The Woman I Wanted to Be (28 page)

What I did know was that I liked him immediately, so immediately that the first thing I did was to hug him. I’d never met the man but there was something about the openness of his smile and his blue eyes.

Like the other industry professionals, he was shocked when I told him our numbers. He found them “unimaginably low” for a “lifestyle” designer, as he called me, with such recognition. “It should be a $2 billion business,” he said.

Soon afterward I emailed him to ask if he could be on my board. “Yes,” he replied, “I could.” I immediately sent him the date of the next board meeting, and was taken aback when I got his reply: “I said I could, I didn’t say I would.” His loss, I thought and wrote him off.

It was Silas who got the relationship back on track when he invited Barry and me to dinner at his home in New York. Barry and I
were leaving for India that night and I told Silas we couldn’t stay for dinner but we’d drop in on our way to the plane. Silas took us into a side room. “I know you met with Joel Horowitz,” he said. “He’s your guy. You should have him on your board and make him a partner.” “Really?” I said. Silas nodded. “Really,” he said. “I’m going to see him next weekend and tell him.” And that’s how wonderful Joel joined the board and the company.

My son started to negotiate the contract with Joel over the phone in July of 2012 when we were at Herb Allen’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. He didn’t know I was sitting on the floor outside his door listening, my heart swelling with pride and gratitude that I had such a loving, smart son to represent the company and protect me. It turned out that Joel’s hesitation was my invitation to be only a board member. “I don’t do boards,” he explained. “I’m not interested in giving general advice four times a year. I’d need to be an active partner.” In the end, we agreed that Joel would invest for a small share of the company, my family would increase our investment, and Joel and I would cochair the board.

I was thrilled, and so was Alexandre, though for different reasons. I was excited about Joel’s business expertise and Alexandre was excited that he would be an authority figure with the stature and respect to hold me in check. DVF was still reeling from the very expensive blunder I’d made the year before when I launched a new fragrance called Diane with a company too small and too inexperienced to market and distribute it properly. It was costing us a lot of money to terminate the contract. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been allowed to sign with that company had Joel been there.

What was there when Joel arrived at DVF in August of 2012 was mayhem. Even thinking about it now is painful, and I blame myself. Myself only. Everyone was running around feeling my panic and the
lack of direction. All along I had been trying to find solutions but there was never any time to stop and think; the bullet train just kept going.

I
t was during those terrible days just before the Spring 2013 collection that I finally had to confront another major problem: Our product had lost its identity. On one side the design department was making complicated fashion, while on the other side, to counterbalance it, merchandising was making banal commercial pieces. Everyone was working hard and doing what they thought was right, but truly none of it was on brand, and I didn’t like any of it. My own history and the brand’s heritage, the iconic dress, the archive of fifteen thousand prints—why weren’t we focusing on those assets? What we had lost along the way was everything we had put in the “DVF 1974” capsule collection, which we then abandoned to address overproduction. I realized much, much later that that little capsule collection was truly the essence of the brand.

I remember those days as the worst time ever. I was going back and forth from my office to the design staging area as we prepared the fashion show, and getting more upset by the minute. Looking at racks and racks full of clothes that I knew were useless was wrenching. I couldn’t sleep. I even cried. I couldn’t quietly doubt anymore. It was so clear that the product was wrong. Only the beautiful colors—Yvan is a genius with colors—felt on brand but that was not enough. Still the show had to go on.

The unexpected gift that turned out to save that show was the debut of the wearable computer: Google Glass. Two months before, at the Sun Valley conference, the cofounder of Google, Sergey Brin, had called to me from where he was hiding behind a tree. He didn’t want to be seen as he was wearing his new, very secret technology: glasses
that were capable of taking pictures and videos and displaying email. There was a minicomputer on his brow! We continued to chat, and when I learned he had never been to a fashion show, I invited him and his wife to mine the following September.

