Diane von Furstenberg (34 page)

With more women in leadership roles on Seventh Avenue and in department stores, the business side of fashion was becoming more female-driven. The focus now was on relationships, not fast deal making.
Martheleur found herself doing business with young women like herself. The middle-aged men who’d been in control in department stores when Diane had started out in the seventies were gone, replaced increasingly by young women.

In those pre-9/11 days, there was once again a general exuberance in New York fashion, just half a decade after the
New York Times
had predicted its death. The economy boomed, which meant more opportunities for more designers and more money being spent on clothes. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s cleanup of Times Square spread to Seventh Avenue, which was looking spiffier than it had in ages. Soon the Garment District would even get its own Hollywood-style Walk of Fame, with designers’ names immortalized in the sidewalk between Thirty-Fourth Street and Times Square in decorative plaques.

The buoyant mood infused the DVF Studio. Diane’s spring 2001 show had a “hotel life” theme and showcased clothes for “the woman on the go who is ready for anything at a moment’s notice,” according to the program notes. That meant easy, body-conscious dresses and clingy tops with side ruching in packable fabrics such as silk jersey and supple leather. The models paraded down the runway in Diane’s studio with loose hair, their bright pink toenails peeping out from tall, strappy sandals. The show “caught the spirit of girl power in a refined way,” wrote Suzy Menkes in the
International Herald Tribune.

It all looked fresh and youthful, even to the hypercritical eye of the
New York Times
chief fashion writer. “Ms. von Furstenberg is not a great designer,” wrote Cathy Horyn. “But she is good at doing what great designers do, which is to exploit a look, so that year by year, it becomes her own.”

Diane was not an innovator in the art of dressmaking. Her clothes weren’t marvels of technique and decoration. Still, her Hotel Life collection expressed a coherent and clearly defined aesthetic, one that had informed her fashion from the start and reached its apotheosis with the wrap. Diane had created a sensation with that dress, and when the sensation
ended, when she couldn’t repeat its success, she got busy extracting its essence. The DNA of the wrap—its ease, sexiness, brightness, and sass—was now revealed in an array of new models. Diane had left the arena of trendiness and entered the kingdom of style.

DIANE BECAME A GRANDMOTHER FOR
the second time on June 1, 2000, when Tatiana gave birth in California to a daughter, Antonia, by her boyfriend, actor Russell Steinberg. (Alexandra and Alexandre von Furstenberg’s daughter, Talita, had been born in May 1999.) Through her health was failing, Lily, accompanied by her nurse, made the trip to Los Angeles from New York, where she’d been staying in Diller’s apartment at the Carlyle while being treated for a respiratory ailment.

In recent years, Lily had lived mostly in a house on Harbor Island in the Bahamas, tended to by caregivers arranged by Diane. Lily and Hans Muller had broken up, and Muller had married someone else, though Martin Muller says his father “was still in love with [Lily]. She was absolutely the love of his life.” Lily’s health was failing, and she was more comfortable living in a warm climate.

Before making the trip to California, Lily “had rested deeply—as in almost a coma,” recalls Tatiana. Lily stayed at Diller’s house in Malibu, and she and Tatiana “spent a lot of time together,” says Tatiana. Lily promised Tatiana that she would live to meet the baby, and she kept her word. “She stood up and walked into my hospital room in Santa Monica. Her body was failing her, but her will and her mind were still powerful. She felt so accomplished and full of pride that we could all be together”—mother, child, the baby’s maternal great-grandmother, grandmother, and grandfather. Diane and Egon had also both arrived, staying at Diller’s house to be on hand to welcome their grandchild. Egon had brought a ridiculously grand present for the baby—a pair of diamond earrings and matching necklace that had been in his family for generations.

When Tatiana brought Antonia home to Silver Lake, Lily spent a few hours with them, then flew back to New York. She would soon fly
with her nurse to Brussels to be with Philippe and his wife, Greta. “You cannot imagine my grief watching Lily leave, knowing I would never see her again,” says Tatiana.

Lily died a few weeks later at Philippe’s and Greta’s home. She was seventy-eight. Before the body was removed to the mortuary, her nurse, Lorna MacDonald, wrapped Lily’s head in a green and blue DVF scarf with Diane’s signature in bold black at the edge. Lily was buried in the scarf in Brussels, next to her husband, Leon. “They fought a lot, and now they are together at peace,” says Philippe.

