The Woman I Wanted to Be (19 page)

Soon after I’d started shadowing him, he bought a new factory near Florence, which was making fine, slinky nightgowns. The factory had excellent equipment and the perfect needles to work on jersey fabrics, and he converted it to manufacture his shirts and T-shirts. From that moment, Manifattura Tessile Ferretti became a vertical operation from fibers to knitting jersey to printing to finished clothes. The conversion of the new factory prompted more yelling, but I’d gotten so used to it I hardly paid any attention. What I did take in was the development of an amazing manufacturing company that would soon have a huge impact on my life.

Many of the things I still do today, I learned from that man. I had no idea that would happen, which is something I always tell young people. “Listen, always listen. Most people at the beginnings of their lives don’t know what they want to be unless you have a real vocation, like a pianist or a doctor, so it is very important to listen. Sometimes there are doors that will open and you think it is not an important door and yet it is—so it’s very important to be curious and pay attention, because sometimes you learn and you don’t even know you’re learning.”

I
spent almost a year with Ferretti, and learned so much, even though I was distracted. I was thinking about Egon and my heart was heavy. I knew Egon was coming home to Europe for the winter holidays and was taking his new Italian girlfriend, not me, to his family’s house in Cortina. He was stopping first in Paris and he asked me to arrange a dinner at Maxim’s with our Geneva University friends. Although it was a painful evening, I didn’t show it. I made a huge effort to be cool, smooth, and funny so Egon wouldn’t know how fast my heart was beating as he stared at me from across the table. I was even more depressed because of the fortune-teller I’d been to that afternoon who told me I would be married within a year and traveling far away. What nonsense, I thought. I was in love with Egon and knew I’d lost him.

For all my unhappiness, I refused to mope. I had a life to live, after all, with or without him, so after spending Christmas with my father and Philippe skiing in Crans-sur-Sierre, I went to St. Moritz to join Marisa for the New Year. The Palace Hotel had a habit then, and probably still does, of giving a very special rate to young, pretty girls, and Marisa and I had a fabulous time, skiing, dancing, and laughing day and night. After the New Year, which was also my twenty-second birthday, who showed up but Egon. Without the girlfriend. It took only one night for our love to be rekindled, and with it, an invitation to visit him in New York. My mother gave me the best twenty-second birthday present ever—the airplane ticket—and the journey began toward that little wrap dress.

I stayed in New York only two months but that short time changed my life. I loved the city, I discovered. The people were alive, creative, and ambitious. There were no boundaries; everyone was young, doing interesting things and free of all the suffocating traditions and class distinctions of Europe.

I wanted to stay but I had to find some way to support myself.
Egon suggested I try modeling, which seemed a possibility after I met the famous photographer Francesco Scavullo at a party one night. “Let me photograph you,” he said. I remember how nervous I was the next day as Way Bandy, the infamous makeup artist of the time, lined my eyes and added rows of false eyelashes while François, the French hairstylist, piled three hairpieces on my head. I posed topless, the very long hairpieces hiding my breasts. I was astonished with the result. “Could that seductive creature be me?” I wondered. With no hesitation I went to show the photos to the famous, grande dame model agent, the German-born Wilhelmina, expecting her to marvel and invite me to join her beauty stable. Wilhelmina looked quickly at the pictures while inspecting me from head to toe from the corners of her eyes. She was just as quick to coldly announce that I could never be a professional model. At least it was confirmed: Beauty was not what I should pursue as a career.

The busy social life I had with Egon in New York proved to be an important fashion education. Because I was Egon’s girlfriend and he was so visible as a young, attractive aristocrat, various designers in New York, like those in Paris, offered me their clothes to wear. I spent time discovering the back rooms of those designers and saw how different the fashion in America was from Europe. In England it was the time of Carnaby Street, Biba, and Ossie Clark, influenced by India and the hippie movement. In France, fashion was more serious with couture and dressmakers leading the way, although in 1966, Yves Saint Laurent had cleverly democratized fashion by creating the first designer ready-to-wear at his Rive Gauche boutiques.

