The Woman I Wanted to Be (27 page)

My goals had shifted. No longer was I striving to be financially independent. I was. I didn’t need to prove that the first time around wasn’t an accident. I had. What I wanted now was to turn a good company into a great company, to leave a legacy, something that would live beyond me. I had reached the age where you begin to think about what you leave your grandchildren and their children.

I was already building a legacy outside the business. Having empowered myself, it was my duty to empower other women. That is why I got involved with Vital Voices and established the DVF Awards. It
was also my turn to support the fashion and New York communities that had given me so much. In fashion, the opportunity came from the CFDA. I can’t overstate how honored I was to be elected its president in 2006.
Women’s Wear Daily
put my election on the front cover: “Von Furstenberg Elected: Brings Power Contacts, Jet-Set Savvy to CFDA.” Steven Kolb, the new executive director, and I became a team. My first goal was to turn the organization into a family, bring in fresh blood, and make sure the more established designers helped and mentored the newer ones. Together we would have more power, more leverage than on our own. The first month I was elected, Steven and I flew to Washington, DC, to lobby Congress for copyright protection against design piracy. When we arrived that morning, our lobbyist, Liz Robbins, told us it was a bad day. Everyone was busy and we would probably spend hours waiting and meet no one. To her surprise and our delight, it turned out we had more clout than she had thought. We met with Senators Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Olympia Snow, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the future Speaker. We explained the urgent need to protect our designs, posed for photos, and left excited. We have yet to pass the law, but we certainly raised the profile of design and showed mass merchants the value of hiring designers instead of simply copying them.

After the disaster of 9/11 and its effect on the New York economy, my friend Anna Wintour, the powerful editor of
Vogue
, had the idea of creating a fund to identify and promote young American designers. The CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund was created and being part of it is one of my biggest sources of pride. Some of today’s brightest talents and most successful businesses have emerged from the fund. Alexander Wang, Proenza Schouler, Rodarte, Rag and Bone, Prabal Gurung, Joseph Altuzarra, Jennifer Meyer—to name just a few—all came up through it.

CFDA is committed to promoting diversity and protecting the health and well-being of models. It supports Made in NY, an initiative spearheaded by Andrew Rosen (son of Carl who saved my business in 1979) to reenergize the local garment industry. CFDA helps develop American design talent with many scholarship programs. It also rallies in times of need. We raised over one million dollars for Haiti’s earthquake relief and support the Born Free campaign to eliminate the transmission of HIV from mothers to babies.

Steven and I will never forget the day we went to City Hall to meet with the newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg. “What can the city do for fashion?” he asked. “We need a place for our fashion shows, we need a fashion center. I would love to get one of the piers along the Hudson River,” I told him presumptuously.

We never got a pier, but the mayor’s deputy, Dan Doctoroff, did not forget my request. We will get a home for Fashion Week at Culture Shed, a new two-hundred-thousand-square-foot, highly flexible cultural institution, which will be a crossroads for the full range of creative industries. I joined the board of Culture Shed, which will stand at the northern end of the High Line, the immensely popular park that is the pride and joy of my family.

The High Line was the dream of Josh David and Robert Hammond, young neighbors from Chelsea and the West Village, who had the audacious idea of reversing one of Mayor Giuliani’s last acts, signed a few days before he left office: a demolition order for the old elevated railroad that runs from Gansevoort Street to Thirty-Fourth Street. They wanted to recycle it into a park. My family joined in their dream and we succeeded, with the help of so many. The old railway was transformed by the amazing design work of James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofido + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf, and opened in 2009. Millions of visitors and New Yorkers enjoy strolling along the
beautiful, long green ribbon of wild flowers, shrubs, and grasses above the urban streets. I am one of them.

F
or all of this, Forbes named me one of the twenty most powerful businesswomen in the world! Yet my own business was moving along an uncharted path from one opportunity to another without a clear set of goals or much discipline. While we had been lulled by our remarkable growth, companies that had started only a few years before, but had a clear road map and were driven by smart marketing, were suddenly worth much more.

