Read Diane von Furstenberg Online
Authors: Gioia Diliberto
D
iane’s name had fallen downward through Fashion with the swift trajectory of a boot dropped from the sky. During her five years in Paris she’d lost many of her licenses, including the most lucrative one, with Sears. The Midwest retailer had canceled her contract in the late eighties after she failed to attend several key meetings in Chicago. Those licenses she had left—for cheap children’s clothes, stationery, nurse’s uniforms, luggage, eyewear, and a fashion line in Mexico—were mostly producing “junk,” she recalled. “I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t listen. I could tell, they thought, ‘She’s a has-been. What does she know?’” Her cosmetics line, The Color Authority, had disappeared when Beecham underwent a series of mergers and acquisitions. In the process, Revlon bought Diane’s Tatiana fragrance, but then colored it purple and reformulated it into a tacky, sickly sweet scent. By 1989, Diane’s annual income had dropped 75 percent, from four million dollars to one million.
What Diane dreaded most had happened—her brand had become passé in a world where brands ruled supreme. Fashion now was dominated
by big corporations focused on marketing, growth, brand awareness, and profits, as opposed to innovation and artistry. Seventh Avenue was almost unrecognizable from the seventies when Diane had entered the business. Many design firms had closed, as manufacturing was outsourced to large factories in Asia.
New York fashion boomed with a roster of new stars: Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren. This outer-borough-born triumvirate comprised the first American designers to win global recognition, and each member carved out a particular territory in the fashion landscape—Karan, having-it-all chic; Klein, youthful sex; Lauren, preppy elegance.
Karan’s territory had once been Diane’s. In the 1970s, while Diane was the toast of New York, Karan had labored in back-room obscurity as an assistant to Anne Klein. She’d worked on the Anne Klein collection for the landmark Versailles fashion showdown, and after Klein’s death the following year, she became chief designer of the house. “Donna designed Anne Klein longer than Anne Klein did,” says Karan’s longtime marketing and communications director, Patti Cohen. “She wanted to have a little Donna Karan label within Anne Klein, and they said no, so after a long time of going back and forth, in 1984 they basically fired her and gave her money to start her own company.”
In 1985, Karan moved into the former showroom of deposed fashion king Halston. In an act symbolizing how completely Halston’s moment had passed, one of his associates erased the videotapes of the designer’s fashion shows with the intent to sell the blank cassettes to Karan.
Her first collection of “Essentials,” seven easy pieces that could be mixed and matched, was an immediate hit. In the coming seasons, Karan became known for her sophisticated jersey dresses, Lycra tights, and feminine power suits. Her soft fabrics and fondness for wrapped skirts, shirts, and dresses recalled Diane’s aesthetic, though unlike Diane, Karan favored a neutral palette and avoided prints. She also sold at a higher price point than DVF, though in 1989, the year Diane returned
to New York, Karan debuted a less expensive, youthful clothing line, DKNY, that went after the type of independent, on-the-go working women who’d made Diane famous.
Big-boned and heavy-featured, Karan had none of Diane’s feline allure. Yet, as a CEO and working mother of a young daughter, she embodied the superwoman idea of the eighties, an image reinforced by her 1992 ad campaign featuring a model posing as a woman president. In October 1989 the cover of
Manhattan, Inc.
magazine proclaimed Karan “The New Queen of New York.”
Amy Spindler, then the
New York Times’
chief fashion critic, wrote that Karan had become “the heroic female personification of New York fashion,” revered for her flattering panty hose—a staple in the American woman’s wardrobe—“forgiving colors,” and practical, timeless designs that were “full of solutions for imperfect bodies” and women who cannot afford to replace an entire wardrobe each season.
Still, Karan’s sales paled next to those of Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. They were two smart, streetwise tycoons from the same bustling neighborhood in the Bronx—who’d risen to the top of American life with a couple of good ideas and audacious marketing.
Both depended for their print and TV ads on photographer Bruce Weber, the bearish, disheveled “auteur” of their sleek, polished images. Weber’s stock-in-trade, as Michael Gross wrote in
Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren,
was to create “selling imagery from the raw material of high-end fantasy.” Weber was a genius at articulating the “codes” of a brand in visual terms, so that what the brand stood for was immediately apparent. For Lauren that meant glossy, Gatsby-esque scenes of beautiful people cavorting on the manicured lawns of estates and in rooms laden with the rich trappings of wealth—lush upholstery, crystal chandeliers, extravagant carpets. For Klein’s underwear and perfume ads, Weber created a sophisticated world of elegant sex, incorporating beautiful, semi-nude bodies that evoked classical statues against spare monotone backgrounds.
