Diane von Furstenberg (7 page)

Later, Marie-Antoinette, perhaps history’s most famous clotheshorse, decreed that only she and her closest friends could wear
le grand corps,
a jewel-bedecked corset that was tighter and meaner than anything worn by ordinary women.
Le grand corps
was so constraining that one princess passed out every time someone at court told a joke. She could never get enough oxygen to laugh.

If Diane had stayed in Paris, it’s unlikely she would have become a famous designer. As a Belgian, the French fashion establishment would never take her seriously. With the exception of the father of haute couture himself, Charles Frederick Worth, only one non-French designer at that point had ever succeeded in Paris couture—that was the Chicago-born Mainbocher, who happened to have French ancestors and a very French name, Main Bocher, which he collapsed into one word.

The models, photographers, and fashion journalists Diane met through Koski and Marisa were living the kind of über-glamorous life she coveted. She grew restless working as Koski’s assistant, and in the summer of 1968 she abruptly quit her job. “I didn’t wait for my month’s salary. I took Albert’s radio, charged a plane ticket to him, and left,” Diane recalled.

“I guess she knew I wouldn’t mind,” says Koski. “I was very rich, and her salary wasn’t so extraordinary. It was a very relaxed company, and a very relaxed time.”

Now Diane was free to travel with Marisa. At the Mare Moda fashion weekend in Capri, the friends “stayed in a pretty hotel and dressed up and went to wonderful parties,” Diane recalls. “I met Valentino and [his partner] Giancarlo Giammetti, and Italian playboys. Both Marisa and I ended up having a romance with Italian playboys.”

At Mare Moda, Diane also ran into Angelo Ferretti, the flamboyant owner of thriving textile factories in Italy, whose son Mimmo was a friend of Egon’s brother. Ferretti invited Diane to apprentice with him, to learn everything she could about clothes manufacturing. It would turn out to be the most important relationship of her early career.
“I was looking for my door to be independent, and Ferretti opened it for me,” Diane says.

ANGELO FERRETTI’S FACTORIES SAT IN
a nest of textile companies in Parè, near Como, Italy, thirty miles north of Milan on the shores of Lake Como. The area swarmed with billionaires, duchesses, and movie stars who lived in extravagant villas high in the hills, and with artists who peddled their work to the textile manufacturers. In his mid-forties, Ferretti played the role of big-shot businessman—bossy, volatile, and flamboyant. A tall, bulky man, he wore bespoke suits and owned a yellow Maserati that he drove suicidally fast through the Italian hills. He also had a black Rolls-Royce that he drove to work and parked smack in front of the factory’s main entrance, blocking the door. Though reckless in most of his habits, he was almost comically fastidious about his clothes. If he noticed a wrinkle in his trousers when he arrived at work, he’d give the pants to a seamstress to press, then wander around the premises in his underwear, greatly enjoying the reaction of his workers. “He was like a king,” recalls Sue Feinberg, the designer who would later oversee production of Diane’s clothes at Ferretti’s factory outside Florence.

“Today he’d be in jail for the way he treated his employees,” adds Diane, noting that he screamed “Imbecile!” at them whenever he was dissatisfied with their work, which was a great deal of the time. No doubt he’d also be in trouble in this environment-conscious age for what Diane says was another Ferretti practice: dumping his toxic, leftover dye in Lake Como.

People whispered that Ferretti had won his Como factories in a poker game. Actually, he’d bought them after World War II with loans from relatives, including his father, an officer in the Italian army. A combination of business acumen, luck, a stellar product, and a cadre of diligent, talented workers enabled him to keep his family and his mistresses in style, in villas and swank apartments, jewelry and fast cars, despite a gambling habit that should have ruined him.

Most of his weekends were spent at the roulette tables in Monte Carlo, where he lived rent-free in a three-room apartment, courtesy of the Hotel de Paris Monte-Carlo. In Paris, he stayed at the Plaza Athénée on the tab of the city’s premier gambling club, Le Grand Cercle. A diabetic, he traveled everywhere with a cooler of insulin.

Diane immediately felt at home in Como. Her grandfathers and grandmothers, her uncles and aunts, had owned and worked in textile firms and clothing shops. In Italy, as in Diane’s family, textiles were more than cloth. They came from the blood and soil of the people. Many of the workers in Ferretti’s factories had learned the crafts of weaving, dyeing, printing, pattern making, and sewing from
their
parents, in a long line stretching back generations.

