Diane von Furstenberg (28 page)

She realized what she wanted more than anything was to get back into fashion.

She decided to reenter the way she started—by approaching several established Seventh Avenue firms about taking her on as a division. She would do the designing and leave the manufacturing and distribution to others. In 1990 she signed a deal to design a moderate sportswear line for Russ Togs.

The company had been founded, like so many American clothing businesses, by Jewish entrepreneurs who’d grown up on the Lower East Side. Eli and Irving Rousso left school as teenagers to work in the garment industry. After serving in the armed forces during World War II, they started Russ Togs with their father in 1946. At the time Diane signed on with the firm, Irving Rousso, a man of driving ambition and epic chutzpah, who built the firm into one of the nation’s most successful manufacturers of moderately priced sportswear, still served on the company’s board.

Irving had started out as a salesman
and
a designer, and he worked every day, all day, even on Yom Kippur. “My father was going to kill me.
But I didn’t care,” he recalled in
Schmatta,
the 2009 documentary about the New York garment business. In his quest for success, Irving stopped at nothing. His two uncles also had a business on Seventh Avenue, making ladies’ suits. “They were very successful, and we weren’t doing any business,” Irving recalled. So he went to all the stores in New York that carried his uncles’ line, bought every style, and knocked them off. “My uncle called my father screaming, so my father comes over to me and says, ‘Son, did you do such a thing?’ And I said, ‘Pop, let me say something to you. If you were my competition, I’d knock the shit out of you, also.’”

By the early nineties the retail landscape had changed dramatically, and Russ Togs had hit hard times. Department stores were closing out their budget divisions and, in an era before Target and other big-box stores, moderately priced lines such as Russ Togs had no place to go. The company came up with the idea to reinvent itself by acquiring prestige labels. At the time they signed a deal with Diane, they’d already bought Diesel, a hip European jeans brand, which they would introduce in the United States.

Russ Togs seemed to be Diane’s best option. “This third child of hers—her brand—was floundering,” recalls Kathy Landau, a New Yorker who’d been living in Los Angeles when Russ Togs hired her to move home to oversee marketing for its new DVF division. The morning after she’d been hired, Landau opened the
Los Angeles Times
to see a huge ad for schlocky, ninety-nine-cent DVF cosmetics cases sold by the Thrifty Drug Store chain. Landau remembered Diane’s glory days with the wrap dress and couldn’t believe her brand had sunk so low. Diane herself had also faded from public consciousness. When Landau told her friends she was going to work for Diane von Furstenberg, they couldn’t even place who that was. Diane had merged in their minds with other dark-haired beauties who’d been famous in the seventies. “They’d ask me, ‘Oh, was she the one who was kidnapped?’ And I’d say, ‘No, she’s not Gloria Vanderbilt. And she’s not Paloma Picasso, either,’” Landau recalls.

Russ Togs set up a showroom for Diane in the company’s Seventh
Avenue headquarters, and she went to work. She was unhappy designing inexpensive sportswear in cheap fabrics—leggings, catsuits, jackets, and skirts. “I ate a lot of humble pies,” she said. But at least she was working. She’d also begun the process of divesting herself of her remaining licenses and reclaiming her name. “In some cases, I had to buy it back, in some cases, beg it back,” she recalled. By 1992, the only products still produced under a DVF license were eyewear, luggage, children’s wear, and the fragrance Tatiana.

Things improved a bit the next year, when Diane got to design dresses, her sweet spot. “I was marginally happier with the dresses I went on to design in 1991, clever woven wrap tops and stretch woven skirts,” she wrote. “The fabric wasn’t what I wished it could be, but finally there was a product I could somewhat identify with.”

Diane decided to celebrate the new dress line by hosting a press breakfast similar to the ones she’d held in the seventies at her Fifth Avenue office. She had all the furniture cleared out and installed a display with the new clothes. At 7
A.M.
, a couple of hours before the breakfast was to start, Landau got a call at home with startling news: Russ Togs had declared bankruptcy. (In a short time, the company would go out of business.) She rushed to the office and told Diane. Without missing a beat, Diane said, “In that case, we’ll do it ourselves.”

