Diane von Furstenberg (35 page)

Though she’d written those words long ago, they still evoked the essential feature animating her career. Diane had found her fashion DNA in the femininity of European clothes, in clingy fabrics, defined curves, hot colors, and flirtatious prints. But in translating Old World allure into American dresses, she had also drawn on her own struggle for independence. The result was a style as suitable for the boardroom and the office, the car pool and the classroom, as for the candlelit boudoir.

For the second time Diane had imposed her vision on American women, and a new generation was wearing her clothes. All she had done was respect the narrative of her brand; she’d shown how a woman could live a man’s life while remaining a feminine woman. It had been a hard road back, but she’d stayed the course. Giving up would not have occurred to Lily’s daughter.

Epilogue

2014

D
isco-era sex symbol Raquel Welch vamped for the cameras, and Bee Gees tunes wafted from a replica of Studio 54, but the party at the former May Company Building in Los Angeles really didn’t capture seventies Manhattan. No (visible) drugs. No interesting mix of bohemia and high society. No Andy Warhol to write about it snarkily in his diary the next day.

Instead, the opening-night party on January 10 for “Journey of a Dress,” an exhibit celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Diane’s wrap, had the feel of the new millennium. Waiters carrying silver trays offered water as well as champagne. Hard-charging figures from business and entertainment with images to promote worked the room (Jeff Bezos, Marisa Tomei, Ed Norton, Paris Hilton, Demi Moore, and Gwyneth Paltrow among them). Meanwhile, milling about were a publicist-controlled roster of reporters and bloggers who’d write glowingly about the event.

The exhibit filled several cavernous spaces of the old Wilshire Boulevard building, which sits next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The evening began with a live-streamed red-carpet event cohosted by Diane, model Coco Rocha, and television personality Andy Cohen. Guests entered through a wide, pink-walled corridor of photos of famous women wearing wraps: Michelle Obama, Amy Winehouse, Madonna, and Amy Adams, as the character Sydney in
American Hustle,
the hit movie of the moment and a love letter to seventies style. A gallery off the entrance was dedicated to portraits of Diane by artists and photographers, including Warhol, Chuck Close, Annie Leibovitz, and Helmut Newton.

Walking across floors covered in Diane’s iconic animal and geometric prints, guests came upon the central exhibition space and the highlight of the show—hundreds of mannequins, their sculpted cheekbones resembling Diane’s, in wraps dating from the birth of the dress to today. They lined up like the Chinese “terra cotta armies,” Diane remarked, in reference to the collection of tomb sculptures in Shaanxi Province depicting the armies of the first emperor of China.

Diane herself wore a dramatic black wrap gown with a chartreuse sash and kimono sleeves lined in chartreuse that trailed to the floor. She’d created and paid for the exhibit herself, part of a yearlong celebration of the wrap’s fortieth year.

Today Diane’s clothes can be bought on four continents and—before the wrap dress celebration in Los Angeles—exhibits had honored her work in Beijing, Moscow, and São Paolo. Like many high-end brands, in recent years Diane has expanded into China, the world’s fastest-growing market for luxury goods. She has fifteen shops in China with plans to more than double that number in the next four years, and 2.5 million followers on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. “What I like about women is always strength, but Chinese women are like strong women on steroids,” Diane told Deborah Kan of the
Wall Street Journal Digital
. She’s recognized
on the street now in China. It’s a measure of the global success she’s achieved in the thirteen years since her marriage to Barry Diller.

Diane likes to tell reporters about the three stages of her business life: the first was reaching financial independence, the second was to prove that her early success wasn’t an accident, and then the third is to develop a company that will last long after she’s gone.

“I don’t think about legacy, but she does,” says Diller.

On a personal level, Diane says, “I want to be remembered as a nice woman who inspired other women.”

She has bigger plans for the legacy of her brand. As Diane grows older, she’s focused increasingly on strengthening DVF so it will start being less about one particular woman and more about the abstract things she represents—independence, confidence, having-it-all glamour. It also means that clothes have to become less important to her business than accessories. The wealthiest fashion companies, after all, make most of their money on such items as perfume, handbags, and sunglasses.

