The Woman I Wanted to Be (29 page)

I made an appointment to see Michael Govan, the dynamic leader of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and husband of the equally dynamic Katharine Ross, the superstar of fashion communications—art, fashion, and culture in one couple. In the museum parking lot, I got cold feet. “What am I going to tell him? Let’s cancel,” I told Grace Cha, my trusted VP of global communications. “We’re already here,” she said, incredulous. “Let’s go in.” And so in we went.

Of course as soon I began talking to Michael my adrenaline started racing. I relived the success of the exhibition in Beijing and how I had commissioned Chinese artists for it. I could feel his excitement and, with nothing to lose, I asked him, “How can I make this happen within your world? Do you know of any space near LACMA that I could use?” “Maybe,” he said smiling.

The old May Company department store building sits on the LACMA campus and they had been using it for storage. They had begun clearing it out as it was going to be rebuilt by mega architect Renzo Piano into the spectacular Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. “You should meet with the Academy people and ask them,” Michael suggested. “The timing may very well work for you.”

An old famous department store on the LACMA campus that will become the museum of the film Academy? Was I dreaming? It sounded perfect!

When I entered the movie poster–lined hallways of the Academy to meet Dawn Hudson, the CEO, and Bill Kramer, director of
development for their future museum, I was determined to seduce them. I guess Dawn felt the same way. She was wearing a DVF top, which I considered a good omen. She suggested we see the space, and if we liked it, she would ask the board.

The big, gloomy storage building was divided into endless large rooms packed with crates of art. It wasn’t a pretty sight but I knew my friend interior designer Bill Katz could turn this gloom into glamour. It was full speed ahead.

What I did not know is that the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where I’d never been, was also planning an anniversary, its twentieth. When Eric Shiner, the director, called to invite me to participate, he mentioned that there were lots of photos of me in their archives, and it tickled my curiosity. The next night, I ran into my good friend Bob Colacello, who had been
Interview
magazine’s editor in the Warhol years, and as close to Andy as anyone could be. Stars were lining up and I decided to organize a field trip to Pittsburgh with Bill Katz, his assistant Kol, and Bob so that ideas for the exhibition would start to gel. But before that, I wanted Bob to take me on a day trip to Brooklyn to visit some young local artists. He planned the day guided by Vito Schnabel, Julian Schnabel’s son, who is a successful independent art curator. As we visited the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Rashid Johnson’s studio, I explained Journey of a Dress, and how I wanted to incorporate young artists in it. I invited Vito to come to Pittsburgh, too.

We took off early in the morning to fit in a visit to Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s beautiful nature-intensive house that I had always wanted to see, have a picnic on the way, and end up at Andy Warhol’s museum in downtown Pittsburgh. We toured the museum, marveled at the paintings, watched the movies, and ended up in the private archive rooms where Eric had pulled out all of the photos
Andy had taken of me over the years. Bob and I felt as if we were back at Warhol’s Factory.

For a few weeks I continued to visit artists’ studios with Vito. I commissioned Dustin Yellin to make me a sculpture the minute I entered his studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He had never heard of the wrap dress, so I gave him a wrap for his girlfriend. Apparently he wore it around his studio instead, seeking inspiration from my early motto: “Feel like a woman, wear a dress!” I guess it worked, because he created a stunning 3D collage of the wrap frozen midmotion without a body inside. The “dress” is made up of hundreds, probably thousands of tiny, scanned black-and-white paper images of prints and newspaper articles cut into the shape of my first link print and laminated on multiple layers of glass inside a glass case. The dress floated in what looked like an aquarium to me and was the perfect blend of art and the wrap. Finding similar concepts with other artists, however, was getting very cerebral and confusing.

“Don’t make it too complicated,” Bill scolded me. “This exhibition has to be about the dress and about you. The art should only be from artists who have known you, painted you, worked with you . . . it is your journey and the journey of the dress. That is what this show has to be about. Use your bold prints, honor them, paste them on the walls, on the floors! Don’t be shy!” Bill is the most visually secure person I know . . . no wonder Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, and Francesco Clemente don’t hang a painting without his advice. I was convinced. I kissed him.

