The Woman I Wanted to Be (21 page)

Back then, however, my main goal was to be free and independent. I was constantly on the go. I loved being that woman high on her heels walking in and out of places like a tornado, taking planes as if
they were buses, feeling pragmatic, engaged, and sexy. I loved the idea of being a young tycooness who smiles at her shadow and winks at herself in the mirror. I loved having a man’s life in a woman’s body. In a sense I had become the woman I wanted to be, and it was then, at twenty-eight, that I met Barry and we fell in love. He, too, was a young tycoon, barely thirty-three. We both were living an American Dream, separately and together.

My wrap dress had become the “it” dress and I had become a celebrity. I was identified with all my products and was the model for them, all that in no time at all. I had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

Even the staid
Wall Street Journal
took notice and on January 28, 1976, ran a feature about my “fashion empire” on the front page. I was beyond proud of myself that morning as I took a very early flight to Cleveland for a personal appearance (having young children, I tried to stay home with them at night and fly early in the morning). There were almost no women on that flight. I sat next to a businessman with my pile of magazines and newspapers on my lap. The
Wall Street Journal
was on top. After a few minutes of staring at me and my legs, huffing and puffing, trying to figure out how to start a conversation, the man asked, “What’s a pretty girl like you doing reading the
Wall Street Journal
?”

I looked at him, but said nothing. I could have shown him my front-page story, but it seemed too easy, and to this day, the fact that I did not remains one of the best personal satisfactions I’ve ever had. I kept my triumph to myself. Though of course I have told that story so many times since that I have more than exploited this poor guy’s chauvinist attitude, which was so common at the time.

Exposure attracts exposure and two months later, I was on the cover of
Newsweek
. That was a very big deal in those days before CNN
and the Internet. President Gerald Ford had been slated for the cover, having just won the Republican presidential primary, his first since replacing Richard Nixon in the White House, but the editors must have thought I’d make a more appealing sell and decided to put me on the cover instead. When an urgent call came from
Newsweek,
I snatched one of my favorite green-and-white jersey shirtdresses off the rack and raced over to Scavullo’s studio, where he squeezed me in for the photo in the midst of a cover shoot for
Cosmopolitan
.

The
Newsweek
cover ended any anonymity I might have had, which, at first, I found intimidating. I’d been invited to the White House just before the cover ran by Luis Estévez, the Cuban-born California designer who made First Lady Betty Ford’s clothes. It was my first visit, so you can imagine my amazement to find myself seated at President Ford’s table and joking with the president about
Newsweek
choosing me for the cover over him! It all seemed unbelievable, especially when Henry Kissinger introduced himself to me as if I wouldn’t recognize him. He subsequently became a good friend and after he and his wife Nancy bought a home near me in Connecticut we often had dinner together.

We all know the value of publicity, but the
Newsweek
cover launched a tsunami. The story spiked sales of the dresses, with more stores fighting for them, and brought me a whole new and very profitable line of work: home design.

There is an energy and an audacity that comes with youth. Older people often find this unchecked spirit uninformed and irritating, and are surprised when that spirit triumphs. And so it was with me and Sears, Roebuck. I’d been approached shortly after the
Newsweek
cover by a bedspread manufacturer who wanted to put my name on the bedspreads he was making for Sears. Bedspreads? I thought. Why stop at bedspreads? At the time, Sears was a very powerful company
with many stores and a large catalog on everyone’s kitchen counter. They had enormous advertising power and would take out eight- to ten-page magazine ads showing an entire house. Why not give the Sears customers the choice of more interesting home products? Mine.

I put together some sketches and flew to Chicago to see the all-powerful Charles Moran, the head of Sears’s huge home furnishing division, which did about $1 billion a year in sales. My mother often reminded me of that day when I left the apartment at six a.m. carrying a huge folder with my presentation. I think even she was impressed by my drive and energy.

