The Woman I Wanted to Be (25 page)

Catherine brought a lot of value to the fledgling company. I wore one of her designs myself the following year when I sat for my portrait by Francesco Clemente on the day Talita was born. I remember joking about being a sexy grandmother as I posed for Francesco that day. The painting hangs now in the lobby of my studio on Fourteenth Street and will be forever in my memory as the day I become a grandmother for the first time. That dress was called Angelina and was cleverly draped and very flattering with all kinds of details from old-fashioned dressmaking. Angelina proved to be very successful.

Alexandra was getting more and more involved and was a wonderful image for the company. Though she liked the new draped dresses well enough, she was still concerned about our lack of direction. She had a point. Between the wraps and the new drape dresses we clearly had a viable collection but we didn’t have a clear path of how to distribute it and move the business forward. The consultants we had hired advised us to go into the moderate market, but it didn’t match the sophistication of the designs. I was confused and stressed.

That summer as I was driving to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to meet Barry and fly to Alaska, I took a very bad turn. Having passed the airport turnoff, I swerved, bumped into something, and was spun back onto the highway where I hit an eighteen-wheeler. I had a big, huge pain in my chest and I remember asking the ambulance crew, “Can you live if you have a hole in your heart?” It turned out that in addition to the eighteen stitches I needed in my head, I had broken five or six ribs and punctured a lung. (I also totaled Barry’s BMW.)

I spent the next two painful but peaceful weeks in a small hospital in Hackensack, New Jersey, with great doctors and such tight security that I was convinced there was a mob boss on my floor. Barry and the
children wanted desperately for me to be transferred to a hospital in New York, but I refused. I loved that little hospital and I loved the time alone, as Hackensack was far enough from Manhattan to discourage visitors. I needed a break. I knew I was exhausted and confused, and so did Alexandre. “You had the accident because you don’t know what you’re doing,” he said, not as a reproach but out of concern. That was perhaps a harsh comment, but I think he was totally right. Just as a few years before I’d thought my tongue cancer symbolized my inability to express myself, I saw the accident as a symptom of my lack of a road map for my business.

The nights were long and painful in the hospital, despite my wonderful nurse with whom I became friends. I have few memories of those two weeks in a no-man’s-land, as I never wrote about it in my diaries. All I know is that I had a tube in my lung, did not read or watch television, and waited motionless for my body to heal. It did. Slowly and steadily I sweated out all the bad.

I
knew I had to make a change and the catalyst presented itself the moment I arrived back at my apartment in the Carlyle—and discovered water pouring into the bedroom from a leak in the ceiling. “That’s it,” I said to myself. “I’m moving downtown.”

And another new life began.

I created a wonderful living space next to my private office on the top floor of the West Twelfth Street studio carriage house. I decorated the living area with Balinese artifacts and put an iron canopy bed against the exposed brick wall. I made a large dressing room that was also a yoga studio. I loved the décor of my new bohemian lifestyle, so different from the Carlyle. In the morning I would make a cup of coffee and cross the highway practically in my pajamas to walk along the
river. I had a small guest room where my mother stayed when she visited me. She was never really comfortable there; years later it occurred to me that the exposed brick may have reminded her of the camps.

On the other hand, Christian Louboutin loved staying in that guest room and practically lived there as he showed his early collections of shoes on my dining room table. At the time he had just begun selling his sexy, red-soled heels to Barneys, Jeffrey, and Neiman Marcus. As I watched him develop new, spectacular shoes every season, selling only a few styles at a time, I suggested he build a core line he could offer every season, and was proud that I was able to help him build his talent into a huge global brand. We became the best of friends, going on to share personal appearances across the country, and began taking lots of holidays together. We’ve walked and driven the dusty Silk Road in Uzbekistan all the way from Tashkent to Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, and Fergana, to end up on the border of Afghanistan. Christian and I are both Capricorns, and like two little goats we love to climb. We’ve hiked up and down the hills of Egypt and the steep mountains of Bhutan.