Our new creative director Yvan Mispelaere had just started, coming in with big credentials from Gucci, where he was head designer for women’s wear. Gucci’s designs and ours are very much in the same sexy seventies style so it seemed a perfect fit. He came to New York in 2010 to meet Paula and me and we hired him on the spot.

It started well, with a first “inspiration” walk through the streets of Paris. I took him to see an exhibition on Isadora Duncan at the Musée Bourdelle in the 15th Arrondissement, and decided to base our next spring collection on that. We called it “Goddess.” It was modern but timeless, and very sexy. The prints were bold, the colors luminous, and I loved it. Our collaboration was well received and it seemed like a match made in heaven. After that first collection that we did together, I relinquished all of my design authority. I had China to take care of, and many projects that needed my time and energy.

As I spent more time working outside the studio, Yvan was left to run the design department. A perfectionist, he took his role very seriously. Everyone was intimidated by this European designer who came from Gucci and was changing everything. Yvan’s idea was to divide the collection into a vintage group called “DVF 1974,” add
accessories to it, and create another, elevated, more designed line to exist by its side.

It sounded great in principle, but the problem was that every one of his many ideas was produced, resulting in too many products and eventually a lack of focus. I started to sense this when I went to Honolulu just before Thanksgiving in 2011 for the grand opening of my first store in Hawaii. The manager, Marilee, and my old friend Princess Dialta di Montereale had organized a fantastic party with the who’s who of Honolulu. It was a glamorous evening, we sold a lot of clothes, and everyone was happy. But I felt something was wrong . . . the assortment of products was overwhelming, and though it looked good and was colorful, I wondered whether that kind of output could be sustained long term.

Furthermore, when I returned to New York, I found a lot of confusion. Design had taken over so completely in less than a year that it was affecting merchandising and production. Calendars and deadlines had started to lag, making everyone nervous. I was fond of Yvan, respected his talent, and knew how hard he worked. So I would come in and out, not digging into the problems but spending my time pacifying everyone and ceding more and more authority to him. More importantly, I also ignored Paula when she said the clothes were going off brand, confusing our buyers, and our customers.

T
hough I hadn’t yet realized the full importance of DNA and staying on brand, we started taking an inventory of the brand’s assets, and our first project was to reexamine the DVF monogram. Over the years, those three letters had become so familiar that even my family calls me DVF now! Our new, brilliant graphic designer, Diego Marini, played with the
V
and the
F
, opening it up and creating a flow the monogram
had never had. He placed it between a scattering of lips on our shopping bag and stationery. I loved this bold, elegant new image that represents all I endorse: strength, love, and freedom.

I remember taking an early-morning helicopter from Cloudwalk to a windy runway at a deserted airport on Long Island in the summer of 2012. As we approached, I looked down to see our new monogram, gleaming, fifteen feet tall, surrounded by the huge team of Trey Laird, the advertising guru I had hired to shoot our next ad campaign. Designed to look metallic, and as tall as a house with nothing but sky above it and space beyond it, the logo was made almost surreal by the water we kept hosing across the ground. I loved that huge logo, and the images of our model for the season, Arizona Muse, posing in and around it. After the shoot I collapsed laughing into the juncture of the
V
and someone took a snapshot. I love that photo and fought to put it on the cover of this book!

It was a fun day. What wasn’t fun was the disciplined process of creating a “brand book,” a task Paula and Trey were insisting on. The goal of a brand book is to clarify what a brand stands for, to define one vision everyone can follow. At first I found this project an annoying and unnecessary exercise. But I soon realized how wrong I was when I had to struggle with the questions being posed. What is the brand? What does it stand for? What message does the brand project? Is the message consistent? What is the core design? What are the core colors? Who is the customer? Describe her. The answer to the last question should boil down to a few words, Trey said. A few words? How could forty years in fashion and millions of customers be encapsulated in a few words? Marketing genius Lapo Elkann, Alain’s son, refers to my brand as the ultimate Love Brand. How could we explain that? The whole company was going through therapy and I was very stressed.

