The Woman I Wanted to Be (18 page)

THE
BUSINESS
OF FASHION

I
didn’t dare call myself a designer for many years despite the overwhelming success of my wrap dress. Yves Saint Laurent was a designer. Madame Grès was a designer. Halston was a designer. Me, I came into fashion almost by accident in the hope of becoming financially independent. I never dreamed that the simple dress I launched in 1974, a dress that was easy, sexy, elegant, and affordable all at the same time, would catapult me into fashion history. Yes, I’d sold millions of dresses by 1978. That dress had been inducted into both the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and the Smithsonian Institution collection, though I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even know what the Smithsonian was at the time. At the age of twenty-nine I’d even made the cover of
Newsweek,
which identified me as “Dress Designer Diane von Furstenberg.”

Still, I didn’t dare call myself a designer then, any more than I dared call myself a good mother while my children were still growing. You cannot make these claims until you get much older, because you need to have the proof, and so it wasn’t until after I discovered I did have a second act, that I could do it again and be relevant and be right that the first time was confirmed, that it wasn’t an accident. Only after almost two decades since I’d created the wrap dress, did I call myself a designer.

Looking back, what has been a whirlwind life in fashion fits neatly
into three distinct phases: The American Dream, The Comeback Kid, and now, The New Era. This third phase, which I’m just moving into now, promises to be the most fulfilling. The goal is ambitious: to capitalize on all that I have done before and create a legacy for the brand so it will last long beyond me. The process has been painful at times and stressful, but the result, I hope, will be worth it. For me, it already is. To still feel relevant and so engaged at my age is a wonderful adventure. In a lot of ways, I am doing the same thing I did the first time. But finally I can use my experience and my knowledge to form a long-term vision. My instinct remains the constant. Being impulsive is my most valuable quality, though it is also my biggest fault. I have to caution myself, but it is still the driving force behind the brand, and amazingly, forty years after its birth, the wrap dress and I are still here and kicking.

I owe everything to that little dress: my independence, Cloudwalk, my children’s education, the trips we took, the donations I make, the Bentley I drive, my place in fashion history—it all comes from that one little dress. That one little dress has taught me everything I know about fashion, women, life, and confidence.

I did not think much of the little wrap dress when I created it, but I now appreciate its value and uniqueness.

Looking back, I can’t help but think, what if? What if I’d never met Egon? Gotten pregnant? Felt driven to support myself after we married? What if I hadn’t met Angelo Ferretti in Cortina or Diana Vreeland in New York or Halston or Giorgio Sant’Angelo? What if?

I’ve long believed that the “ifs” were the doors to my future, and I dared to open them, one by one, as they came along. I knew the kind of woman I wanted to be but I didn’t know how I would become her. Opening those doors led me on a path to fashion, and that became the path to the woman I am today.

4

THE AMERICAN DREAM

T
he journey began after Egon and I left Geneva in 1968, he to New York to train at the Chase Manhattan Bank, I to Paris to look for a job. We were both twenty, too young to think seriously about a future together, so we each set off on our own adventures. It was in Paris that I discovered a world I didn’t know, the glamorous world of fashion, which would seduce me forever.

I stumbled into it through my best friend in Paris, Florence Grinda. Florence was a vivacious socialite whom I’d met in Geneva but became close to at a party in St. Tropez. Her husband, the tennis champion and playboy Jean-Noël Grinda, had disappeared into the bushes with a Swedish model when I found her sitting alone and feeling sorry for herself. We started to talk, and to console her, I took her to the port for an ice cream. We became best friends, and when we returned to Paris, night after night I left my tiny ground-floor studio on avenue Georges Mandel in the 16th Arrondissement to go out with Florence and her husband. Through her I met exciting people
and got invited to lots of parties. She got designers to lend me clothes, a common practice that was new to me. A fun new world was opening. However, what I desperately wanted was a job.

