Diane von Furstenberg (11 page)

The von Furstenbergs often ended up at Halston’s house after an evening that started, say, by socializing with the old guard at an uptown charity event, then moved to partying downtown with the hipsters at a club like Max’s Kansas City, a favorite of rocker Patti Smith, who’d arrived in New York around the same time as Diane.

The von Furstenbergs had the looks, money, style, and decadence to rise to the top. Soon they were the most talked-about couple in New York. Diane dressed to be noticed and photographed—during the day in Saint Laurent skirts and blazers, hippie-chic dresses from Ossie Clark, and romantic crushed-velvet pants and ruffled shirts by Jean Bouquin, the French designer who epitomized Saint-Tropez cool. At night, she dazzled wearing dresses in diaphanous fabrics with plunging necklines and armholes that showed a good deal of her breasts. She liked to reveal them, posing topless occasionally, once for Francesco Scavullo for the cover of
Town & Country,
though the picture, with a clothed Egon, was cropped to show only her sculpted shoulders and chunky David Webb necklace.

Nudity was “an important part of the seventies. From 1969 to 1980, everything—art, music, literature, politics and (as we know now from lawsuits against the Catholic Church) religion—involved people taking their clothes off,” wrote humorist P. J. O’Rourke in his foreword to
New York in the 70s,
a collection of photographs assembled by Allan Tannenbaum, photo editor of the now defunct
SoHo Weekly News.

As Tannenbaum’s photos attest, public nudity was glorified, an expression of the unbridled sexuality that pulsed through pop culture. It could be found at private parties and downtown clubs, at political demonstrations and performance-art installations. The New York cable show
Ugly George
provided one of its strangest expressions. Tricked out with zany video gear, a man calling himself Ugly George prowled the city streets, accosting young women and asking them to expose their breasts for his camera. A surprising number of women agreed to follow Ugly George to secluded spots in alleys and doorways, and sometimes even returned with him to his apartment.

THE VON FURSTENBERGS TRAVELED OFTEN,
following the seasons with other migratory jet-setters, from New York to Saint-Moritz to Cortina to Sardinia to São Paulo and back. The press alternately ridiculed and fawned over Diane as a “princess,” but mostly fawned. At the time, the title had a certain cachet. These were the glory days of “international white trash,” a phrase coined by writer Anthony Haden-Guest to describe the hordes of hard-partying, hard-spending Europeans, many with dubious aristocratic titles, who washed up on the shores of Manhattan. They were fleeing the stuffiness of old European society, unstable economies, high taxes, and kidnappings. “I didn’t have to carry a gun in New York like I did in Italy,” says Mimmo Ferretti, who worried that his family money made him a target for kidnappers.

In New York, the up-all-night, no-job-to-go-to Europeans—good-looking, sophisticated, and gorgeously dressed—found freedom, excitement, and acceptance. They were sought-after guests at fashionable dinners, parties, restaurants, and clubs. The Europeans gave New Yorkers an excuse to admire old world glamour and status and, as the revolutionary spirit of the sixties waned, made it “all right to be stylish and irresponsible again,” as Bob Colacello wrote.

Most of the reporters who covered Diane’s first fashion opening, in April 1970, focused on her link to European royalty. A
New York Times
piece in which Bernadine Morris, the paper’s chief fashion writer, referred to Diane as “the Princess” was typical. Other journalists emphasized her status as a society star. In her
New York Post
column, Eugenia Sheppard, for example, described the parties Diane and Egon had recently attended and didn’t even mention Diane’s collection until the third paragraph.

The stories reflected a fundamental fact:
Diane
was the product. Her most “brilliant invention was herself,” says John Richardson. “That’s what she’s all about.” Diane re-created herself as a beautiful, on-top-of-the-world princess, and this, combined with her natural “style and charm and charisma,” as Macy’s chief, Terry J. Lundgren, put it, was what drew people to her and her brand.

“I did make it all up,” Diane says. “But I’m not an imposter!” The invention comported with her deepest sense of self, of the strength, discipline, confidence, courage, and sophistication she strove to achieve.

“I remember when we first started, when Bloomingdale’s first bought Diane’s dresses,” recalls Francine Boyar, Diane’s house model in the seventies. The store “took out a full-page ad in the
New York Times
and told Diane she had to be in the picture in one of her dresses and she had to come to Bloomingdale’s because the customers wanted to meet the princess.”