Handsome and bisexual, Klein was a struggling young designer working out of a small showroom at the York Hotel on Seventh Avenue when one day in 1968 his life was changed by the opening of an elevator door. A vice president of Bonwit Teller was on his way to an appointment on the floor above Klein when the elevator stopped unexpectedly. The executive saw Klein’s minimalist, tailored dresses and coats in neutral colors and immediately recognized their commercial potential. He stepped out, introduced himself to Klein, and told the young designer to take his samples to Bonwit’s. Soon Klein was one of the store’s top sellers.
At the time, Klein was married to his childhood sweetheart, Jayne Centre, and the father of a daughter, Marci. As his business took off, he moved his family from three rent-controlled rooms in Forest Hills to a glamorous Upper East Side apartment. In 1974 he split with Jayne. Four years later, Marci was kidnapped but rescued after Klein paid the $100,000 ransom, dropping it off himself in a paper bag at the top of an escalator in the Pan Am Building. A former Klein babysitter and two accomplices were caught and convicted.
The trauma disrupted the decadent life of sex, drugs, and partying till dawn that Klein had embarked on since leaving Jayne. He was seen with beautiful women but also at gay discos, and he shared a house with his fellow designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo in the mostly gay beach community of Fire Island Pines.
As a new gilded age dawned with the 1980s and AIDS decimated the gay community, Klein entered Hazelden, the drug rehabilitation hospital in Center City, Minnesota, joined AA, and married his pretty, tawny-haired assistant, Kelly Rector, who’d once worked for Ralph Lauren. When the profits from Klein’s jeans began sliding in 1983 after Carl Rosen’s death, Klein bought Puritan Fashion. As time went on, Klein’s women’s clothes grew more elegant and expensive and his status jeans more popular with both sexes. He became a style icon among gay men, in part for his sexy underwear ads starring rapper Marky Mark, soon to morph into the movie star Mark Wahlberg.
In the race to the top of American fashion, Klein’s only rival was Ralph Lauren. Born Ralph Lifshitz, Lauren was the anti-Calvin, his style of WASP old-money prosperity the opposite of Klein’s hip, androgynous aesthetic, and his family-man image the opposite of Klein’s hard-partying decadence. Lauren lived quietly with his wife, Ricky, and three children in faux aristocratic splendor in homes in New York, Colorado, Jamaica, and the Hamptons.
Lauren’s clothes seemed fogyish next to Klein’s sleekly minimalist creations and Karan’s sexy, draped jersey outfits. But that was exactly the point. Lauren’s flagship Polo brand stood for a world of manor houses, tailored clothes, servants, old silver, horses, sports cars, and antiques, a world he had created in his own Disneyland of a store in a grand limestone mansion on the southwest corner of Madison Avenue and Seventy-Second Street.
With its polo-player-on-a-horse emblem, the Polo brand evoked an American version of a familiar though often mocked type—the dim aristocrat. But while the Polo aesthetic was a risible cliché to the Brits, and the London Polo shop failed, closing after two years, Americans loved all things Polo. Never before Ralph Lauren,
Time
magazine gushed, had a clothing designer “established a product range so wide, a retailing network so extensive, a marketing image so well defined.” In 1986, Polo sales of a wide range of products (expensive women’s clothes were the least of it), from shirts and chinos to sheets and shoes, hit $1.3 billion, a fourfold jump from 1981.
CalvinDonnaRalph. The names were repeated so often together that they could have been one word. In New York in the early eighties, their celebrity clout was unrivaled in fashion. Meanwhile, Paris had produced its own stars, including Claude Montana with his aggressive black leather clothes, Thierry Mugler with his padded shoulders and power-woman space suits, and Azzedine Alaïa, whose gorgeous, body-conscious clothes recalled the designer’s designer of the pre–World War II era, Madeleine Vionnet.