A friend of hers introduced me to the handsome and mysterious fashion photography agent Albert Koski, who represented all the best fashion photographers of the time: David Bailey, Bob Richardson, Art Kane, and Jean-Louis Sieff, among others. Koski hired me on the spot to be his assistant, his do-everything girl, from answering the phone in the little house in which he worked and lived in the 16th Arrondissement to curating the photographers’ books to send to advertising agencies and magazines. That house on rue Dufrenoy was a beehive of talent filled with cool photographers and young models, a hot spot of glamour, beauty, and fashion.

I was much younger and certainly greener than all the people coming in and out of the office and was a bit intimidated by it all, though I was determined not to show it. It was my first involvement with models, many of whom came to rue Dufrenoy. The big models were Jean Shrimpton and Veruschka, probably the most beautiful women ever; Twiggy and Penelope Tree, the strangest ones; and, of course, Marisa Berenson who, along with Florence, was to become my best friend and godmother of my son, Alexandre. From Italy, there were Isa Stoppi, Albertina Tiburzi, Marina Schiano, and Elsa Peretti, who became the successful jewelry designer for Tiffany. There were also Americans, Cheryl Tiegs and Wallis, along with the timeless, forever magical Lauren Hutton. I did not meet every one of them then, but I dealt with their photographs all day. They were all Diana Vreeland’s “girls.” As editor in chief of American
Vogue,
she had invented them.

Working for Albert Koski was an invaluable indoctrination, though I didn’t see it at the time. I was assimilating a lot of
information without totally comprehending it, but assimilating it nonetheless. In years to come, I would often refer back to what I learned there. It’s only in retrospect that you realize that all the little experiences add up to a whole. What I did know then was that the world of fashion was fun, glamorous, very cool and I loved it. It was 1968. Everyone felt free, acted laid-back, and projected an image of being bored, though we were anything but.

It was then that I realized that fashion was a huge industry, a long chain of professions linked together. It started from the fabric mills making fabrics to designers making clothes and models showing them. Editors would choose them, photographers and illustrators and writers captured them, and magazines printed them. That long chain of inspiration, talent, emotion, and ideas would end with the women buying and enjoying fashion.

I became aware of trends, the must-haves of the moment. Big, clunky costume jewelry was in, fueled by the antielitism era of counterculture youth. So were big belts and hippie clothes—Indian silks, Afghan embroidered coats—and long hair, furs, and jewelry for girls and boys. Hairpieces, fake eyelashes, hot pants, and platform shoes were in and I wore them all.

Marisa Berenson was the perfect “it” girl of the time. She had traveled to meet Maharishi in India with the Beatles and was on the cover of
Vogue
covered with bold turquoises and corals. She was the image of glamour. I met Marisa through Florence and we immediately became friends. We were barely twenty but Marisa was already a top model. She was tall, skinny, and very elegant, and, like a chameleon, could transform herself into many different creatures of beauty. I saw a lot of her then. On the weekends, we would do a marathon of movies, going from one movie theater to another, crying watching Vanessa
Redgrave in the tragic role of dancer Isadora Duncan and laughing at the Stanley Donen comedy
Bedazzled
. We would end up late at night at La Coupole in Montparnasse to eat oysters, meet friends, and go on to nightclubs.

Marisa lived with her grandmother, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. At the time Schiap (as people called her) was no longer working. She was an old, ailing lady, retired in her
hôtel particulier,
a grand townhouse on rue de Berry. Although her terrifying presence could be felt throughout the corridors, I never met her. Marisa, who would go on to become an actress, working for director Luchino Visconti in
Death in Venice,
Stanley Kubrick in
Barry Lyndon,
and sharing the screen with Liza Minnelli in
Cabaret,
had her own side entrance through the garden.

I remember being at that house with Marisa one day when she received an invitation to go to Capri to a fashion weekend called “Mare Moda.” She asked me to go with her, but I didn’t have the money. When I told her, she plunged into her handbag and gave me a few five-hundred French franc notes to buy my ticket. I will never forget that generosity, nor will I forget that very glamorous fashion weekend on the Mediterranean island. We dressed up eccentrically, stayed out late, laughed a lot, and flirted with attractive young Italian playboys. Marisa was a top model, but, to my surprise, I managed to hold my own.