I can see myself now in that boardroom with a lot of white, middle-aged midwestern men glancing at my sketches and staring at this strange creature from New York with masses of curly hair, a foreign accent, and a lot of leg trying to sell herself to design home furnishings for Middle America. I can only imagine what they were thinking when, in response to Moran’s question of what I wanted in compensation for my work, I said I wouldn’t do it for less than half a million dollars. That was an unheard-of amount in those days, but I was young and bold. As weeks passed I became afraid I’d pushed too far, but then I got the call that they had accepted my proposal. What I did not know was that when I signed the contract with Sears I broke a taboo. If you sold to upper-tier stores like Neiman Marcus and Saks you were not supposed to also sell to a mass merchant like Sears. But because my dresses were so hot in department stores, I managed to get away with it.

For the third time I set up a studio in my apartment and hired Marita, a young girl with great taste, to help me design what was in essence a private label line for Sears, The Diane von Furstenberg Style for Living Collection, which quickly grew beyond sheets and towels into curtains, tableware, rugs—eventually even furniture. It was a lot
of hard work designing and color-coordinating the different products, then presenting them to the legions of Sears buyers in different categories, and I soon hired an experienced textile designer couple, Peter and Christine d’Ascoli, to manage the Sears collection. It was well worth it. In the seven years I worked with Sears, retail sales of my home furnishings line grew to $100 million a year.

No wonder I call this phase of my business The American Dream. Even I find it hard to believe, as I write this, what I achieved in so little time. In less than five years, I’d gone from a little European girl determined to support herself to achieving success that far exceeded that dream. I was only twenty-seven when I bought Cloudwalk, twenty-nine when I was on the cover of
Newsweek
, barely thirty when I bought a huge apartment on Fifth Avenue as a birthday present to myself.

There was a price for my success, of course. I always felt I had to run faster and faster just to keep up with the business, which filled me with anxiety. The anxiety proved to be justified when the American Dream turned into a nightmare.

I
saw it coming, but my partner didn’t listen to me. Neither did my lawyer, my accountant, or Ferretti, for that matter. I was the one on the road making personal appearances, noticing the racks and racks of the printed jersey dresses in one department store and the racks and racks of the same dresses in the department store across the street. They, on the other hand, looked at the avalanche of orders after the
Newsweek
cover and supported the decision to up the production at Ferretti’s factories, all wrap dresses: blue and white, red and white, green and white! Women all over the country had at least two, five, sometimes ten of
those dresses, if not more, already hanging in their closets—and the market for them crashed.

I remember that Sunday in January 1978 when every department store in the city took a full page in the
New York Times
advertising the wrap dress on sale. I was so used to seeing the dress advertised that I wasn’t particularly alarmed. I didn’t realize the negative impact until the next day, a snowy Monday, when
Women’s Wear Daily
announced that the market for my little dresses was “saturated,” that the sales marked the “end of a trend.” The dresses were still hot with the public, but overnight the market for new sales collapsed in department stores across the country. I was close to panic. Orders plummeted and I faced $4 million of dead inventory. What to do? The only thing I could think of was to immediately stop the twenty-five thousand new wrap dresses Ferretti was making each week. He was furious with me, but I had no choice. My company was on the verge of bankruptcy. I was in shock.

I felt even then, and know now for sure, that we had done it to ourselves. We had behaved like amateurs on a runaway horse. My instincts to diversify the offerings and expand from just making wrap dresses had been ignored when I reported seeing the glut on the market. That little dress was everywhere. I wanted to expand the dress into a collection, a wardrobe, but my associates didn’t consider that the demand would ever end. I should have been more forceful in cutting back the orders after the
Newsweek
cover.

I separated with Dick Conrad, paying him $1 million for his 25 percent share of the company, hired a new president, replaced the lawyer and accountant who had ill advised me. I was now chairman, sole owner, and head designer of Diane von Furstenberg, Ltd. So it was I who received the letter from Roy Cohn, the most feared lawyer
in America who had been Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right hand. Ferretti had hired him to sue me. My heart stopped, but I didn’t show my fear. I called Roy Cohn and screamed bluffs: “With all the things I know about Ferretti, I don’t think you want to go after me,” I threatened. Then I hung up. My bluff worked. I never heard from him again.