What I loved most of all about my West Twelfth Street carriage house was the feeling that I belonged there. My personal style and designs were one and the same again—simple, happy, sexy—and everything in my life was beginning to feel coherent for the first time in years. All of this, including the creative characters in my vibrant neighborhood, made me feel like a young new me. Once again I was giving lots of fun parties, including one for the publication of
Signature Life
. Tatiana asked a friend of a friend to organize the music, and that is when we all met Russell Steinberg, who soon after became father of my second grandchild, Antonia.

The business was still limping along, but little by little we were gaining traction and I was certainly happier than I’d been in a while.
I was very touched and proud when the CFDA asked me to join its board of directors in 1999. It was very reassuring to be recognized by my colleagues. For the first time in many years, I no longer felt like an outsider. I was back in the world of fashion.

What I didn’t anticipate was a run-in I had with Alexandre in what has become known as the “family intervention.” The whole family was gathered in Barry’s office in New York where we were discussing the creation of the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation for charitable donations. After that discussion, Alexandre, who manages our family money, confronted me. “You’ve got to refocus your energies on making a plan for what you want to do with the company and stop hemorrhaging money,” he said. “Or else pull the plug.”

I was very angry at being confronted like that—or being confronted at all, for that matter. It was my money after all, and there was progress. I did understand Alex’s concern, but in my mind, this time it was less about money and more about me. When I’d first started out in business, my goal had been financial independence and I had achieved it. This time my goal was to prove to myself and the world that the first time around hadn’t been a fluke. My pride was more important than the cost of achieving that goal. It was also about the wrap dress, the style that was mine and had a place in women’s closets again. Pull the plug? Now?

I slammed my fist down hard on the table. “Give me six months!” I said. “I’ll turn it around. You’ll see.” Alex backed off and we all agreed to the six months.

He was right, of course. I couldn’t just keep spending money without a plan. But I felt I might be on my way with the enthusiasm of young women for my dresses again, and that’s what I wanted to work on. I did, however, need professional sales help.

And that’s when Paula Sutter came into my life.

Stefani from Scoop introduced me to Paula, her young friend and former colleague, over lunch at Balthazar, the French downtown bistro. Paula, who was then greatly pregnant, had been the vice president of sales and marketing for DKNY. She and Stefani had both been part of Donna Karan’s dream team that was so successful in the eighties launching DKNY. Many of the women on that team went on to have spectacular careers. “You should hire her,” Stefani said. It was I who had to do the convincing when Paula visited me in my office. She didn’t want to commit to a full-time job because of her impending motherhood, but I managed to persuade her to come on as a part-time consultant. That was 1998. When Susan Falk, who wanted to return to corporate life, left the following year, Paula became president of Diane von Furstenberg Studio. She remained the company’s invaluable president for fourteen years.

It was a struggle for her at first, accentuated when Alexandre came to see Paula to reissue his now familiar ultimatum. “You’ve got six months to turn a profit or close it down,” he told her. Not a great welcome. Paula, however, was on my side.

With her credentials she could have gone to bigger, more successful names at the time, but she saw that our company had really good DNA and really good bones but needed “Windexing,” as she put it, to get rid of the messiness. She was as excited as I was about the possibilities that lay in the young, not in the middle-aged dress department. The demographic model had been wrong from the start, so we changed course.

The retail experience was trending toward a new, more modern approach. Department stores were beginning to establish contemporary or “affordable luxury” divisions and that’s where Paula thought we belonged. It would be a great opportunity for us to go after the younger consumer and pretty much retell our story in a new and
modern way, but to get there, we first we had to reposition the brand as universally cool.