Diane’s son, Alex, says her clothes sell well because they offer quality, fit, and design at a good price. But DVF—a $500 million company at retail, according to Diane—is not an “it” brand in the mold of, say, Michael Kors, a $3 billion dollar company that in 2013 was the most sought-after brand by American teenagers, though its stock has been underperforming in the past year. Mostly, the young covet Kors’s signature “MK” handbags.

It’s impossible for a fashion company to reach such mega-popularity and wealth without a must-have accessory, one that becomes an instantly recognizable status item—such as a Kors handbag with the MK logo, or sunglasses emblazoned with Chanel’s double
C’
s. (Scent is another means to this end. Chanel makes most of its billions through the company’s Chanel No. 5 fragrance.)

Though there’s no formula to achieving such success, becoming a public company can provide huge sums of money for the kind of relentless
marketing needed to take a brand to the top—and to get large numbers of people to pay a premium price for accessories featuring the brand’s logo.

With this in mind, Diane has shaken things up in the executive ranks at DVF. In 2012 she hired as her cochairman Joel Horowitz, one of the architects of Tommy Hilfiger’s success.
WWD
speculated that Horowitz was hired to take DVF public, as he had orchestrated Hilfiger’s IPO in 1992. Fashion IPOs have suddenly become fashionable. Michael Kors’s extraordinarily successful 2011 IPO sparked interest on Wall Street in other designers, and investors began nosing around Diane because of her celebrity and international clout—
Forbes
in 2012 named her the thirty-third most powerful woman in the world.

Joel Horowitz’s arrival preceded by a year the departure of Paula Sutter, president of DVF since 1999, who’d played a key role in Diane’s comeback. Now, after years of unfocused management, Diane says she finally has “clarity,” and she’s brought in a new team to take DVF to the next level. In April 2015 she hired Paolo Riva, a former executive at Tory Burch, as CEO. “For years I only wanted women executives,” Diane says, “and now I only want Jewish [and Italian] men.”

In September 2012, two days after taking a victory lap on the runway following her show at Lincoln Center with Yvan Mispelaere, the talented Frenchman who’d been her creative director for two years, Diane announced his departure. Mispelaere, who’d followed Nathan Jenden in the job, received mostly stellar reviews for his DVF collections. Cathy Horyn wrote that he was “one of the best right hands in the business,” someone “who built on [Diane’s] style without losing its cool, funky essence.” But Diane says she started to feel that the clothes under Mispelaere’s direction “had gone off brand,” that they did not have enough of her signature easiness. Even more surprising, Diane announced that Mispelaere would not be replaced. Henceforth, she would rely on a team of designers, with only
her
creative vision leading the pack.

In February 2014, however, Diane hired Michael Herz, formerly creative director of the British brand Bally, as artistic director of DVF. As
curator of the L.A. wrap-dress exhibition, Herz had designed 40 new styles to join the 160 historic wraps. Reviews of his first DVF collection, shown in September 2014, were enthusiastic, with Vanessa Friedman of the
New York Times
crediting him with harnessing the “accessibility and straightforward spirit” at the heart of DVF.

More changes were under way. Diane and many of her fellow designers had begun to feel a nagging weariness over Fashion Week. In 1994 this festival of American style had moved to one centralized location in Bryant Park. Sixteen years later, in 2010, a dispute with park management over the timing of the shows forced a move to Lincoln Center. The fashion community, though, never warmed to the new location, grumbling that it had a trade-show vibe that grew more noticeable with time. In February 2014, Diane joined a cavalcade of design powerhouses, including Michael Kors, Oscar de la Renta, and Tracy Reese, who opted to show their collections off-site. The atmosphere at Lincoln Center, they complained, had become like an airport terminal, with noisy, long lines and designers rushing in and out, “haul[ed] away like the wedding caterer,” as Vera Wang told Eric Wilson of the
New York Times
.

