Diane von Furstenberg (12 page)

Before Diane would sign a contract with Conrad, she insisted he meet Egon. Throughout her career, she kept the practice up—having family members vet key employees. “He took me to a fondue restaurant on Fifty-Sixth Street to check me out,” says Conrad. “He was very good-looking, very pleasant.”

Having passed the Egon test, Conrad signed a contract with Diane at the end of December 1971. Soon afterward, Diane went to Italy to oversee production of her next collection. “I’m making beautiful things and rushing around, doing 1,000 things at once,” she wrote her new partner. “So happy we are going to be the best team on Seventh Avenue.”

Diane could pay Conrad only a modest salary—according to her, $300 a week, but she offered him a 25 percent stake in her company. “We put together an operating plan of what the first line was going to be. We were going to make or break it on the first line because we didn’t have the capital to get to the second line,” Conrad recalls.

Diane’s father had given her eighty thousand dollars as a wedding present, but she’d spent it. She had only Ferretti’s credit and ten thousand dollars from a diamond ring she had pawned. (The ring had been a present from her father and Egon to celebrate Tatiana’s birth, and she later bought it back, paying a huge interest.) The new partners started work on
April 1, 1972. “The first thing we did,” Conrad says, “was get the hell out of Fifty-Sixth Street and onto Seventh Avenue.”

Since the early 1800s, Manhattan’s Lower East Side had been the center of clothing manufacturing, providing garments for workers on farms in the North and slaves on southern plantations and, later, uniforms for soldiers of both sides fighting the Civil War.

As the demand for ready-to-wear apparel surged with industrialization, the Garment District was pushed toward Midtown, settling into a neighborhood bordered by Forty-Second Street on the north, Thirty-Fourth Street on the south, Fifth Avenue on the east, and Ninth Avenue on the west. Seventh Avenue ran through the center of the district, “a place of Dreiserian amounts of soot and lint, crammed with hamburger dives, cigar shops, dress rack operators, models, and fabric salesmen, and controlled by manufacturers who’d arrive in their chauffeured Packards and Cadillacs,” Bill Blass wrote.

The luxury showrooms of these rich manufacturers symbolized the power of fashion in New York’s economy. Still, the inspiration, the lifeblood of Seventh Avenue remained Paris. In France, designers were Leonardo da Vincis of cloth and thread, whose reputations were built on vision and tradition. At the Burgundian court of Philippe Le Bel, the king of France from 1285 to his death in 1314, for the first time in history women began changing their clothes to showcase their status, taste, and wealth, not because the weather changed or their garments wore out. In the seventeenth century, Louis XIV created a standard of luxury dressing that demanded rules and endless reinvention. In response, a fashion industry bloomed in Paris to satisfy the lust for the latest finery worn at Louis’s court. The craving soon spread throughout Europe and beyond.

In the nineteenth century, during France’s Second Empire, Charles Frederick Worth set up shop on the rue de la Paix and ushered in haute couture with its rigid hierarchies and elite cabals. In the twentieth century, Paris designers became world-famous celebrities, the names Chanel,
Lanvin, Balenciaga, Patou, and Dior heralded from the pages of
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
and the women’s pages of US newspapers.

In contrast to France, American fashion had always been aligned more with commerce than with art. With a few exceptions, labels on even the highest-end fashion contained only the names of the manufacturers. For years, the
New York Times
had a strictly enforced policy of not publishing the names of designers, instead only mentioning those of the companies for which they worked. In the American fashion magazines
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
, neither the editorial features nor the ads provided the names of American designers. These local fashion leaders labored in obscurity in the back rooms of Seventh Avenue, keeping their heads down, “grateful” to be given a chance to knock off seventy-nine-dollar copies of Dior dresses, as Bill Blass noted.

Twice a year, with almost religious devotion, American buyers, manufacturers, designers, and journalists made the pilgrimage to Paris to witness the city’s couture openings. What they saw determined the silhouette, colors, skirt lengths, and accessories for the next season. American women, too, were hooked on French clothes, either the real things or knockoffs.