The press breakfast went ahead as planned, and soon after, Diane moved Landau and the president of the Russ Togs Diane von Furstenberg Sportswear division, Kathy Van Ness, uptown and went back into business. “It was nothing but us and a desk,” recalls Van Ness. “We did everything from finding the factories [in Hong Kong], to setting up the organization, to planning the buys, to figuring out the gross margins, to talking to retail stores, to managing salespeople—everything you do in any other business, but this was a start-up, from zero. It was a huge rush of energy to launch it. I couldn’t have imagined what her brand would become considering where we started, which was with nothing. But Diane was very clear about where she wanted to take it.”

The wrap dress, and the story of the wrap dress, permeated all her ideas about her business, even in planning a separates line. She wanted to make easy, comfortable, affordable clothes that enhanced a woman’s femininity and confidence. “Her customer profile of a strong, confident, independent woman was the same as it had been in the seventies,” says Van Ness.

As in the seventies, Diane’s designs centered on prints. She “would sit in her office sketching ideas—checks, geometrics—very bold and brave designs,” says Landau.

Adds Van Ness, “She was very much about clothes that anyone could wear—if you had a bust or didn’t, if you had a waist or didn’t.”

Diane launched the dresses in March 1992 at Macy’s flagship store in New York’s Herald Square. The store had given her the windows, which Diane decorated to look like her office, with a desk, books, photos, posters, and sketches scattered across the floor.

As a crowd of sixty people gathered outside, Diane stood in the window with a microphone. “I feel like a fool,” she began, her voice echoing outside through a loudspeaker. Then she held up each dress to the perplexed crowd, explaining that “they are designed for women who work.”

Afterward, she met customers on the fourth floor, where fifteen hundred square feet had been devoted to displays and racks of Diane’s dresses. The next day she hosted a reception for fifty of Macy’s best customers in the store café, followed by a fashion show. She also made appearances at Macy’s stores in Tysons Corner, Virginia, and in Cherry Hill and Paramus, both in New Jersey. The dresses sold well enough, though, as Diane later admitted, the fabric wasn’t good, and they were not well made. She stayed with it for a while, but her heart wasn’t in it, and after a few seasons she ended the line.

By then she was on to a new project. It had started in the summer of 1991, when, in the Concorde Lounge at JFK on her way to Paris, she ran into Joe Spellman, a marketing expert for Elizabeth Arden. Diane told Spellman about her frustration—she wanted to rebuild her business
but didn’t know how. Spellman put her in touch with Marvin Traub, the former chairman of Bloomingdale’s, and Lester Gribetz, the store’s former vice co-chairman. She considered forming a partnership with the three men, and they began discussions on the best way to relaunch DVF. During one of their talks, Spellman suggested Diane start by selling her clothes on QVC, the home shopping channel.

QVC, for “Quality, Value and Convenience,” had been founded four years earlier, in 1986, by a restless entrepreneur named Joseph M. Segel. After watching a videotape of the Florida-based Home Shopping Network, the broadcast cable TV network, Segel decided he could do a better job. Operating out of a huge, windowless brick hangar in a bland suburban corporate park in West Chester, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles west of Philadelphia, QVC first broadcast on November 24, 1986, from 7:30
PM
to midnight, and reached an audience of 7.6 million.

In a few years, the network was broadcasting 24/7 and had established itself as the world’s foremost purveyor of such products as fake jewels, macramé sweaters, frozen crab cakes, and inflatable mattresses. QVC was piped into cable networks that went to 45 million US homes, as well as hospital waiting rooms and auto repair shops, where it flashed nonstop on TV screens. In 1992, sales were $1 billion a year.

From its start, QVC was a landing pad for celebrities sliding down the trash chute of pop culture. This was where Annette Funicello hawked her mohair Teddy bears, Victoria Principal pitched her makeup line, and Marie Osmond sold her doll collectibles. But no one epitomized the huckster vibe of QVC more than comedian Joan Rivers, who at fifty-nine was already a plastic-surgery cautionary tale and whose eponymous costume jewelry line provided her a comfortable “annuity,” as she put it. “God bless QVC,” she told Novid Parsi of
Time Out Chicago
. “They came to me when nobody was doing it, when it was a dirty thing to do, and it’s been my rock.”

On the last Saturday in February 1992, Diane took the Metroliner to West Chester with her would-be partners—Gribetz, Traub, and
Spellman. The moment she walked into the QVC studio, she saw her future—it looked like money. As she followed the three men down the hall, she found herself thinking out loud, “I want to own this place.”

