Read Diane von Furstenberg Online
Authors: Gioia Diliberto
Still, Diane did everything she could to support Egon’s business. During the fall collection shows in April 1974, the couple held their second joint show, this one attended by their children. As the girl models paraded in Diane’s shirtwaists and wraps and the boy models in Egon’s shirts, sweaters, and casual pants, Alex, four, and Tatiana, three, sat “quietly in the audience,” the
New York Times’s
Bernadine Morris noted. “But soon, startled either by the music or the models dancing along the runway with their arms flailing like windmills, the children ran to join Mommy offstage.”
With the preternatural insight children often display, Alex explained to Morris that his parents were like “Tatiana and me.” They had “the same sort of” brother-sister relationship.
Diane was the big sister looking out for Egon, protecting him, indulging him. “Egon would come into the showroom with his girlfriends and take the samples off the racks and throw them on the floor like we should pick them up,” says Conrad. “I would get very angry with him, and I had to threaten him a couple of times. He was brought up as a prince, and he felt he could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.”
Though Diane says Egon had plenty of money, his extravagant lifestyle sometimes left him with cash-flow problems. One day Diane asked
Conrad to loan Egon forty thousand dollars. “If I loan it to him, I’ll never see it again,” Diane said. “If you loan it to him, I’ll make sure he pays you back.” When Conrad demurred, Diane gave him two paintings as security, one by Jean Dubuffet and one by Max Ernst. Egon never repaid Conrad, who eventually sold the Dubuffet for a profit. The Ernst hangs to this day in Conrad’s New York living room.
I
n the 1970s you could don a DVF fur over your DVF dress, toss a DVF scarf around your neck, and pack for a trip with a DVF suitcase. You could wear DVF jewelry and improve your vision or shield your eyes from the sun with DVF glasses. You could carry a DVF handbag, step out in DVF heels worn over your DVF panty hose, tell time on a DVF watch, and go to sleep in a DVF nightgown. (In later years, you could also have surgery in a DVF hospital gown, attended by a nurse in a DVF uniform.)
According
to WWD
by the end of 1975, Diane’s name was on twelve products worth about forty million dollars in annual sales. Like many designers, she’d discovered licensing, which had become the hottest way to grow a fashion brand. But it was a risky business that could ruin a hard-won image if a designer slapped her name on too many cheap, tacky products. Walt Disney had started it all in the 1930s by hiring outside companies to produce and distribute Mickey Mouse toys, books, and other kitsch. The practice quickly spread to French fashion, with designers from Dior to Saint Laurent to Pierre Cardin putting their names on
almost everything, including stockings, sheets, chocolates, wigs, frying pans, golf clubs, sausage machines, stereos, and inflatable boats.
Licensing worked like this: Once a contract was signed, the designer was paid either a lump sum or a percentage of projected first-year royalties. Afterward, the designer’s royalties amounted to anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of net wholesale sales. The designer often (but not always) retained control of the quality and style of the products, while the license holder took care of manufacturing and distribution.
Though American designers were slower to embrace licensing than the French, by the 1970s, John Weitz, Anne Klein, and Bill Blass all had lucrative licensing agreements. No one, though, was making more money from the practice than Halston, who had thirty-one licensing accounts, generating myriad products and four million dollars in annual royalties. Then, in 1973, Halston sold his company to the conglomerate Norton Simon for ten million dollars. The sale made him spectacularly rich, but it was the start of his steep downward slide. He lost the right to control the use of his own name and would never get it back.
Diane took the cautionary lesson to heart. She knew her trademark was her most valuable asset. She told herself she would never accept a deal, no matter how lucrative, that forced her to give it up. Diane von Furstenberg stood for something. It stood for
her
. She was the brand. “There’s always an echo with an icon,” says Stefani Greenfield, the creative brand director of DVF Studio. “People are attracted to an icon’s essence,” which they’ve picked up from advertising and the media. So when they buy a feminine, sexy dress by Diane von Furstenberg in bold color and fabulous print, “it’s as if they’re buying a piece of Diane’s energy and confidence,” Greenfield says.
Diane, however, did not maintain tight control over her licenses. She fell into the trap of signing on with too many mediocre companies whose products, including children’s clothes and stationery, had nothing to do with her core collection of feminine, sassy clothes. “People were offering
me deals [right and left], everything was moving so fast, and I was so young,” she says.
