Diane von Furstenberg (33 page)

Rucci is known for his exquisite, astronomically priced creations produced under his label, Chado Ralph Rucci. But for reasons that remain mysterious, he is not among the favored at
Vogue.
Wintour has never gone to a show of Rucci’s, nor has she featured any of his clothes in her magazine. (Rucci left his label in November 2014.)

“Either Anna Wintour likes you or she doesn’t, and if she doesn’t, you’re nowhere,” says one longtime fashion observer.

AS IT TURNED OUT, DIANE’S
friendship with Wintour and the
Vogue
excerpt did little to boost the reception of her book, which sold modestly and garnered mediocre reviews. The
New York Times
critic deplored the book’s “bouts of superficiality,” while conceding that it “persuasively illustrates how her hugely successful clothing and cosmetics businesses were nurtured by endless hours of hard work and hundreds of personal appearances.”

Suzy Menkes, writing in the
International Herald Tribune,
criticized the book’s “bathetic” tone. Menkes cited as examples Diane’s complaint that while attending a White House dinner celebrating the 1979 Egypt-Israeli peace accord, she ruined her new Manolo Blahniks on the wet presidential lawn, and the mention of how Diane shared with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis not only a recent battle against cancer but also the same hairdresser, Edgar Montalvo.

Menkes found the book’s descriptions of famous social events “frustratingly feeble,” including an account of the Proust ball held by Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, where all Diane had to say was that the “people had made a big effort to dress up.” Menkes speculated that Diane was perhaps “just too nice (at least in print) to be a pertinent diarist or even a colorful gossip. . . . Anxious not to hurt anyone, there is barely a breath of criticism of friends and colleagues.”

Diane wasted no time bemoaning her book’s reviews and got busy on what really mattered—fashion. For a dose of fresh blood, in May 1998 she hired Catherine Malandrino, a Frenchwoman seventeen years her junior. Malandrino had graduated from the French fashion school ESMOD and trained at a series of Parisian couture houses, including Emanuel Ungaro, before becoming the head designer at Et Vous, a French company that made chic, affordable clothes for young working women. Recently, she’d left that job and moved to New York to be with her boyfriend, businessman Bernard Aidan. Diane first interviewed Malandrino at the Carlyle Hotel, where Diane continued living during the renovation of her West Twelfth Street property. “Diane was so sensual, the way she sat on the sofa and moved her legs and arms,” recalls Malandrino. “I thought, Diane
is
the wrap dress.”

They had long talks about the DVF woman and what she represented and about the state of fashion in general. The era of the masculine power suit—with its oversized jackets and big shoulders—had finally waned, only to be replaced by hard-edged looks that were difficult to wear. At the extreme were British designer Alexander McQueen’s “bumster” pants, which were cut so low on the hips that they revealed the buttocks. “Diane and I talked a lot about how to reinvent femininity in fashion,” Malandrino says.

When it came to style, they found that they shared many of the same ideas, flowing from their common European heritage, including a reverence for the work of Yves Saint Laurent, whose clothes they both wore.

Diane and Malandrino studied the designer’s old dresses together, until the Frenchwoman began to understand the “codes” of DVF. “I dove into her life and her archive,” says Malandrino, who pored over Diane’s files of old prints and ad campaigns. By the time she actually sat down to design Diane’s dresses, Malandrino understood Diane and her aesthetic so completely, she says, “it was easy for me to design the dress, and soon I was in the studio draping and cutting.”

By spring 1998, Diane had expanded her retail distribution to 118
stores, representing 30 accounts, including Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale’s. But the dresses arrived in a dizzying array of prints, including snakeskin, bamboo, chain-link, diamonds, and Diane’s signature. On the racks, the swirl of prints “looked very schizophrenic,” Diane conceded. Women were overwhelmed with choices, and the stores were left with racks of unsold dresses.

For Diane it was scarily reminiscent of the seventies, when she’d saturated the market with wraps and had nothing with which to replace them when the style ran its course.