At that moment the soap opera actress Susan Lucci was on the air pitching hair products. Operators sitting at tables keyed in phone orders on computer screens from customers watching on television, charged each order to a credit card, and then pressed the Send key, which transmitted the order to a warehouse. QVC was able to slash costs by cutting out the middlemen. The company bought all the merchandise sold on the channel directly from manufacturers and shipped it from the company’s immense loading dock in West Chester. Delivery was promised in a week.

Diane watched in amazement as the phones lit up. At the end of her hourlong segment, Lucci had sold around a half million dollars’ worth of shampoo and conditioner. Diane saw Lucci’s pitch as an extension of what she herself had always done—talking directly to customers during her countless personal appearances at boutiques and department stores. But on QVC, Lucci reached more people at one time than Diane could have imagined.

As soon as she got back to New York, Diane called Diller. “Barry, you’ve got to go there,” she said. At the time, he was just as much at sea as Diane. He’d recently resigned from Fox, the network he’d started six years earlier, after Rupert Murdoch refused to make him an equity partner. He had no idea what he would do next. He was restless, newly fifty, and eager for a fresh challenge. No one had been more sharply cognizant of the changing cultural zeitgeist than Diller. But media and entertainment had grown far more complex since the start of his career. He decided he should at least look at QVC, for Diane’s sake, if nothing else.

Home shopping seemed a small thing for Diller’s huge ambition. What’s more, he was put off by the schlocky merchandise QVC offered. That could be changed, Diane told him. Indeed, Darlene Daggett, the brains behind QVC’s fashion merchandising, was trying to attract a more
sophisticated audience with higher-caliber products pitched by higher-caliber celebrities. Recently, socialite C. Z. Guest had been hawking garden tools, and Diane’s friend Kenny Lane had sold a lower-priced line of his upscale costume jewelry.

After his first trip to the QVC studios in West Chester, Diller came away impressed. “It was the first time I’d seen screens used for something besides telling stories,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting.’”

Still, he wasn’t convinced. At the time, Diane had signed a partnership agreement with Gribetz, Spellman, and Traub to produce a fashion line for QVC. Traub often met with Diane and Diller for Sunday dinner at the Carlyle Hotel—where they had separate apartments—and he recalled Diller complaining, “Why are we bothering with this? This is minor league stuff. Let’s go buy NBC, and we’ll put Diane’s [clothes] on NBC.”

“You may be right,” Traub answered. “But [QVC] is like starting in the minor leagues in baseball” or opening a play outside New York to test the waters. “Let’s see if we can make it work with QVC” first.

In the end Diller agreed, but he advised Diane to go forward on her own, so she could control her fashion line 100 percent. Diller bought out Traub, Spellman, and Gribetz for a nominal amount and negotiated Diane’s deal with QVC himself. (Diane’s first memoir relates a differing narrative. According to
A Signature Life,
Diane’s partners had declined to take part in the apparel line at all.)

Diane would design a small collection of silk garments called Silk Assets. The collection would include three dresses priced from $105 to $120; a blazer at $105; a kimono-style jacket at $98, oversized shirts from $78 to $88, two pants styles at $48 and $58, a wrap skirt at $48, T-shirts from $38 to $49, and two scarves at $40 and $48. Depending on the success of Diane’s first appearance, a new collection would be produced every two months or so and would include pieces that would coordinate with earlier collections so shoppers could build a complete wardrobe.

At 8
AM
on November 7, 1992, Diane strode onto a triangular slice of stage that had swiveled into place on the revolving QVC set, wearing a purple Silk Assets wrap dress and black Manolo Blahnik pumps, as Katherine Betts wrote in
Vogue.
Squinting into a bank of hot lights, she regarded the set, which had been decorated like a living room, with a sofa, a fireplace, and a stark white backdrop, to which an assistant was tacking up one of her colorful scarves. “Please, let’s not have scarves tacked up on the wall!” Diane said.

Her segment had been set up like a talk show, with a host, Jane Rudolph Treacy, a pretty, ebullient young woman, interviewing Diane at a desk. One of the network’s most popular hosts, Treacy had logged close to ten thousand hours hawking Breezies underwear, budget shoes, and gemstones on a show called
Rock Stars.