The success of the wrap dress gave Diane the luxury of exploring new directions. She decided what she wanted now was to start a cosmetics business. The idea first came to her during her tryst with Ryan O’Neal at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. Seeing the pots of makeup in her hotel room bathroom, the
Love Story
star chided her, “Why do you need all that stuff?” Embarrassed, Diane blurted, because “I’m thinking of buying the company” that made the cosmetics.
The bluff soon turned into a fierce ambition. She dreamed of joining “the ranks of women like Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, and Estée Lauder, who created their own empires,” she wrote. “I loved the legends of these women and rather fancied myself as an up-and-coming one of them.”
Diane formed a cosmetics division in her company and hired a staff to produce a line of makeup and treatment products. In 1974 she opened her own DVF beauty store, finding an ideal spot in a small, empty shop on Madison Avenue between Sixty-First and Sixty-Second Streets, a few blocks from Halston’s boutique. (Soon, the cosmetics would also be sold in stores that carried Diane’s clothes.) She supervised the renovations, modeling the décor on the house of Guerlain on the Champs-Elysées, everything understated and elegant, with clinical bars and stools where women could sit to test the cosmetics. Diane’s products, packed in beige pots and stored in cabinets painted with images of women representing the four seasons, included lip gloss, lipstick, powder, eyeliner, body shampoo, bath oil, and talcum powder, all moderately priced.
To celebrate the opening on November 11, 1974, Diane took out a full-page ad in the
New York Times,
featuring professionally written ad copy and a photograph of her by Francesco Scavullo. She hired a sales staff and makeup artists, including Gigi Williams, a twenty-four-year-old downtown club girl and wife of Andy Warhol assistant Ronnie Cutrone. Williams
had a decidedly punk style—she favored boots, chains, studs, and spiky hair. But Diane insisted that Williams wear DVF to work like the other shop assistants. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” recalls Williams. On the day the beauty shop opened, Williams was behind the counter in a DVF shirtdress in a green and black zebra print when an elderly woman with a cloud of white hair walked in wearing the exact same dress. “I was mortified!” she says. Diane gave Williams and the other sales staff two new DVF dresses a month, and eventually Williams learned how to adapt them to her own style. Diane let her express herself by wearing “two dresses at a time, with one like a coat, and crazy belts and cowboy boots,” Williams recalls.
Diane loved having a cosmetics business, but her dream of becoming the next Estée Lauder never came true. “We never should have gone into cosmetics,” says Dick Conrad. “I should have warned Diane off it. But I was just as infatuated with our success as she was. When you’re a very fast-moving vehicle, as we were, you don’t want to step off. You figure, everything else has worked out so well, this will, too.”
But Diane couldn’t repeat her wrap-dress success with lip gloss and mascara. “We were going up against armies, and we didn’t even have a squad,” says Conrad. “We were undercapitalized and undermanaged, and we were competing with world-class companies. Because of the clout of our dress business, we got good positioning in the stores, but it was still tough. We started losing a couple million a year.”
The only bright spot in Diane’s cosmetics line was Tatiana, a fragrance named after her daughter. Since couturier Paul Poiret introduced a signature perfume, Rosine, in 1911, designers have been linking scent to their fashion lines, the most famous example being Coco Chanel’s Chanel No. 5. Introduced in 1921, Chanel No. 5 remains the world’s most popular scent—every thirty seconds a bottle of it is sold somewhere in the world.
There are many reasons for a designer to get into the fragrance business. Scent is relatively inexpensive to manufacture, and it’s cheaper than designer clothes, so it’s a great way to draw customers to a brand. To
formulate Tatiana, Diane turned to Roure Bertrand Dupont in Grasse, France. One of the world’s major creators of fragrances and the supplier of several of Estée Lauder’s perfumes, Roure Bertrand Dupont produced hundreds of scents before Diane approved a fresh floral one that she felt not only smelled sensational but also comported with the bright femininity of her clothes.
Halston had hired Elsa Peretti to create a bulbous teardrop for his blockbuster eponymous fragrance, but to keep costs down, Diane used an ordinary stock bottle for Tatiana. She also came up with an ingenious way to promote the scent—a packet of Tatiana was attached to the cleaning instructions of the thousands of dresses she sold each week. Women tried the fragrance, and many turned around and bought a bottle. “We did very well with it. It made money,” says Conrad.