Angelo Ferretti’s success was built largely on a new cotton-jersey fabric he developed. “It was article six-oh-three-oh; I still remember the number,” says his son Mimmo. “We were the first to do it. We put together two different kinds of yarn, and, wow, it worked. Instead of shrinking ten percent, it shrank only five percent, and it held all its color.” It would become the fabric of the wrap dress and play a huge role in Diane’s success.

Ferretti had some designer accounts—he made shirts for Ferragamo and Louis Féraud, for example. Mostly, though, he used his gorgeous cotton jersey for “horrible stuff, really schlocky things like you’d find at Monoprix or UPIM [the European equivalents to Target],” says Feinberg. Among them were tens of thousands of T-shirts. Until Diane came along, she adds, “I don’t think Ferretti realized what he had.”

Still, Diane learned a great deal from Ferretti: how to spot designs that would translate into good prints for fabric, how certain colors worked together harmoniously, and the various techniques for dyeing. “Ferretti had thousands of prints,” says Diane, who spent hours going through them, and quickly she developed her “own point of view.” Designs that “had some movement to them,” particularly ones that evoked nature—animal
skins, tree bark, leaves—sparked her imagination the most and would become signatures of DVF style.

DIANE SPENT THE FALL OF
1968 traveling back and forth between Ferretti’s factories in Italy and her mother’s apartment in Paris. At the time, Egon was living in New York, where he had enrolled in a training program at Chase Manhattan Bank. He and Diane had broken up, though they remained friends, and when he brought his new love, an Italian girl, to Paris for a visit, he asked Diane to arrange a dinner party for her. Diane complied. Through Florence Grinda’s connections she “borrowed a dress from Lanvin” for the dinner, Diane recalls. “It was at Maxim’s, and we were maybe twelve people. I remember Marc [Landeau, Egon’s close friend] taking me home afterward, and I was really down.”

It saddened Diane that Egon would be taking his new girlfriend, not her, to his mother’s house in Cortina for the Christmas holiday. So convinced was she “that [she’d] lost the love of [her] life” that she consulted a fortune-teller. The seer’s prophecy: Diane would be married and pregnant within six months, though by whom, the fortune-teller didn’t say.

At the end of December, Diane went to Saint-Moritz with Marisa. “I was making a lot of money as a model, and I wanted Diane to come with me, but she didn’t have the money, so I pulled this wad of cash from my bag and gave it to her,” recalls Marisa.

In Saint-Moritz they shared a room at the five-star Badrutt’s Palace Hotel, where management gave deeply discounted rates to beautiful young people, whose presence they felt enhanced the atmosphere. “We’d go down to have massages to stay in shape, then we’d come up to the room and order room service and eat everything on the menu. Then, we’d go out to ski, and at night we’d party,” recalls Marisa.

Egon’s uncle, the married Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, was staying at the hotel with a gorgeous Italian actress who was his mistress. “He
used Marisa and me as decoys,” to draw attention away from his affair with the actress, says Diane. “If you’re with three girls, it looks [more innocent] than if you’re with one.”

On New Year’s Day, Egon showed up and took an inexpensive room under the eaves at the hotel. His Italian girlfriend was nowhere in sight, and he confessed to Diane that he still loved her. “We spent the night together, and Egon invited me to New York,” Diane recalls.

She knew Egon was bisexual, and she accepted it. In the pre-AIDS world of the jeunesse d’oré, sexuality was fluid, in an almost pre-Freudian, nineteenth-century way. “We didn’t think in terms of gay or straight,” says Marisa. “We were just free. I was in love with Helmut Berger. It didn’t bother me that he was bisexual. We adored each other. My grandmother was horrified. But to me it all seemed very natural.”

There was a certain glamour attached to dating a bisexual man, and a sense of conquest in sparking heterosexual desire. Many of the gay men in Diane’s circle were handsome, sensitive, romantic, caring, and well dressed. They could dance well, and they were enthusiastic lovers. “When they were with you, they were really with you,” says Gigi Williams, a makeup artist who worked for Diane in the seventies and slept with her share of bisexual men. “They weren’t testosterone-driven, misogynistic, or womanizing, like so many straight men,” adds Williams. “They were very empathetic. Anyway, everybody was everything in those days.”

Excess and flamboyance were celebrated. What damned you was excessive caution and dullness and adherence to bourgeois ideas about proper behavior and sexual categories. This did not mean that people didn’t fall madly, exclusively in love, and that hearts weren’t broken. It meant only that tolerance—or at least its appearance—prevailed.

Whatever their sexual inclinations, men of Egon’s background were expected to marry and produce an heir. Egon began introducing Diane as his fiancée even before they discussed marriage. And she worked hard to play the part of consort to a prince. “She was not terribly at ease socially, not very self-assured,” recalls the photographer Marina Cicogna, who
produced movies in the sixties and seventies. “She was a girl from a good family in Belgium, but she hadn’t been exposed to the world of wealth and glamour that Egon had grown up with.”