Through it all, she still had a knack for grabbing attention. In a nod to the Y2K scare that global computer systems around the world would cease to function on January 1, 2000, she wore a “Diane life vest” at her February 1999 fashion opening. Described by the designer as a command center “for the wired woman,” and created by Diane in conjunction with Sony, the silver silk vest had pockets and pouches to hold a cell phone and other high-tech gear.

Diane was the only live model in the show. To save money, she dispensed with hiring models and instead presented her collection on an installation of mannequins in her West Twelfth Street studio. “If there’s no woman, there’s no dress,” Coco Chanel famously said. It’s difficult to take the full measure of clothes without seeing them move on live bodies, and that’s why designers have been showing their collections on real women since the belle époque. The first couturier, Charles Frederick Worth, employed house models to parade through his salon for customers, a practice that continued for decades and evolved into more elaborate “fashion parades” at Paris couture houses and Seventh Avenue showrooms.

By the nineties, when the Council of Fashion Designers of America consolidated the New York shows in big white tents in the east and west plazas of Bryant Park, runway presentations had grown so lavish that they could cost from $250,000 to $400,000, including models’ fees, tent rental, and production costs. “It’s an enormous amount of energy for fifteen or twenty minutes,” Diane told
WWD
.

Diane was spending millions on her business, including salaries for a staff of 120, promotional events, and ad campaigns, while the relaunch of her wrap at $180 to $190 a dress brought in less than $1 million wholesale. At one point, she tried to raise $10 million by selling a piece of her business to Gucci, but Tom Ford, Gucci’s creative director, and the company’s CEO, Domenico De Sole, invested in Beatle daughter Stella McCartney’s fashion house instead.

Barry Diller and her children were equal partners with her in the business, and they “wanted to pull the plug,” as Diller puts it. They’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t smart to continue financing a comeback that might never make money. They’d recently established the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation to support human rights, health, environment, arts, and education projects, and the funds being poured into Diane’s fashion might have been better used for the foundation. “I don’t know by [then] what the investment was, but it could have been between five and ten million, or it was going to be ten million in a few months,” Diller says. “It’s not like you’re a bank or you’ve got partners. We were putting [our] money out.” Some of it was Diller’s and some of it was Diane’s.

“She had savings,” says Alex. “She’d sold [her apartment] at 1060 Fifth Avenue. She had money. And I said, ‘DVF, you gotta stop investing all your money in this business.’ It’s like actors who invest their money in movies for themselves.”

Diller decided there was only one solution. “We had a family intervention,” he says. “Alex, Tats, me, and Diane. It was in my office, and we said to Diane, ‘Look, it’s not going well. It’s losing money. It’s not working.’”

Anger flashed in Diane’s eyes. She glared at her family seated around the table in Diller’s office and slammed her fist down on the table. “Give me six months,” she demanded. “I’ll turn it around. You’ll see.”

“We tried to talk her out of it,” says Diller. Beyond the money, he was concerned that Diane was unhappy. In fact, he says, the intervention was
not really about the money. “It was because it was making her miserable, and who needs it?”

But Diane was determined to persevere, to prove that her success had not been a fluke the first time around. So Diller and Diane’s children gave in. Diller recalls, “We said, ‘Okay. You can have six months.’”

IN SEPTEMBER 1999, SEVERAL MONTHS
after her family’s ultimatum, Diane showed her spring 2000 collection.
WWD
pronounced it “a hit.” The collection “sprang to life” with “fresh, whimsical and feminine” fashion. The paper praised her new prints inspired by nature, including “a bold giraffe motif, playful flamingoes, climbing ivy and—the most mischievous idea—a cannabis print.”

Cathy Horyn, the new chief fashion critic for the
New York Times,
applauded the “sexy variations on wrap dresses and fluted, ruffled skirts.” After the show, Diane introduced Horyn to a healer named Romeo, who handed out beads “which he said would ward off aggravating people.”

Perhaps Romeo also brought good luck, because soon after the opening something extraordinary happened. In November Diane showed up at number six on
WWD
’s list of one hundred favorite brands, a “dramatic new entry,” according to the newspaper. The biennial rankings typically changed little from year to year. Career-clothes workhorse Liz Claiborne held the top spot for the second year. Vera Wang, who’d received a lot of publicity for dressing celebrities for the most recent Academy Awards show, also broke into the Fairchild 100 brand chart.