Next, we met with Stefan Beckman, who designs the magnificent sets for Marc Jacobs’s runway shows, and that was when the exhibit started to find its shape: we would have a time line, an art room, and one big room with an army of mannequins. I had always said I wanted an army of wraps, like the terra-cotta army of warriors I had seen in Xi’an, China; a
huge army of mannequins wearing the wraps. We’d started that idea with a group of thirty-six in Beijing, but I wanted many more for LA. I took Stefan to the mannequin manufacturer Ralph Pucci, whose in-house sculptor proceeded to design a mannequin by studying old photos of my face. He brought them to life with high cheekbones and, at my request, strong noses. I also wanted the mannequins to have a powerful pose, and so they did, inspired by the contrapposto of Michelangelo’s
David
. I went many times to check on how those mannequins were evolving, and when I was satisfied that they looked strong and fearless, I ordered 225 of them.

Stefan designed the display of the mannequins, which would be divided into five diamond-shaped pyramids: a large one in the middle and four smaller ones around it. On the floor around the diamonds would be wide stripes of six “hero” prints chosen from the archives that we now call the six sisters: the nature-inspired Twigs, the geometric Cubes and Chain Link, the Leopard and Python, and the graphic print of my Signature. They would be greatly enlarged, printed on vinyl, and run across the floor and up the walls, making the whole thing look like a flag. I was thrilled. I had always wanted us to have a flag!

Now that Bill and Kol were designing the rooms, Stefan the sets, and Pucci the mannequins, Franca Dantes, our valuable archivist, was pulling images for the time line: Diana Vreeland’s 1970 letter of encouragement, early advertisements, and memorable photos of women in wraps—everyone from Madonna to Ingrid Betancourt to Michelle Obama to Cybill Shepherd in
Taxi Driver
, Penélope Cruz in
Broken Embraces,
and Amy Adams in
American Hustle.
For the art room we would send all the works by Warhol, Francesco Clemente, Anh Duong, a new work by Barbara Kruger, photos by Helmut Newton, Chuck Close, Mario Testino, Horst, Annie Leibovitz, and the
contemporary works we had commissioned for China. Luisella, once my assistant and now our VP of global events and philanthropy, was working on the logistics with Jeffrey Hatfield, our production person who had done Moscow, São Paulo, and Beijing. We were almost set except I did not have the most important link: Who was going to curate the dresses? Who was going to look at our huge archives, make sense of it all, and put it in a clear presentation? I certainly could not do that nor could anyone at DVF. For us they were just a bunch of old dresses!

Serendipity presented the answer. In June 2013 I went to England with my granddaughter Antonia to her boarding school orientation day, and to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Bob Miller, the founder of Duty Free shops and my cograndparent of Talita and Tassilo. When I go to London, I often take the opportunity to meet designers, to evaluate the pool of talent available. One of them was Michael Herz, creative director for Bally Switzerland.

We had met many years before when he was still a student and had a conversation sitting outside the Victoria & Albert Museum. This time, we had tea and a pleasant chat at Claridge’s. He confessed that I always appeared on his inspiration boards. I liked his humorous take on things and I loved his description of women. There was poetry in everything he said and I was intrigued. He told me he was finishing his contract and would be taking time off. “It would be fun to do a project together,” I said, having no idea what the project could be.

The moment I landed back in New York, I called Michael. “I may have a project for you,” I said, and I invited him to Cloudwalk for the following weekend. Maybe he could curate the exhibition.

When Michael walked into my archive room and started putting the dresses on himself, I smiled. I left him to work alone for two days, to absorb it all. His first selection was very interesting. He had pulled out dresses I hadn’t
seen in years. He had spent hours in the old press books, taking photos, making notes, and sketching. By the end of his stay, I knew he should curate the show. “You have three months, three months to divide the dresses into groups and make sense of it all. I want you to mix them, old ones, new ones, and show the timelessness and the relevancy of the dress. You are allowed to reissue old prints, play with scales, and design new dresses . . . but it has to be seamless and effortless.” He worked for one month alone and then we took two long days to go over it together.