In America, fashion was different because of its large distribution through hundreds of department stores across the country. Seventh Avenue firms were running the show, keeping their designers anonymous. But a clever publicist, Eleanor Lambert, had the idea of
bringing those designers out of the back rooms and into the spotlight. She created the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Bill Blass, Anne Klein, Geoffrey Beene, and Oscar de la Renta became celebrities. I fell in love with the new breed of designers—Giorgio Sant’Angelo, Stephen Burrows, Halston—who used soft fabrics, jersey, and bright colors. All that inspired me no end and as I left New York to return to Ferretti, I was excited, hoping I could learn more and one day create some things on my own to sell in New York.

I
looked at all of Ferretti’s resources with a different set of eyes when I went back to Como. He was extremely successful at making tens of thousands of silk scarves and jersey tops, but I believed more could be done with the incredible infrastructure he had built. The innovative uses of jersey I had seen in designs from Giorgio Sant’Angelo and Stephen Burrows inspired me, and an idea began to percolate in my mind. I wanted to try and make some dresses in the Ferretti printed fabric. I was drawn to the opportunity of filling the void I had seen in New York between the high-fashion hippie clothes and the stale, double-knit dresses. Maybe I could fill it with an offering of colorfully printed sexy easy jersey dresses.

I started to spend lots of time at the factory outside Florence and became friends with Bruna, the patternmaker. Together we made my first dresses: a T-shirt dress, a shirtdress, a long tented dress, and a long tunic with pants. We used whatever printed fabric was leftover in her sample room. Then, on my days in the Como factory, I spent hours going through Ferretti’s archival prints, choosing some and begging Rita, Ferretti’s right hand, to print some sample yardage for me.

The family had adopted me and I felt very much at home with them. Ferretti’s son, Mimmo, was around a lot and he helped me, too.
We had fun working together. The Tuscan countryside around the factory was lovely and Mimmo and I used to have some great meals in the neighboring villages. Ferretti was encouraging and allowed me to carve out a small corner for myself in their sample room. Even though I was cautious, I knew it was disruptive. I now realize he must have seen in me some potential I didn’t yet see in myself. He also introduced me to his tailor in Milan, and with him I started to drape some fancy evening clothes, but I was more comfortable in the factory working with Bruna on simple little dresses.

I
don’t know what my future would have been without the generosity and support of Ferretti. I was still working at the factory when I got pregnant and my life changed drastically. With my accelerated marriage to Egon, the dream I had of a career in fashion also accelerated. The only person that could help make that dream come true was Ferretti.

“This is what’s happening,” I said to him on a short trip to the factory in the midst of the wedding preparations. “I am pregnant, I’m getting married to Egon, and I’m moving to America. Please allow me to complete all the samples I have been working on and let me try to sell them in New York.” Ferretti smiled and his response was more than I could have dreamed: “Go ahead. I believe in you and I think you will be successful.”

I put a sample line together, most of it made with Bruna in Ferretti’s printed jersey, except a few velvet dresses made by the tailor in Milan. All the clothes had easy shapes, were sexy in their simplicity, and packable for sure. One hundred dresses folded in a single bag. I was at another door to my would-be career. I could only hope it would open.

E
gon
and I married on a beautiful, sunny day, three weeks after his twenty-third birthday. I love the photo of us laughing and smiling under a shower of rice as we exited the town hall in Montfort-l’Amaury. It was taken by Berry Berenson, a young photographer and Marisa’s sister, who later married actor Tony Perkins and was tragically killed on 9/11 aboard the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. That exuberant photo reminds me not only of our wedding day and of beautiful Berry, but right behind us, out of the five hundred guests, is Ferretti! There, in one happy image, are the two most important men in my life at the time, though I didn’t know yet just how important Ferretti would be.

After a short honeymoon sailing the fjords of Norway and a great month with our friends at Liscia di Vacca on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda, I picked up my samples from the factory in Tuscany.

As I boarded the Italian liner
Raffaello,
I carried all of my hopes with me: the baby in my womb, and that suitcase filled with dresses. Egon had gone by plane weeks before but I insisted on sailing. I wanted to take the time to visualize my new life and arrive slowly in New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, like any immigrant with an American dream. I had no idea how quickly that dream would come true.