The myriad images of Diane in the media reinforced the idea of her as sexy, beautiful, glamorous, and successful. By association, these qualities attached to her clothes. Though the designer herself still suffered bouts of gnawing insecurity, she imparted a veneer of glowing confidence to the public. Diane gave women permission to wear color, prints, and clingy fabrics, which they otherwise might not have had the courage to don.

“It’s all about archetypes,” says Stefani Greenfield, creative brand director of DVF Studio. Wearing Diane’s clothes made women feel more like their image of Diane, “more powerful and confident,” Greenfield says.

From the start, Diane was selling much more than clothes. She was selling an idea of womanhood that joined feminist ideals of independence and achievement to old world notions about sex and femininity.
In an era when college girls who wore lipstick were stigmatized on some campuses for colluding with male oppressors and professional women were urged to tamp down their sexuality by wearing masculine suits, Diane broke the rules about how a liberated woman should behave. She vamped into meetings in teetering high heels, fishnets, sexy dresses, and full makeup, speaking in a vaguely French accent with a whiff of Euro decadence that gave her the allure of a foreign femme fatale.

She enjoyed whipping off her shirt for photographers. (
WWD
ran the full topless picture from Diane’s
Town & Country
cover shoot, noting that the magazine perhaps “disappointed” readers by printing a cropped version.) To a ball in Dallas around the same time, Diane wore a floor-length Capucci dress with two suspender-like straps that barely covered her breasts. She so entranced the Texas oilman sitting next to her at dinner that his furious wife demanded to talk to Diane in the ladies’ room. “I think she was going to beat me up or something,” Diane told
Newsweek.
(Today she has no memory of the incident or how she managed to avoid the confrontation.)

Her disco diva exhibitionism often cast Diane in a frivolous light. Yet her entrepreneurial verve was grounded in a serious feminist conviction: Women should find fulfilling work that enabled them to support themselves.

That principle has been a cornerstone of feminist thought since Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her groundbreaking study
Women and Economics
in 1898. “Nothing makes a woman feel more insecure than being trapped, doing something because she has no alternative,” Diane wrote in her 1977
Book of Beauty.
“I believe that to be happy with a man you have to know that you could leave him and take care of yourself. To stay with him because he pays the bills and supports you financially and because you don’t feel that you could take care of yourself is a form of slow death.”

Diane understood that most women wanted it all—career, love, marriage, children—and despite any feminist anger they might have toward
the patriarchal forces that held them back, they yearned to look pretty and attractive to the opposite sex. This was the chief tension in Diane’s life—achieving the independence and power of a man while remaining a feminine woman.

DIANE HAD BEEN IN BUSINESS
for barely a year when she realized she’d been operating in an amateurish manner on luck, connections, and Ferretti’s credit. Her business had started to build, but with only twenty accounts, her volume was still too tiny for the big Seventh Avenue firms. What’s more, her shipments from Ferretti were reliably late. No one took her seriously. “They thought I was another one of those social girls who pretends she wants to work,” she recalled.

She began to think the best thing would be to join a firm as a house designer and leave the business details to others. After being turned down by two manufacturers—Jonathan Logan and David Crystal—whom she’d approached about joining their firms as a division, she talked to Johnny Pomerantz, CEO and son of the founder of Leslie Fay, a major apparel conglomerate.

Pomerantz, who met with Diane early in 1971, advised her to stay in business for herself but to get a partner who knew the inner workings of Seventh Avenue and could help her develop the infrastructure of a real fashion house. “I liked Diane’s clothes, but mostly I liked her,” says Pomerantz, who met Diane at her makeshift showroom at the Gotham Hotel. “I thought she was a special person. She was exciting. Ambitious.” He also sensed they had much in common. “I saw a book on her shelf about being Jewish, and I’m Jewish.”

It was almost a professional qualification. Most of the manufacturers who ruled Seventh Avenue were Jewish, the children and grandchildren of immigrants who’d arrived in New York at the end of the nineteenth century. In those days, the nation’s power elites were dominated by New England, Wall Street, and Chicago WASPs. But on Seventh Avenue
there were no quotas, no social, religious, or educational barriers to impede smart entrepreneurs.