Buyers and shoppers loved Diane’s clothes—including a new batch of dresses in solid colors with soft draping—as much as the critics did. Diane’s roster of accounts exploded, reaching more than three hundred by the end of the year. In many stores her brand was a best-seller. In 1997 she’d sold less than one million dollars’ worth of clothes; in 1999 she sold more than twenty times that amount. Though her business had yet to break even, she was on the right track.

She’d asked Diller and her children for six months to turn the business
around, and she succeeded, as if by magic. “I knew I had a great product; I just had to get some traction,” Diane says.

She credits much of this traction to the savvy management of the company’s new president, Paula Sutter. A young woman and new mother who had been vice president of sales at DKNY’s domestic women’s division, Sutter worked for Diane as a consultant before being appointed president in 1999. Sutter came up with a business plan, including the establishment of monthly deliveries to create a fresh flow of DVF fashion to retailers and better placement of Diane’s clothes in the nation’s stores.

Diane also hired graphic designer Craig Braun, a former “flirtation” who had designed the cover of the Rolling Stones’ album
Sticky Fingers,
to redesign her label. Braun used Diane’s signature in a san serif typeface, with a lowercase
v
in
von
. To polish her image and dissociate herself from all things uncool, Diane stopped appearing on HSN to hawk her Silk Assets line (she was still relying on the income from Silk Assets to partially fuel her comeback), sending a young employee in her place.

Diane prided herself on the cabal of women she’d assembled to help her run her business, including Sutter and Kathy Landau, the company’s senior vice president, who’d been with her since 1990. Diane had even allowed Landau to bring her baby and its nanny to work every day. And when Landau had a second child, Diane paid for a baby nurse who accompanied Landau and her infant to the office each morning. “She made it easy for me to come back to work,” says Landau.

Diane trusted women, believed in them, and wanted to be surrounded by them. Male designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Halston, and Bill Blass might be geniuses of technique, but they would never know what it felt like to actually wear their clothes. Only women understood what other women wanted. Diane loved men, but she believed that women were stronger beings, more evolved. “I never met a woman who wasn’t strong,” she says. In the seventies, she admitted, she’d had “a tendency to hide behind a man in a suit, for the business part” of DVF fashion, “and every time I did that it was a mistake.” The suits had given
her disastrous advice, and she’d almost lost everything. Of course, she also had herself to blame for the misguided handling of the business, a fact she acknowledges today.

A number of her employees and ex-employees say she does take responsibility for her decisions. But—always fighting to keep her confidence up—she has been known to blame others. Once, during a discussion about the demise of one of her company’s most lucrative licensing deals, Diane said to a (female) DVF executive, “
You
blew that deal.”

“
You
wanted out,” the executive shot back. “You’re rewriting history.”

“If I didn’t, I’d only have myself to blame,” said Diane.

Seventh Avenue itself was becoming a place for women, and Diane benefited from this sea change in fashion. The millennium saw the rise of young women as the new generation of sales leaders, replacing the old cigar-chomping male garmentos. Dubbed
garmentas
by
WWD,
these new women were part of fashion’s exploding focus on brand coherence, the principle that every component of a fashion business—stores, advertising, showrooms, and sales staff—should reflect a singular image. Diane’s chief salesperson was a beautiful, cosmopolitan thirty-two-year-old named Astrid Martheleur. She had studied at the Lycée Français and spoke four languages. At night, dressed in DVF, she went out to stylish clubs and restaurants, such as Halo and Indochine, where she was a living advertisement for her boss.

As a group, women designers had come into their own. The AIDS epidemic had made investors wary of backing male designers, and in general, women had gained ground across the professions and in business. In the late nineties, these forces helped to usher in the era of the female designer. Recent years had seen the rise of Donna Karan, Jil Sander, Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace, and, at a lower price point, Anna Sui, Cynthia Rowley, Nicole Miller, and Cynthia Steffe.