When young people eager to start their own lives and careers ask me for advice I smile and always say: “Passion and persistence are what matter. Dreams are achievable and you can make your fantasy come true, but there are no shortcuts. Nothing happens without hard work.”

That advice is the essence of my journey with the little dresses when I arrived in New York. Egon would go off in the morning to his new job at the Lazard Frères investment bank and, greatly pregnant and with my dream in place, I’d struggle out of the apartment with my suitcase full of clothes to make the rounds of department stores
and centralized buying offices. The people I met were amused and intrigued by the unorthodox presentation of little jersey dresses pulled out of a Vuitton suitcase by a young, pregnant European princess, but it did not materialize into anything. I persevered, though, especially after the birth of Alexandre.

The door that opened two months later, in March 1970, was the most critical one in New York: that of Diana Vreeland, the intimidating, all-powerful dragon lady editor in chief of
Vogue
. It seems amazing to me now that I had the audacity to enter her fashion shrine and show her such simple little dresses. I had the advantage, of course, of having social status, but my youthful confidence is what made me push open that door. Diana Vreeland? Why not? And that was the beginning.

It was Diana Vreeland who first understood and appreciated the simple uniqueness of the jersey fabric and the easy, flattering fit of the dresses. They may have looked like nothing on hangers, but the dresses looked strikingly sexy and feminine when she put them on two of her in-house models, Pat Cleveland and Loulou de la Falaise, both of whom later became my friends. “How incredibly clever of you, and how modern this is,” Mrs. Vreeland told me, ending our brief meeting with “Terrific, terrific, terrific.” And along with my suitcase I was back out that door and facing another.

I opened that one, too, with the assistance of Kezia Keeble, one of Diana Vreeland’s young and beautiful fashion editors. I had no idea what to do next as I folded my dresses back into the suitcase outside Mrs. Vreeland’s office, so I asked Kezia. “Take a room at the Gotham Hotel on Fifth Avenue during fashion week. The California fashion companies show there. There will be a traffic flow of buyers around,” she told me. “List yourself on the Fashion Calendar and put an announcement in
Women’s Wear Daily
.” I didn’t hesitate. “Can I use your phone?” I asked as I sat at Kezia’s desk.

I settled in a room at the Gotham Hotel and spent the first long days waiting for buyers. I had previously done some interviews and those early articles said much more about me being a socialite princess than the clothes I was showing, which, at first, I found frustrating. But that publicity prompted curiosity. Traffic picked up after several early articles in
Women’s Wear Daily,
the
New York Post,
and the
New York Times
.

I was so excited to write the first order from a little boutique in New Jersey on my freshly printed custom order forms. Sales really began to gain traction the next season at the Gotham Hotel after my dresses appeared in
Vogue
. I remember large orders from Hutzler’s, a department store in Baltimore, and Giorgio’s, the fashionable boutique in Beverly Hills. Then Bloomingdale’s came in. Their five-person team took over the room, discussing windows and advertising. I was overwhelmed. Not only was my English still a bit shaky; I understood nothing of the rag trade jargon.

T
hose early years were difficult for many reasons. On one side Ferretti was not easy to deal with. My first orders of a few dozen dresses in a specific style was not what he had expected. “I have a factory, not a sample room,” he insisted. Flying to Italy once a month, I would beg for his attention. He would yell. I would cry. “Stick with me,” I kept pleading with him. When my orders were finally delivered they were often wrong—wrong color, wrong style, wrong size, wrong everything, yet whatever I shipped to the stores would sell immediately. That is what encouraged me to persevere.

I was totally on my own, with no experience, and the challenges were enormous. I remember Air India’s freezing warehouse at Kennedy Airport, where, sitting on the floor sorting out a new shipment
from Italy, I had to cross out all the labels written in Italian and rewrite them in English. I can see myself crying from the cold and exhaustion, but now, of course, that experience has become a fond memory. So has the way I stored the folded dresses in our dining room and shipped all the orders myself, while also handling the invoices.