Jews were naturals for the rag trade. Because their land had been confiscated over the centuries by the rulers of Europe and Russia, Jews had been pushed into becoming bankers, peddlers, and tailors. Their survival depended on discerning the needs and appetites of the larger culture. An instinct for what would sell accelerated their success on Seventh Avenue, as it would in Hollywood, where Jews also became the captains of the town industry.

By the turn of the twentieth century, 60 percent of all Jews employed in New York worked in the garment industry. Clothes were a way not only to put food on the table but also to reinvent yourself. Levi Strauss’s blue jeans of 1873 were the first Jewish success story in American fashion, followed by the post–World War II moguls who became spectacularly rich and, a generation later, by the design stars Calvin, Donna, Ralph, and DVF.

Pomerantz recognized in Diane the kind of coarse strength essential for Seventh Avenue success epitomized by his father, Fred. When Johnny started out as a salesman for Leslie Fay, he handled fifteen styles, and his father forbade him from taking an order unless the buyer bought every style he offered. One day, Pomerantz recalls, “the buyer for Bloomingdale’s came to the showroom and gave me an order for fourteen styles, a bigger order than I’d ever seen in my life. But I told her I couldn’t take it until I checked with my father.”

“Tell her to go fuck herself,” Fred Pomerantz told his son.

“You’re not going to like this,” Johnny told the buyer before repeating his father’s words. She ended up taking the fifteenth style—Pomerantz still remembers it was number 2118. “And after that she became my best customer,” he says.

Diane decided to take Pomerantz’s advice, and to help her set up a new company, Pomerantz introduced her to Richard Conrad, managing
director of Laurence Gross Ltd., which made clothes in the “young designer” category. At thirty-nine, the tall, bespectacled Conrad “seemed so old,” Diane recalls, but he knew his way around Seventh Avenue, and she needed his expertise and connections. A graduate of Rutgers University, Conrad had worked his way up in the rag trade, starting as an order picker, and he learned the business from one of its masters, Henry Rosenfeld, who’d made his first million before age thirty-five and was head of an eponymous business on Seventh Avenue.

On a thoroughfare of slick operators, Rosenfeld was one of the slickest. He’d grown rich by offering copies of expensive dresses—“class” in Seventh Avenue parlance—at “mass” prices. This simple formula earned him a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, a summer house in Atlantic Beach, an airplane, a boat, twenty-five pairs of solid-gold cuff links, and, despite his balding, undistinguished appearance and lack of education—he hadn’t read a book since dropping out of high school—an affair with the world’s most desirable woman, Marilyn Monroe.

Rosenfeld, who had a wife and two daughters, met Monroe through his racetrack buddy Milton Greene, a
Look
magazine photographer who became the star’s manager.

Rosenfeld paid Monroe’s bills at the Waldorf Astoria, where she stayed in New York in the early fifties before her marriage to Arthur Miller.

The dazzling star often came to Rosenfeld’s showroom, which was decorated like the nightclub El Morocco with zebra-striped upholstery, electric-blue walls, and palm trees with cellophane leaves. While he was working for Rosenfeld, one of Conrad’s jobs was to serve Monroe. “Henry would say, ‘Dick, do me a favor, take Miss Monroe into the stockroom and let her try on anything she wants. But don’t touch her!’”

Rosenfeld’s most popular model during Conrad’s tenure was a collared Arnel-and-cotton shirtdress with a sash belt that sold wholesale for $8.95. “We had it in four colors. Henry ordered a million yards of fabric, and he told his salesmen on the road to offer the stores just that one item.
That important lesson fit very neatly into the Diane situation, when the opportunity arose to have one sensational dress,” says Conrad.

He had been following Diane’s progress in
WWD.
He was curious about her and her clothes, and he agreed to meet her at her suite in the Gotham Hotel. During their meeting, Diane pulled off her shirt and, braless, tried on a couple of sweaters for Conrad’s reaction. Then she gave him two shirts she’d had made for him in Ferretti’s fabric, so he could experience how wonderful it felt against the skin. “I wore them on the weekends, and I felt a little funny because they weren’t exactly manly prints. But I got her message about the importance of the relationship between fabric and body,” Conrad says.