BACK IN NEW YORK, DIANE
buried her grief in work. In the first year of the new millennium she had myriad new projects. She launched an Internet site, dvf.com, that allowed web surfers to email her directly, continuing the conversation she’d been having with her customers since the start of her career. She would still travel the department store circuit making public appearances, but now she could also communicate with women electronically and in this way reach many more of them. Each week fans sent dozens of emails, and every month Diane posted an online diary in which she regularly shared details about her travels and work. She also embarked on constructing her first freestanding boutique in a large space adjacent to her West Twelfth Street studio.

The Manhattan Meatpacking District had changed dramatically since Diane first moved there in 1997. The old marketplace was still home to about thirty meat-packing companies, but an influx of designer showrooms, hip restaurants, and boutiques was rapidly taking over the twelve-block neighborhood as the meat packers moved to the Bronx.

One day, as her mother lay dying, Diane told her she would probably marry Barry Diller “sooner or later.” From time to time over the years, Diller and Diane had discussed marriage, “but not really a lot,” says Diller. It wasn’t something they were burning to do, yet their deep involvement in each other’s lives and emotions made marriage a logical possibility. They were already living together “in the way we live
together,” says Diller—that is, in separate residences, though within a short limo ride of each other.

Then, in late January 2001, a week before Diller’s fifty-ninth birthday, it “just seemed like the right time,” says Diller. Friends say that Diane’s cancer and her mother’s death led her to think deeply about her legacy, about what she would leave behind for her children and grandchildren. Diller was like a father and grandfather to them. Alex and Tatiana would be his heirs; he’d already deeded his Malibu house to Alex.

Diane told Oprah Winfrey in 2014 that
she
proposed to Diller. “I called him and said, ‘You know, if you want, for your birthday I’ll marry you. And he said, ‘Let me see if I can arrange it.’”

In any case, no sooner had Diane decided to marry Diller than she began to have doubts and called her children and close friends for reassurance. “Am I betraying myself?” she asked Tatiana. “Am I going from being a free woman to a kept woman, a trophy wife?” Tatiana told her she was doing the right thing. André Leon Talley also reassured Diane. “I told her, ‘You need to marry this man who’s proved he loves you,’” says Talley. Diane called Egon, whose advice was “Make sure you are always happy. In any case, you will always be Diane von Furstenberg.”

Still, Diane wavered until the last moment. When
WWD
heard about the possible marriage, a reporter from the paper called Diane for a comment. She was evasive. “Maybe one of us will still change our mind,” she said. “And neither would take it badly if the other said, ‘Let’s not do it.’ Neither of us would be offended. That’s how large the thing we have is—it’s hard to explain.”

Nonetheless, she had a dress sewn up—a champagne-colored, dolman-sleeved model that she would be showing at her fall opening the following week. She also planned a party, though not as a wedding reception but as a birthday celebration for “the three Aquarians” in her life—Diller and her children, Alex and Tatiana, who all celebrated birthdays around this time.

On February 2, a glitteringly cold, blue day, Diane and Diller took his
limo to City Hall in Manhattan. Diane wore a sable vest over her dress and alligator boots, and she carried a bouquet of sweet peas and lily of the valley in honor of her mother. They were married at one thirty in a civil ceremony attended by her children; her daughter-in-law, Alexandra; Tatiana’s boyfriend, Russell Steinberg; Tatiana’s best friend, Francesca Gregorini; her baby granddaughters; and her brother, Philippe, and his wife, Greta, who’d flown in from Brussels. Annie Leibovitz took the official wedding photo. Diller’s wedding present to Diane was a collection of twenty-six diamond studded bands for the twenty-six years they hadn’t been married. Her present to him was “myself,” she said.

Later, they celebrated with 350 of their friends. The guest list included Diane’s fellow fashion powerhouses Calvin Klein and Carolina Herrera; celebrities such as Diane Sawyer and disco-era pal Ian Schrager, the former owner of Studio 54 who’d reinvented himself as a successful hotelier; and Egon. Guests dined on a buffet of chicken curry, pasta, eggplant parmigiana, and assorted salads. Afterward, they danced to a Cuban band. There were three birthday cakes (in honor of Tatiana, Alex, and Barry) and many toasts. Diane gave one “that was all about me,” said Egon. “I was embarrassed for Barry.”