Trey was excited though. “The brand is you, it is your story. The European princess who comes to America with a few jersey dresses and turns them into an American Dream. Who else can claim that story? And your huge archive of prints, that also needs to be part of the brand book, it is unique.” I decided to let him work it out.

T
he problems ran deeper than just improving branding and marketing. I wasn’t a great manager and never will be. This became clear when Alexandre started to do a detailed audit and overview of the company. I was shocked to learn that he had trouble tracking the numbers. He was shocked by the casual and inefficient structure of the company, which was run as one entity without each division, wholesale and retail, having accountability and transparency. We’d grown fast and profitably yet we hadn’t invested in the infrastructure. We didn’t even have a proper CFO.

Alexandre’s list of grievances was very long, yet he held some back because he didn’t want to upset me. He kept on talking about transparency and accountability. I resented hearing those words but I knew he was right.

In all of my years in business I had never stuck to a business plan. I always followed my impulses and grew them into businesses. Some were huge successes, some were poorly executed and failed. That kind of energy gives authenticity and a human factor to a company, but it creates a lot of chaos, and chaos it was! Paula and I knew that if we were going to move into the big leagues, we would have to completely rework the structure, invest in experienced division heads and give them authority, add financing, and expand our family board with at least one member with a strong business and retail background.

Once I realized we desperately needed help on all levels of
management, I was shameless in seeking it. I had lunch with the chairman of Coach, the chairman of Calvin Klein, and Mickey Drexler, the retail superstar at J.Crew, among other professionals. They all said the same thing: Your name and your brand are so much bigger than your business. The growth potential is enormous. It was both frustrating and instructive—frustrating because they thought I was much bigger than I was, instructive because even though I had achieved a remarkable level of success and recognition, I was still acting like someone who was just starting.

“Build accessories,” they told me. “It is critical to your growth and profitability.” As it was, accessories were 10 percent of our sales, and ready-to-wear 90 percent, which had made our success to date even more astonishing. Still, to move into the next world we would have to close that gap.

Meeting these retail experts for lunch wasn’t enough. I needed one on my team and on my board. We already had one board member from outside the family, Hamilton South, former president and CMO of Polo Ralph Lauren who now runs his own marketing and communications firm, HL Group. Besides being a loyal friend for over twenty years, Hamilton has an excellent strategic mind. I needed to find that trusted expertise in business as well.

During my hunt, I realized I knew the king of them all, Silas Chou. Silas is the wealthy superstar apparel investor based in Hong Kong who had bought Tommy Hilfiger some years before when the company was in trouble, then helped build it up successfully before taking it public. More recently, Silas had bought Michael Kors and done another IPO in 2011 for billions of dollars.

I knew Silas socially, and as I set out for my events in China, he had offered to give me a party at his home in Beijing to introduce me to everyone. It was a memorable dinner at his penthouse replica of
a courtyard house, with a dramatic view of the Bird’s Nest stadium and all across Beijing. He’d filled the apartment with celebrities and brought in dancers for the occasion. Silas also came to the Red Ball in Shanghai. He came to the exhibition in Beijing, and, back in New York, he came to lunch at my studio.

I was in awe of Silas’s success in business, but he was too busy to join my board. Still, he was very enthusiastic. “You don’t understand how valuable DVF is,” he told me. “In order for you really to grow, Diane, you need a machine behind you. You could be so big.”

“I have an idea,” Tommy Hilfiger told me at yet another lunch. “Joel Horowitz. He was my partner and I owe him everything. You should meet him.”

What I didn’t know about Joel when he walked into my office a few weeks later in February 2012 was that he’d turned down one business idea after another that Tommy had proposed to him. He had worked hard with great success all his life, retired, and now he loved playing golf and living a pressure-free life in the Florida sun.