print. She loved it and agreed to join us.

We introduced new wraps, and some simple solid-color dresses with soft drape, to the buyers by staging a presentation that was inspired by the old Paris couture houses. I transformed the studio into a living room, decorating it with the sofa, some paintings, a huge mirror, and a piano from my old Fifth Avenue apartment. Every fifteen minutes or so, models would appear in different designs and strike
motionless poses by the piano or around the indoor pool as the pianist played Gershwin or Joplin.