Cicogna first met Diane when Egon brought her to a party Cicogna hosted in Venice during the September 1967 Venice Film Festival. A rich cast of movie stars showed up, including Jane Fonda, Marcello Mastroianni, Elizabeth Taylor, Catherine Deneuve, and Claudia Cardinale. “It was supposed to be a fun, yé-yé sort of party. We’d asked everyone to dress in white and gold,” Cicogna says.

Most of the women wore the kinds of clothes they’d wear to go dancing at a nightclub—short party dresses or sexy pants outfits. Diane arrived on Egon’s arm dressed like her mother in a black and white Chanel suit with a white blouse and foulard, clutching the chain of a shoulder bag. In a photograph Cicogna took of her that evening, she looks pale and scared.

DIANE HAD HEARD STORIES ABOUT
Manhattan, about its swank eateries and smart hotels, its neon glamour and Wall Street zest. When she told her mother about Egon’s invitation, Lily gave her a plane ticket as a twenty-second birthday present. Lily knew Diane would be staying with Egon and his roommate, Baron Stanislaus Lejeune, at their apartment at York and Eighty-First Street. Diane told her father, however, that she would be living with a girl named Suzanne Lejeune. She knew he’d disapprove of her bunking with a man “and this way he could still write to me [in care of] S. Lejeune,” Diane recalls.

She left Paris on a cold night in January 1969. As the jumbo jet lifted higher and higher, Diane looked out the window. The tall, twinkling city had flattened out to resemble a swath of black silk spattered with crystals and paillettes. The journey that would change her life had begun.

New York

D
iane fell in love with New York the moment she stepped from the taxi onto the pavement in front of Egon’s building and got her first whiff of Manhattan air—that heady mix of glamour, power, danger, grittiness, and wealth.
This
was where she belonged.

At Egon’s side she entered the recherché world where society and celebrity meet. The old guard in New York admired Gianni Agnelli, the rich and influential head of Fiat, and embraced his charming, handsome nephew. It didn’t hurt that Egon himself was a prince, a title that gave him a magical glow, invoking romance, fairy-tale endings, and an exotic history of palace riches and court intrigues. Since moving to New York, Egon had been invited everywhere—to Park Avenue dinners and grand charity balls, to gallery openings and polo games in Southampton. Now he took Diane with him. She met everyone from Diana Vreeland and Andy Warhol to Brooke Astor, Nan Kempner, and Truman Capote. Painfully aware that she was included on guest lists because she was
Egon’s girlfriend, “Diane tried desperately to fit in,” says the writer Bob Colacello, who met her soon after he arrived in New York.

“Egon introduced me to all these [society] girls who’d take me to lunch at 21 and La Grenouille, and they’d explain to me how ‘if you sit on
that
side, it’s Siberia,’” and social suicide, “and it all felt so strange,” says Diane.

The sixties had been a time of freaks and hippies, of political activism and radical chic. Soon the revolutionary spirit, faux and otherwise, would be overtaken by the dawn of the disco decade with its hedonistic brew of style, irresponsibility, indulgence, and glitz. At the fringes was the drug- and sex-soaked demimonde that thrived in the downtown clubs and gay bars. Egon moved effortlessly through the night worlds of New York. “He was in perpetual party mode,” says Colacello.

Though Egon participated in the training program at Chase Manhattan, his banking career stalled. “He never really made any money,” says his son, Alex. Still, his family money enabled him to live comfortably, and Diane, as his live-in girlfriend, did not have to work.

The idea of being a kept woman, though, horrified her. It contradicted everything about the life of freedom she craved. It also was an impediment to her most deeply held ambition—to be
somebody.
Since financial independence, Diane believed, was the first step to this end, she toyed with becoming a model. Francesco Scavullo, a fashion photographer best known for his portraits of celebrities such as Brooke Shields and Burt Reynolds, took pictures of her. But when Diane showed her portfolio to Wilhelmina Cooper, the head of Wilhelmina Models, the prestigious agency that represented Lauren Hutton, Janice Dickinson, and Beverly Johnson, Cooper turned her down flat. At a lissome five feet, seven inches tall (she’d shed the chubbiness of her late-teen years), Diane’s figure was in the modeling ballpark. She also had high, chiseled cheekbones and large, wide-set eyes, which made her extremely photogenic. Her face, though, was too strong and mature-looking for American magazines, which at the time favored softer, less exotically pretty women.