That began to change during World War II and the Nazi occupation of Paris, when suddenly America was totally cut off from France. New York’s garment unions, clothing manufacturers, and department store executives feared that the US business would collapse. To stave off disaster, they formed the New York Dress Institute and made a historic agreement to launch a national promotional campaign. They set up a contract stipulating that one half of 1 percent of the cost of every union dress would go into a fund that would be used for advertising American clothes. They also hired the public relations maven Eleanor Lambert, the daughter of an advance man for Barnum & Bailey’s circus, who thought New York designers could be promoted like French couturiers.

Lambert told New York’s manufacturing and store executives to figure out who were their most creative designers. The business executives
chose eleven, including Norman Norell, Hattie Carnegie, Bonnie Cashin, Claire McCardell, and Mainbocher, the Chicago-born French couturier who’d recently fled Paris for New York. Lambert called them the Couture Group, and to publicize them she came up with three ideas that became fashion traditions: the Best Dressed List, which endures today under the auspices of
Vanity Fair
; Press Week, the forerunner of today’s biannual Fashion Weeks; and the Coty Awards, the precursor of awards now handed out by the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

Paris couture never fully recovered its status and luster after World War II. The old French way of structuring clothes had definitely ended. Fashion now depended on the gracefulness and fitness of the body moving beneath the fabric, rather than couture’s way of correcting, buttressing, and harnessing the female form. Fashion also was becoming more democratic. Modern life chipped away at the idea of “perfect” dressing, of one standard, one ideal, and Paris was losing its grip as the be-all of style. Fashion no longer was seen as a rare luxury conferred by a few stars like Coco Chanel. In 1970, the eighty-seven-year-old designer was still going to work in her Paris atelier. But Chanel was dying and so was the couture she represented—though even if Tim Gunn of
Project Runway
fame put a stake through its heart, couture wouldn’t disappear entirely.

Meanwhile, New York designers were perfecting a style of dressing that would soon define how the world wanted to look: casual, comfortable, and easily stylish. The milestone marking the American ascendance came at a legendary fashion show at Versailles on November 28, 1973. Cooked up by Eleanor Lambert, the show was held as a fund-raiser for the palace of Versailles, but Lambert’s intent was more mercenary—to bring attention to American designers. The organizers staged the event in the extravagantly gilded Opéra, where in 1770 the future King Louis XVI had married Marie-Antoinette, history’s enduring symbol of the calamity that can befall a fashionista who spends too lavishly on her wardrobe.

The event was staged as a fashion show preceded by entertainments,
with Liza Minnelli performing for the Americans and Josephine Baker performing for the French. The fashion segments pitted five Parisian couturiers—Marc Bohan of Christian Dior, Hubert Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent, and Emanuel Ungaro—against five stars of New York ready-to-wear—Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Anne Klein, Halston, and Oscar de la Renta. Until then, the idea of American designers showing in Paris “had been completely unheard-of because the French scoffed at anything we did. They thought all we were good for was copying
them,
” says Burrows.

The show also broke ground by showcasing Burrows, an African American designer, and by featuring eleven gorgeous African American models, the first time black models had been paraded so prominently on a Paris runway.

Though there was no official scoring, by all accounts the New Yorkers won. The American clothes dazzled with freshness and vitality: Halston’s cashmere sweater dresses, Burrows’s brightly colored lettuce-hemmed skirts, Blass’s sophisticated flannel pants, Klein’s easy, go-to-work separates, de la Renta’s flowing chiffon gowns. Such clothes proved that great style didn’t have to be couture. This was the essence of American fashion—simple, informal separates that could be mixed according to the wearer’s own style and not the dictates of some imperious designer. In contrast, the elaborate gowns, fitted suits, and structured day dresses shown by the French looked stiff and old. The poker-faced French models, walking carefully and erectly across the stage in the manner of a traditional defilé, as classical music played, looked rigid and dull, compared with the American girls, who, smiling broadly, vogued to tunes by pop artists such as Barry White.

At the end of the Americans’ presentation, the French citizens in the audience jumped to their feet, cheering and throwing their programs into the air. “We killed,” says Burrows.

The Versailles show has been hailed as a turning point in fashion, the first time in three hundred years that the world stopped looking to
France for inspiration. Actually, the shift had been going on since World War II, though Versailles marked a moment of acceleration. The next years would see a different direction in fashion, when New York ready-to-wear would set style standards across the globe. Manhattan became a sequined dreamscape of creativity and ambition, as journalists, hairdressers, photographers, models, makeup artists, designers, and their hangers-on swarmed to the city.