That weekend turned out to be more than just fun. It was there that I ran into Angelo Ferretti, the flamboyant industrial fashion tycoon whom I had met once before at Egon’s house in Cortina with his lovely wife, Lena, and son, Mimmo, the best friend of Egon’s younger brother, Sebastian. Ferretti and I had become friends in Cortina, and we were happy to meet again in Capri. After I told him about my work with Koski in Paris, he invited me to come to Como, visit his factories,
and learn about his business. It was an intriguing and unexpected offer. Ferretti was on the other side of fashion, the manufacturing side.

He owned two factories in Pare, near Como, Italy: one, a printing plant where he printed intricate colorful scarves for Ferragamo, Gucci, and other large companies; the other, next door, where he produced knitted silk and high-quality mercerized cotton jersey fabric for shirts and T-shirts. A T-shirt seems like the most common thing now, but it was a novelty at the time. Until then, T-shirts were worn as an undergarment, mostly by sailors. But fashion T-shirts became the hot new trend in the late sixties when Brigitte Bardot started to wear those sold at Choses, a boutique in the port of St. Tropez. They came in a variety of colors and had an anchor with the words “St. Tropez” printed around it.

Ferretti was a pioneer in mass-producing his own upscale T-shirts, having converted old World War II silk stocking knitting machines to knit contemporary jersey fabric since silk stockings had been replaced by nylon panty hose. He also came up with the idea of printing on the jersey and using it to make new, bolder T-shirts. He was a genius really. He was also very much an Italian man: handsome, a serious gambler, a bit of a flirt, and great fun.

Ferretti’s invitation to learn from him was tempting. “I’ll think about it,” I told him. Truth was, for all the glamour of Paris, I wanted to go somewhere else. Paris was a mess. The students had gone on strike in the spring of ’68 and occupied the Sorbonne, soon followed by the workers who went on a general strike and shut down the airports and train stations. I was the age of the demonstrating students and I sympathized with them, but I must confess that my time crossing the barricades was mostly going to and from Régine’s New Jimmy’s nightclub on boulevard Montparnasse.

That summer I left Koski and took Ferretti up on his offer, moving
in with my mother at her new apartment on rue Pergolèse and commuting back and forth to Italy to watch Ferretti operate and learn from him. Many years later, Koski would come back into my life, as he fell in love with my dear friend the screenwriter and director Danièle Thompson. Every summer, they spend time with Barry and me on our boat.

I
see myself as if it were yesterday, sitting behind Ferretti in his printing factory as he is yelling at the colorist who made the yellow too bright or the pink too pale. I see myself sitting behind him at his fabric-knitting factory and he is yelling, yelling, at the engineer who has knitted the jersey fabric too tight or too loose. Always screaming, always passionate about the quality of his printing or the tightness of his jerseys, while I sit behind him watching and learning.

Como was the Italian center of silk and attracted a huge community of illustrators and artists who sold their artwork to the silk manufacturers. Through Ferretti’s eyes I learned how certain designs can make good prints, how to create a repeat, and the difference between printing in application on greige or in discharge on a dyed fabric. I learned from his talented colorists how to create a harmonious palette and from him how to negotiate the prices of the designs. I realize today what a supertalent Ferretti was and how lucky I was to sit in with him creating patterns and watching the plain fabric going from screen to screen to screen to become colorful, precise prints.

He also taught me everything about jersey. He showed me how to evaluate the quality and density of the knitted fabric samples when they were brought to him, presentations that usually prompted the most yelling of all. I sat in on passionate meetings with the fiber engineers.
Jersey, I learned, can be knitted with many fibers, usually silk, rayon, cotton, or acrylic. “Mix is the magic, just like in cooking,” he used to tell me. He was also a great cook, and his favorite dish was
bollito misto.

I learned about dyeing and finishing techniques, about using imbibing agents to give the fabric breathability, and why, with certain fibers, the fabric gives or doesn’t give. I learned all this and more just by sitting behind him in all the meetings with these talented, skillful technicians who had learned from their families for generations. I thought I was doing nothing, but every single thing I heard, I ended up later putting to use.