As fashion week approached, Sergey called me with an intriguing offer: “What if you introduced Google Glass on the runway?” I almost fell out of my chair. I would be launching Google Glass? I thought it was a fantastic idea. My design and PR teams did not. “It’s going to distract from the clothes and ruin the show,” they claimed. “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “What is the main purpose of a show? To get beautiful photographs, right? Not only will we introduce this incredible technology that has never been seen, but we will be making a film that has never been made before: from the point of view of the models on the catwalk!” I also saw it as my secret weapon to turn around a show I was not feeling great about.

Indeed, it became a historic moment, especially when I grabbed Sergey from the audience to take the victory walk. The show was on every evening news broadcast around the world and the film,
DVF [through Google Glass]
was seen by millions on YouTube. Google Glass saved the day.

Yvan and I parted soon afterward. What we had to do to get the brand back on track would compromise his creativity. Joel insisted that I step back in to be the creative director and lead the designs back to our DNA. “What better person to do DVF than DVF?” he argued. Easier said than done. It took me more than a year to regain my confidence, find clarity, and slowly and painfully bring us back on brand.

One morning, my friend François-Marie Banier called me from Paris. He must have felt that I was insecure, and said something enlightening to me: “
assume-toi
,” a French expression that means own yourself. What he was telling me was “Trust your own talent, learn to respect it.” He
was absolutely right. Though I always tell others “Dare to be you,” I wasn’t applying it to myself. “Make me a drawing of it, to remind me,” I told him, laughing. That drawing now hangs on the wall next to my desk.

As I got much more involved in the creative process, Joel reorganized the company into divisions, with a unified team between design, merchandising, and sales, and a clear, nine-month time frame for design development. He hired a president of retail, a division head of accessories, a chief operating officer, our first chief marketing officer, and several others.

Joel also took it upon himself to ask each executive to define the DVF woman in one sentence. To his mounting frustration, he got a different answer each time, so he organized a focus session with Trey.

The goal of the daylong brainstorm was to come up with three words that exemplified DVF. Three words to identify our brand, our customer, and our designs. I was skeptical. We formed different groups and broke down words and sentences. Joel locked us in a room with coffee and pizzas so we wouldn’t lose our momentum. By the end of the day I was surprised to see how many of the different groups came up with the same words: effortless, sexy, and on-the-go. Everyone applauded.

When the fog lifts, all of a sudden you see the light and everything becomes easier. Those three words brought us clarity. If it isn’t effortless, if it isn’t sexy, if you cannot put it in a little suitcase, it’s not DVF. By the next day Joel was inundated with suggestions about what we had to do next, how to relate this definition to every facet of the business. Design and merchandising went back to edit the next collection with a new lens.

Joel’s son found some old Ron Galella paparazzi pictures of me in a blur of motion, and Joel declared that’s what DVF’s image should be: on-the-go and caught in the moment. “She’s glamorous, she’s crossing
the street, her hair is flying and she looks like somebody you want to be,” he said. We needed to find the right model who was sophisticated and had confident body language—a girl who resembled, in a sense, the woman that I’d always wanted to become.

I turned to Edward Enninful, the talented fashion director of
W
magazine, whom I love and respect so much. “Who do you think should be in my ads?” I emailed him. Within the hour he responded with photographs of me as a young woman he’d pulled from the Internet alongside pictures of Daria Werbowy.

And there she was: a thirty-one-year-old Canadian woman of Ukrainian descent, extraordinarily beautiful and interesting-looking with long legs and wide-set blue eyes. Although she appears on the covers of
Vogue
worldwide, Daria is not your average supermodel. You never see her at parties, she is a world traveler, a hiker. She is the epitome of cool.

Daria’s first DVF campaign was evocative and gritty. Night in New York. A beautiful young woman alone, confident, knowing where she is going, glancing behind her. “The images channel seventiesera paparazzi shots,” wrote
Women’s Wear Daily,
“with a spotlight on DVF’s iconic wrap dresses.” I knew we were on the right track.