And yet Barry had won. “My pattern” for thirty-five years had been serial lovers, with “one man kicking the other one out,” says Diane. Jas ousted Egon; Barry ousted Jas; Paulo ousted Barry; Alain ousted Paulo; Mort ousted Alain, Roffredo ousted Mort; Mark ousted Roffredo. Now Diane’s long string of flirtations and relationships, of seductions and secret trysts, was over.

IN A HEADLINE THE NEXT
day, the
New York Times
called the wedding “a merger.” “The marriage came after years of speculation about a relationship widely assumed to be platonic,” the paper wrote. “Ms. Von Furstenberg characterized the romance as ‘very intimate’ and would offer nothing more.”

WWD
also weighed in, calling the von Furstenberg-Diller nuptials “a bit too Cole Porter for the unsophisticated.”

What seemed to the outside world like something that shouldn’t work, to their friends and family worked very well. “I’m so happy about it,” Tatiana says of the marriage. “They love each other so much, like
soooo
much. They’ve shared this lifetime. It’s a real partnership; it’s really deep, it’s crazy.”

Diller is “madly in love with her,” adds a close friend. “He thinks he’s married to Grace Kelly, and she’s beginning to think it, too.”

“I don’t think it would have worked if they were thirty. But when you’re sixty, you’ve had everything in your life you could possibly have wished for on both sides, why not?” says Diane’s friend François Catroux. “But it’s not an ‘arrangement.’ It’s something very sincere. It’s real. It’s done with the greatest respect for each other. I don’t mean it’s a passionate love, but it’s really love, it’s platonic love.”

Catroux adds that getting married was “such a clever idea. It ensures the financial health of the family, and they do good works with the money. Barry has great confidence in Diane. She’s not going to divorce him or sue him. Diane’s children become the beneficiaries of this great fortune, and she and Barry are bigger together than they are separately. They understood how really powerful they could become if they were really together. In this they are so very different from the rest of the world, and they know that.”

“It boggles the mind how socially prominent they became in New York after the marriage,” says André Leon Talley. “Real true high socialites look up to Barry Diller like he’s the king of the world. They love the yacht, and he’s so successful. When Mercedes Bass was chairwoman of the [Metropolitan] Opera ball, there was Barry Diller on her right and Henry Kissinger on her left. At the Literary Lions dinner at the New York Library, there was Barry Diller next to Annette de la Renta. They seem to be so in awe of him.”

Considering Diane’s trajectory of “always inventing herself around the man she’s with,” says Kathy Landau, “it makes sense that “at this moment when she’s crested over the success hurdle and is on the other side,” she’d marry Barry. “A lot of things have come together for her now, later in life, in a way they hadn’t in the other phases of her journey—her sense of self, her comfort with her age, her business.”

Marriage is a way of drawing a line around herself, her children, her grandchildren, and Barry, defining them in the eyes of the world as a family.

Diller says he thought being married “wouldn’t change a thing, because what was there to change? But a year, two years in, I thought, ‘Oh, my God!’ It’s only emotional, but it’s a complete change. It’s commitment. It’s a greater sense of family. It’s absolute security.”

AFTER A HONEYMOON WEEKEND AT
Cloudwalk, Diane went back to work. Her boutique opened in April in a space carved from her vast West Twelfth Street studio. On the first day, a line ten women deep formed outside the dressing room. The most popular items were sheaths in ice cream colors and printed wraps. One customer bought $10,000 worth of dresses at $250 each. Around the nation, the dresses were selling as fast as they arrived in stores, and Diane’s business was up about 40 percent. The dress orders for spring 2001 had been “insane,” Martheleur, the vice president for sales, told
WWD.
“What we had done in one quarter is what I projected for three.”

In June, to celebrate and fuel her success, Diane rented a billboard on Ninth Avenue near her studio and installed a blow-up of the 1972 black-and-white photograph of herself that she’d used in an early ad. Above the dark, cobblestoned streets and the fashionistas clicking along them in their Manolo spikes loomed a giant, twenty-five-year-old Diane. Wearing a shirtdress in her iconic chain-link print with her legs crossed provocatively, she leaned against a huge white cube, across which was scrawled in handwriting four yards high, “Feel like a woman, wear a dress.”