FOR SOMEONE LIKE DIANE, “WHO
has this great, great need to be at the center of attention,” as one journalist who’s observed her over the decades puts it, being out of the limelight felt crushing. It was not in Diane’s nature, though, to feel sorry for herself or sit around brooding. Her style was to keep moving forward, to keep busy. Among the projects she undertook on her return to New York in 1989 was a series of coffee table books. The first one,
Beds,
featured color photographs of 170 beds around the world, some of them her own and those of her friends, including Marisa Berenson’s girly cloud of a bed draped in golden fabric and Kenny Lane’s masculine, dark-wood bed covered in cool, crisp linens.
To launch the book, Diane had five parties on two continents—two in New York, one in Los Angeles, hosted by Barry Diller, one in Paris, attended by ex-beau Alain Elkann, and one in Rome, hosted by ex-husband Egon von Furstenberg.
She also covered the couture collections in Paris in July for
Interview.
The magazine’s contributor’s note described her as the owner of “a licensing business, which includes fashion, beauty, and home products. She is also backing Salvy, a Paris based publishing house.” Her article, illustrated with drawings by Konstantin Kakanias, featured the openings of Christian Lacroix, Dior—designed by Gianfranco Ferré—Ungaro, Valentino, Saint Laurent, and Chanel, recently revived by “the Kaiser (as they call Karl Lagerfeld in Paris),” Diane wrote.
FOR DIANE, KEEPING BUSY ALSO
included dating. She was never long without male companionship, and the first person she began seeing after her breakup with Elkann was Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire real estate mogul, who was as famous for his liaisons with powerhouse women as he was for his media acquisitions, which included
The Atlantic Monthly, US News &World Report
, and, later (in 1993), the New York
Daily News.
By the time Diane began dating him, Zuckerman had already had relationships with the newscaster Betty Rollin, who was best known for
writing one of the first breast cancer memoirs,
First, You Cry,
and Gloria Steinem. “Mort Zuckerman is the only one [of my lovers] I’m embarrassed about,” says Diane. “Even while I was dating him, I was embarrassed.” He didn’t comport with her sense of self as interesting and creative. In the past, Diane had been attracted mostly to artists and writers and men like Diller, who worked in entertainment. She told friends she couldn’t bear to date golf-playing bankers and lawyers. With his focus on business and politics (through his publications), his love of tennis and softball, Zuckerman was not her usual type. Nonetheless, he was a consoling lover during a period of deep malaise. He also provided Diane reentry into the world of New York power.
At Zuckerman’s side, Diane was once again at the center of things. In August 1989 she went as his date to Malcolm Forbes’s seventieth birthday party extravaganza in Morocco, a three-day blowout that embodied the eighties spirit of extravagant excess. Some eight hundred of the world’s best-known people from business, politics, media, entertainment, society, and fashion attended, including Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Nan Kempner, Calvin Klein, and Elizabeth Taylor, who was Forbes’s date.
Guests who hadn’t sailed in on their own yachts were flown in by Forbes and met at the airport by one hundred clapping, dancing, brightly clad Moroccan women, as men in flowing djellabas blew trumpets. Luxury accommodations were provided in Forbe’s white Palais Mendoub overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar, and the festivities included lavish, champagne-soaked meals, fireworks, belly dancers, and a performance by two hundred horsemen in Moroccan costume.
Diane wrote in her first memoir that the mob of celebrities and blowout entertainments made her wistful for her relatively quiet life with Elkann. “I would have preferred to visit author Paul Bowles, who lived in Tangier,” she wrote. Perhaps her wistfulness had as much to do with the fact that of all the designers at the event, including Oscar de la Renta and Calvin Klein, she was the only one not designing.
More trips with Zuckerman followed. In November 1989 she traveled with him to Germany and witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. (Several years later, after she stopped sleeping with Zuckerman, she says, she traveled with him to Cuba, where they spent two days with Fidel Castro in Havana. Diane found the Cuban leader “charming” but “not quite as macho as I had expected.”)
She also went on her own to Spain, China, Japan, Sri Lanka, and Turkey. But the manic traveling could not cure her unhappiness. In the summer of 1990 she was with Barry Diller, David Geffen, and Calvin Klein in the Hamptons when the discussion turned to work. Klein was recovering from injuries suffered in a horseback-riding accident and faced financial difficulties due to flagging jeans sales, but he still had a business. Listening to Klein and the others discuss their work, Diane burst into tears. “I had no business at all,” she recalled.