As insurance that we didn’t stray again, Paula brought in Stefani Greenfield, the friend who had originally brought Paula to me. Stefani, who sold Scoop in 2008 and now has her own consulting firm, understands the brand perfectly. Furthermore, she personally has a huge collection of DVF products and I was delighted to have her by our side.

T
hrough all these transitions, many drawing from the strengths of the past and streamlining them for the future, was the unbelievable reality that in 2014 the wrap dress was turning forty! Joel called a
meeting to discuss ideas for its birthday. Focusing on the wrap dress seemed a déjà vu for Paula and me. We needed to be convinced, but the young girls in marketing, and Stefani, were excited. Ideas were brought to the table: an exhibition, some collaborations.

As I started to think more and more about the dress I had created decades ago, and that was still selling, I realized I had always taken it for granted. Sometimes I even resented it when people talked about it as if it were the only thing I had ever done. Slowly but surely I began to look at it with fresh eyes and appreciated not only what it had done for me but also the value of the design itself. Effortless, sexy, and on-the-go, that little dress was very much the spirit of the brand! I decided to design a new one as an anniversary present to the original that had paid all my bills and had become part of fashion history.

In our line, we had a fit-and-flare dress that was very popular with young women, the Jeannie, named for our superstar head of production. Sleeveless, fitted stretch knit top, a flared skirt. It is simple and comfortable, sexy and effortless, easy to dress up or dress down. It quickly became a bestseller. When Victoria Beckham came to lunch at my office one day, she noticed it on a girl in the elevator and, after touching the easy stretch fabric, ordered one for herself on the spot.

If that flared skirt is so popular, I thought, I should turn it into a wrap dress. So I went to the sample room and called in Emily, the talented young woman I had discovered at the Savannah College of Art and Design when I spoke there at graduation years ago. I had noticed the simple but clever long jersey dress she had designed to wear for the occasion and offered her an internship. Emily has been working with us ever since. I told her that we would do this new wrap dress together. I explained that the top had to feel like a ballerina cover-up: tight jersey to flatter the bust and pinch the waist. For the circle skirt we chose a woven fabric that holds its shape well, but is still light.

We set to work building it and we fit it until it was perfect, just as I’d done with the first wrap dress in the factory outside Florence forty years before. I wanted to name the dress Emily, but along the way it became Amelia instead. We reissued the original snake print, the one that had danced down the runway at the Cotillion Room of the Pierre Hotel, and used it to make the new Amelia wrap. At first, our sales department did not even notice the dress; it had come so late that they barely showed it to buyers. In spite of my insecurity at the time, I forced our retail stores to buy it. I was right, Amelia was a hit, got a full page in
Vogue,
and became a bestseller! Reliving the magic with the birth of a new wrap, I became convinced. We would celebrate her fortieth birthday with pride. I was totally on board and excited when we all met again.

It was more or less at that time, as I started to regain my confidence and excitement, that Paula came to me and hinted that she wanted to leave. She was tired and felt it was time for her to look for a new horizon and new challenges. At first I refused to believe it; I always thought we were joined at the hip, that she was my partner in crime. We had built the new company. We were the Comeback Kids. “I can’t imagine you not being here,” I said. As she continued to discuss our separation with Joel, I slowly started to accept that she would leave.

P
lans for the anniversary were accelerating. We decided to mount an exhibition and this time it would really earn its name: Journey of a Dress. It would be only about wraps: vintage wraps from the archives, current wraps, and we would create some anniversary wraps. A collaboration with Andy Warhol immediately came to my mind. What would be more DVF, more seventies yet modern than a Warhol wrap dress?

The first big decision was where to mount the exhibition. Los Angeles was my choice . . . not only is it a city I love and where both my children live, but it has the right mixture of edginess, style, and pop culture. I love the light in LA, that very light that attracted the movie industry in the 1930s, a light that reinforces colors and boldness.