The sales of the perfume Tatiana enabled Diane to fool herself that her cosmetics business was a wild success. “Diane can’t tolerate anything negative,” says Linda Bird Francke. “Everything has to be up.”
In 1976, according to
WWD,
Diane employed one hundred people and her business overall made $133 million—$40 million from her licenses and $93 million in retail sales from her dress, cosmetics, and fine-jewelry divisions. Conrad says the bulk of the millions came from the wrap dress. She paid herself a salary of $100,000, plus $150,000 in annual bonuses, the equivalent of about a million in today’s dollars.
Though her cosmetics line lost money, Diane would not give up her ambition to transform the faces of American women. In 1976 she published a book,
Diane von Furstenberg’s Book of Beauty: How to Become a More Attractive, Confident and Sensual Woman.
The advice inside amounted to little more than generic tips on skin care and exercise, but Diane sincerely wanted to help women.
Her idea of doing cosmetic makeovers sprang from the same desire. Diane wanted to save women from their cosmetic mistakes, show them how to make the most of their looks, ease their anxieties about aging, and, in the process, improve their confidence. “Women would book
makeovers on the phone and come into the shop,” Williams explains. “Then Diane and I started doing makeovers by mail. I made a questionnaire. Women would fill out information about their beauty routines. I’d make a face chart, and I’d paint the cosmetics on the face chart with my finger and send it back to them; they’d send it back to me and order the cosmetics.”
When Diane sent Williams to do makeovers at the DVF cosmetics counter at Bloomingdales, Williams had to admit that she’d been fired from a job there and banned from the store a couple of years earlier after she’d been caught shoplifting an Estée Lauder lipstick. “Diane was appalled,” Williams recalls. “She took it like a betrayal, and I understood. I was managing her boutique; I was in charge of all the money! But mostly, she was just hurt and disappointed. There’s a very moralistic side to Diane. She just thought I was too good a person to stoop so low as to shoplift.”
In fact, at the time she worked for Diane, Williams faced another personal issue—a serious drug problem. She shot up heroin every Friday night—“I only did it once a week; that was my rule,” she says—and she’d arrive at work on Saturday morning after no sleep. But she was young and never seemed to show any ill effects. If Diane knew, she didn’t let on. She decided to trust Williams, and Williams never gave her a reason to doubt the trust. “I was worried about going into Bloomindale’s because I’d been banned, but [one of Diane’s cosmetics executives] told me not to worry. ‘They’re not going to say anything because you’re working for Diane,’ he said.” And he was right.
During the next several years, Williams traveled across the country to do makeovers and train the sales staff in department stores that sold DVF cosmetics, sometimes with Diane herself. Occasionally, they’d conduct makeup seminars in hotels. “We would do sixty makeovers a day,” Williams recalls. “We’d pick a face in the crowd, and we’d say, ‘Come on, come over here, within seven minutes you’ll look beautiful.’
But we weren’t just selling cosmetics. We were selling feminism. We’d tell women, you shouldn’t be spending more than seven minutes on your makeup, and this is what you need—some mascara, cheek color, and lipstick—because you have more important things to do. Because you can be whatever you want to be.”
T
hough their marriage was over, Diane and Egon would not divorce until 1983. They remained extremely close, bonded by their children, their shared past, their European roots, and their general delight in each other. “Do I think I could have lived with Egon my whole life?” Diane asks, her voice trailing off. She looks out the tall windows of the downtown building where she lives and works today to the sky beyond, as if searching for the answer in the clouds. The question remains open, but her wistful expression suggests she still misses Egon.
She spent most holidays with him and their children and, often, her boyfriend of the moment. Egon still bought Diane expensive jewelry, and they sometimes went out together as a couple. One evening in 1974 they arrived together at the Dakota on Seventy-Second Street and Central Park West for a party at the home of real estate developer Gil Shiva and his wife, Susan, the daughter of MCA Entertainment founder Jules Stein. The guest of honor that evening was the new chairman of Paramount Pictures, a thirty-two-year-old wunderkind named Barry Diller.
Diane usually delighted in meeting powerhouse men, but when she was introduced to Diller, “she was fairly dismissive of me,” he recalls. Egon wasn’t any more encouraging. He “told me my pants were too short,” Diller says. “Probably they were. I was not a great sophisticate then.”