Losing Diane, who held her February and September 2014 openings at Tribeca’s Spring Studios, came as a big blow to Fashion Week’s producer, IMG Worldwide, the global sports and media conglomerate, and to the event’s chief sponsor, Mercedes-Benz. As president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America since 2006, Diane takes the lead in all official matters relating to New York fashion. She was elected to the unpaid post in 2006, succeeding Stan Herman, who is perhaps best remembered for designing uniforms for such firms as McDonald’s, FedEx and Avis. Diane takes the job seriously and has made the CFDA a real force. She vigorously promotes American designers and the causes important to them. Soon after taking over the leadership of CFDA, she lobbied Congress in support of copyright laws that would protect American fashion from knockoffs, noting in an op-ed piece she wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
that “the United States is the only
world fashion leader that does not protect the intellectual property of its fashion designers.”

Even before her election to the CFDA post, Diane was regarded as the industry’s queen mother; young and old designers alike turned to her for guidance and advice. Over the years, Diane’s shows have been among the biggest and most buzzworthy. When models at her spring 2013 show sashayed down the runway wearing Google glasses—a few days later Diane released a short film compiled from the video recorded by the glasses—tweets about DVF exploded. She sparked another social media outburst the following year when she sent nineties supermodel Naomi Campbell down the runway in the finale of her spring 2014 show. Wearing a black and gold shift and a lot of attitude, Campbell strutted the catwalk as Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” blared. Featuring a forty-three-year-old bad-girl model who was famous for her phone-throwing tantrums amounted to another fashion “moment,” held up and glorified by the style brigade. A flurry of tweets, Instagrams, and Pinterest pins streamed out on the web.

Ironically, Fashion Week’s move to Bryant Park in 1993 had been sparked by a series of accidents at shows in lofts and artists’ studios, including caved-in ceilings and blown generators that left audiences and models in total darkness. Diane herself only started showing in Bryant Park in 2006, the year after a track of ceiling lights in her studio crashed down during the finale of her September show, injuring several editors. Now she’s considering dispensing with live shows altogether. She shocked fashion council members at a meeting in 2013 when she suggested that someday designers might show their collections only digitally. In an era of immediate online accessibility of clothes modeled on the runway, live fashion shows are starting to seem irrelevant.

If and when that all-digital day comes, Diane’s job as CFDA president will be easier. Recently Fashion Week has come under attack from all sides. Last year Diane had to mediate when American designers grew furious that the organizers of Milan Fashion Week would not change
their schedule, forcing New York and London fashion weeks to overlap with the Jewish holidays. She sent a conciliatory letter to the international fashion community, urging everyone to cooperate, but the Italians wouldn’t budge. Diane also had to field complaints from residents near Lincoln Center who were disturbed by the noise created by Fashion Week crowds. Neighbors resented, too, the immense generators that spewed pollution through the nearby streets, including a park where children played. (In December 2014, it was announced that New York Fashion Week would be evicted from Lincoln Center after the spring 2015 shows.)

The raised profile conferred on Diane by her CFDA presidency has given more authority to her political endorsements. In 2008 she supported Hillary Clinton for president but switched her support to Barack Obama when he won the nomination. Diane is proud that Michelle Obama wears her clothes—in 2009 the First Lady posed in a black and white wrap dress in Diane’s classic chain-link print for the official White House Christmas card. Because of her strong Democratic leanings, Diane was less pleased during the 2012 campaign when Ann Romney, wife of the Republican candidate for president, donned a magenta, geometric-print wrap dress for a Republican rally. In September 2012, during New York’s Fashion Night Out, a
Vogue-
sponsored festival of after-dark shopping that has since been discontinued, Diane told the crowd gathered at her boutique, “Everyone here better be a Democrat, no Republicans.”

A lover of causes devoted to helping women, Diane sits on the board of Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit foundation that promotes women’s economic progress. In 2010 she created the DVF Awards for women leaders and activists around the world who’ve worked for change in their communities. Every year several women “who have survived, learned from their survival, and are leading from their survival,” as Diane puts it, are each given fifty-thousand-dollar grants underwritten by the Diller-von Furstenberg Foundation (winners also receive a statuette designed by Anh Duong). The ceremony is held annually in the United
Nations cafeteria, which is transformed for the occasion with soft lighting and cushy banquettes. Over the years the event has drawn an A-list crowd of women guests, presenters, and honorees, including Christiane Amanpour, Hillary Clinton, Julie Taymor, Nancy Pelosi, and Oprah Winfrey.