Michael showed me the groups he wanted to do. The huge central diamond would be black-and-white dresses. “Black-and-white is perfect, but only if you mix it with colors. Black-and-white mixed with bright color, that is very DVF,” I insisted. The other groups’ themes were Nature, Animal, Geometric, and Pop. We rearranged them many times and he showed me sketches and the fabrics he wanted to reissue. I loved his choices. He disappeared into the sample rooms and factories for weeks. I let him do his thing, thinking I always had time to edit later.

T
he opening was planned for Friday, January 10, 2014, two days before the Golden Globe Awards. Eran Cohen, our new, much-needed CMO, and his team were in full planning now: construction, marketing, PR, and, last but not least, party planning.

When I went to check on the progress in early December, we met with the party planner but I was frustrated. I refused to have the party in a tent outside. I wanted the party to be inside, yet not in the exhibition. That is when I spotted an extra space adjacent to the large mannequin room and decided to convert its thirty-seven-hundred-square feet into my own Studio 54 with banquettes, mirrored columns, and disco balls!

Everything was in motion, no turning back.

Jeff and his team had started the construction after Thanksgiving and were going nonstop through all the holidays. The art was on the road, the new dresses were being made, and the old ones assembled. Franca was getting rights for the photos for the time line. Luisella, the grand conductor of it all, wanted to be on site. So she took Lensa, her adorable four-year-old daughter who is also my goddaughter, to LA to spend the holidays.

During the holiday while with my family on the boat, I kept pestering Jeffrey to send me photos. I was terrified that plastering the prints on the walls and floors would be too much. I flew back on January 2 and went straight from the plane to the museum. The space was magnificent and there was excitement in the air. The prints were on the floors and, although very bold, it looked almost neutral. I loved it.

We were still debating about the time-line gallery: pink walls? white walls? white floor? chain link floor? When Bill arrived the next day, everything crystallized. There was no more doubt. Pink walls. Chain link floor. Black and white and pink, the core colors of DVF. He started to hang the art, placed the Dustin Yellin in the middle of the time-line gallery and the original picture I had signed on the white cube in the entrance hall under the quote: “Fashion is a mysterious energy, a visual moment—impossible to predict where it goes.”

Franca was sorting out the photos Bill wanted posted in the gallery. Michael was in the side rooms with dozens of interns, dressing the army of mannequins. Looking at the gallery that was shaping up, I decided that I wanted “Feel like a woman, wear a dress!” in neon right above the entrance. Jeffrey made it happen. We needed benches. He made that happen, too. As I walked through the dressed mannequins, I was in awe. I changed almost nothing of Michael’s curation—except for the very central dress, at the front of the first big pyramid. I had a
revelation: “We need the original black-and-white leopard!” I remembered that on my last trip to Miami, at the opening of the new Coral Gables store, a woman had walked in wearing it. I had looked at the label and confirmed that it was an original: 1974. She was very proud. “Call Adis, the Miami manager, and see if she can track that lady down. See if she will agree to lend it.” She did.

Everything was ready.

Friday, January 10, 2014

I
woke up early. Barry was asleep next to me, calm and reassuring. There we were, in the same bedroom where I landed thirty-nine years before. So much had happened and nothing had changed.

Before getting up, I lay still, imagining the day. A press conference was scheduled for 9:00 a.m. followed by a series of one-to-one interviews in different languages that would take most of the day. I had lined up different outfits in order to not look the same in all the photos. For the night, I had chosen a long black gown called the Geisha Wrap, a glamorous dress with dramatic sleeves and an obi sash lined in chartreuse silk.

I got up and, as I ate a bowl of pomegranate seeds, saw my face in the mirror. My eyes were puffy. Not a good start. I put on a mask and got into the steam shower. As usual, I did my own hair and waited for Sarah, the makeup artist, to arrive, though the last thing I wanted
was to put on makeup. Sarah’s touch was light and slowly I started to feel better.

I put on my python jacquard pants, my camouflage leopard shirt, my leather jacket, and my booties, and kissed Barry goodbye. I took the clothes I had prepared and everything I would need to survive the press day and threw it all in the car.