But I still had a huge inventory and an even bigger knot in my stomach. Barry was looking at my numbers and looking for a solution. He was incredibly supportive but knew nothing about the fashion business.

The good thing was that success had made me into a household name. The Seventh Avenue companies that had snubbed me a few years before were suddenly all interested in buying my business. It was another flamboyant fashion person who appeared in my life and saved me. I think of Carl Rosen as the “Seventh Avenue Ferretti”: passionate and visionary. Carl had just made a deal with Calvin Klein to make a line of jeans. Now he wanted to sign a license with me to make Diane von Furstenberg dresses. Not only would he buy and dispose of my inventory, but he would run the business and pay me a royalty with a guaranteed minimum of $1 million a year. Barry negotiated the deal. Barry is known to be a tough negotiator but so was Carl. They went on for days. Only recently, Barry confessed to me that at one point he had pushed so far he thought he had blown it and that Carl would walk out. But he didn’t.

Once again, my mother’s credo proved true: What had seemed the worst, turned out to be good. I had managed not only to get rid of a terrible liability but also to work out a profitable arrangement.

My American Dream was still alive and well as I moved forward. Again, I drew on my mother. “If one door closes, another will open,” she would say—and it did. My beauty line. It had done very well since I’d launched it in 1975, especially Tatiana, the fragrance, but with the
dress business no longer my responsibility, I could now concentrate on taking the beauty line to new heights. Without a moment of nostalgia I got rid of my showroom in the garment district and moved uptown to glamorous offices on Fifty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, in the heart of the cosmetics world. I leased the entire twenty-fourth floor in the old, art deco Squibb building at 745 Fifth Avenue with a view of Central Park and Revlon and Estée Lauder right across the street. I converted what the prior tenant had used as a storeroom into my private, airy, pink office with a terrace. I felt happy and on top of the world!

Since I was chairman and sole owner of the company, it was mine to make or break. I did not think much about funding the beauty business. All my licenses, including the dresses and my home furnishings for Sears, reached $150 million in sales and provided a large income.

My new president was Sheppard Zinovoy, and I hired a professional beauty salesman, Gary Savage, whom I lured from Pierre Cardin fragrance. A ravishing girl, Janet Chin, joined me as a product development person and I even built a state-of-the-art laboratory in the office that was run by an Italian chemist called Gianni Mosca. It all felt very serious when I put on a white coat to enter the lab and test the samples he and his assistant developed, and for me it was a dream come true.

Without the dress business I had the time to play with colors and textures and packaging design. In the seventies we all wore lots of very bright makeup and I had so much fun working with Janet creating and naming the colors and designing the packaging. At Gary’s suggestion we named the line “The Color Authority,” and indeed it was. I was proud, not annoyed, that other cosmetics companies, from Revlon to Estée Lauder, bought and copied our new colors the instant we released them. To me, anyway, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
We redesigned the packaging. No more inexpensive stock packaging for us, but a lovely marbleized white plastic compact that looked like mother-of-pearl with my signature in gold. I’ve always said that makeup is the secret between women and their mirrors, and that makeup is a reflection of our moods. To that end we created compacts that incorporated all the colors you needed, divided into three different moods: Hot Passion Pinks, for a feminine, flirtatious mood; Stop Traffic Red, for strength and authority; and New Wave Metallics, for the browns of more neutral and quiet moods.

As the cosmetics line grew, so did the volume of different bottles, boxes, and caps, which we had to keep stored in a warehouse. It was déjà vu with the inventory of dresses, right down to the multitude of warehouse staff we needed to manage it all. Each product had its own packaging with its own list of ingredients. The many colors we had so much fun creating required their own labels with their own lists of ingredients. On and on. Overseeing and maintaining the line was very expensive.