Paula was enthusiastic and determined. She had such energy talking to the luxury stores like Bergdorf Goodman, but it was difficult. My name was “polluted” they claimed because we were still selling on television, and some buyers still thought of me as an old brand even though by that time we had an enviable track record with contemporary girls. The signature label, Diane, was also problematic. They thought it old-fashioned. Luckily an old boyfriend, Craig Brown, the graphic designer who made the Rolling Stone logo of Mick Jagger’s tongue, reappeared in my life at that moment and he redesigned the label as a typeface “Diane von Furstenberg.”

We took other steps as well. “Diane von Furstenberg Silk Assets” became “Silk Assets.” I eased myself out of the HSN broadcasts and Alicia, a young woman from the office, replaced me.

Paula established monthly deliveries to create an ongoing fresh flow of merchandise in the stores. For our next press day I had the idea of creating evocative
tableaux vivants
around the studio’s pool illustrating the themes of those monthly deliveries: the plants, the flowers, the sea. The models were ravishing in the small, focused collection of featherweight chiffon and jersey dresses in trademark prints and matching colors. The buyers and press walked into a living painting. It was colorful, sexy, edgy, and different from what anyone else was doing at the time.

We continued our show-and-tell in Paris. We packed up and took a booth at Tranoï, an international fashion trade fair for young designers at the Carrousel du Louvre during French Market Week. The best specialty stores from around the world go there. These shops set the taste for everyone else. We were hoping to be a presence in those stores and it happened when Colette, one of the coolest shops, ordered
our sexy, printed dresses for its store in Paris. It was at that time that Betsee Isenberg, the hot showroom rep in LA, also took the line on to sell on the West Coast.

Alexandre was still skeptical. We weren’t really making any money, but there was definitely traction. Paula did some projections and a small business plan when we came back to New York. She showed them to Barry and Alexandre. “I understand,” Barry laughed when she finished her presentation. “You want to try and give the business a blood transfusion.” We adopted those words because that was exactly what we were trying to do—and six months later, it was back to Paris with the next collection.

I remember those days with tremendous affection. Five or six of us from the New York studio would pile into my apartment on the rue de Seine along with all the clothes, essentially camping there for the duration of the fair. We were a skeletal crew—Paula, of course, and Astrid, the best salesperson ever, speaking every language and trying every dress on herself. There was Maureen from marketing and Luisella, the smart Italian girl who at the time was my assistant. We laughed a lot and were very successful at getting orders in the very best international shops.

I felt young again, propelled by the girls around me, and I shared their excitement and enthusiasm. I felt their age. There were no big business meetings, no big marketing plans. None of that. The second time started just as organically as the first. It was, after all, a small business. It was really like incubating a new, young brand and we did it on a shoestring, living off my profit from HSN.

Soon we were selling, selling, selling to specialty stores in England, France, Italy, Spain—all over Europe—as well as shops in the US. Scoop was, of course, our mainstay in New York, and in LA it was Fred Segal, the brilliant retailer who had been the first, in the sixties,
to open a denim-only store. Both stores were big fans of the brand and getting the word out through their very loyal client base. Relaunching amid the nostalgia for the seventies turned out to be perfect. Colette loved paying glamour homage to the seventies and Studio 54, all of which I had thoroughly lived. That I was an original player of the time gave authenticity to my clothes, interviews, and personal appearances. There we were in our booth at the fair, right beside the cool, young designers, and it was all encouraging, but the income was still small.

I looked for a shortcut. On a flight from London to New York I sat next to Tom Ford, and he expressed great interest in what I was doing. I had a flash: Why not sell a piece of the company to Gucci to raise some money so we could go on smoothly? A few months later I flew to London with Barry and Alexandre and Paula met us there. It was the summer of 1999 and Barry was involved in a huge deal trying to buy up Universal, but he took the time to come with us to Gucci. Our meeting didn’t get off to a great start. Tom and his partner Domenico De Sole were late, and Barry was upset. Nonetheless, we went ahead with our presentation and they seemed interested. We had several meetings with their people in New York over the next few months, but somehow shortcuts don’t work for me. In the end, they were not interested and invested in Stella McCartney instead. I was disappointed.