The stage was set for the rise of DVF.

No Zip, No Buttons

T
he offices of Diane von Furstenberg sat on the fifth floor of 530 Seventh Avenue, a thirty-two-story art deco tower ornamented in brass as rich as the buttons on a Chanel suit. In a block filled with towers of fashion, 530 was the biggest, tallest, and most prestigious, a beacon of commercial optimism for the better dress trade on a street prone to busts. Since its blue-ribbon-and-champagne opening soon after the stock market crash in 1929, there had never been a time when every square foot of the building wasn’t leased.

It was a lucky building, and luck was what Diane needed most. Of the seven thousand or so firms crowded into the aging buildings of the Garment District, one fifth disappeared each year, casualties of the ruthless competition that has always characterized fashion. Some would be reborn under new names with new partners; others would be gone forever.

In 1972, Seventh Avenue was still designing more than 90 percent of clothes bought by Americans, and the Garment Center was still New York’s largest employer. It also provided the city’s most promising dream factory, a place where smart, ambitious entrepreneurs could literally go
from rags to riches. Get a run of luck and you can make fabulous money, one manufacturer told
New Yorker
writer Lillian Ross. “All you need in this business is one good dress.”

But by the early seventies, Garment Center jobs had declined by nearly half, to 160,000 from a peak in 1947 of 350,000. Some of the jobs had been lost to Newark and southern Westchester County, where they were filled by low-wage black and Hispanic workers. Others had moved south, though International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) agreements limited Seventh Avenue firms from relocating to southern states.

The job decline threatened a complex ecosystem that was a vital cultural force, a breeding ground for innovation and talent. As Diane later told Guy Trebay of the
New York Times,
the city’s fashion primacy relied on “beehives” of small-scale manufacturing on Seventh Avenue.

A centralized, compact garment district, as Trebay wrote, made it possible for aspiring unknowns “to design and sew a garment at home, and then, with luck and an initial order from, say, Bergdorf Goodman, to take that sample to [a garment district] building and have a pattern made, graded for size, the fabric rolled in from a nearby wholesaler, the pieces cut and assembled and the finished product shipped without leaving a single block in the center of Midtown.”

Though Diane’s clothes were made in Italy, she believed her creativity was fed by the hothouse of ideas and energy on Seventh Avenue. Every morning before ten she took a taxi to her office, often dressed in jeans, since she frequently spent part of her day helping out in the shipping room. She loved being in her office in the morning, sharing a grapefruit with Dick Conrad and drinking coffee while the harsh cries of the workers and the clattering of clothes racks rose up from the street. Over the brown walls she’d hung colorful Andy Warhol flower posters, and she’d filled the offices with inexpensive desks and tables from the Door Store. This was where she belonged; everything about it felt right, like coming home to her parents. While Conrad entertained and cajoled buyers in the
firm’s little showroom—with Diane sometimes serving coffee incognito and eavesdropping on the conversations—Diane worked the phones in her office, calling socialite friends such as Marion Javits, Nan Kempner, and Mrs. Richard Berlin, wife of the owner of
Town & Country,
“to create some buzz” for her clothes, Conrad says. Later, she’d drop off dresses at their homes, hoping they’d wear them to prominent social events and be photographed in them.

Diane and Conrad started with just two employees—a Haitian receptionist and a Trinidadian woman named Olive who sent out orders from the stockroom. Olive would sometimes work with Conrad until 1
A.M.
to get all the orders out to the stores. The labels on the clothes read “Diane Von Furstenberg, Made in Italy.” (She didn’t lowercase the
V
in her name until 1999.) The initialism “DVF” would not appear on anything designed by Diane until 1975 when she first stamped it on sunglasses marketed under her name. (She’d used it earlier on her personal stationery.) “DVF” became her trademark, though it would not be widely employed in Diane’s publicity, either by her or those writing about her, until her comeback in the late nineties. The launch of her website, dvf.com, in 1999 accelerated the media’s adoption of “DVF” when referring to Diane and her fashion business.