Wrapping it up
Diane von Furstenberg is ready to go from icon to ‘oracle.’
After more than 45 years in fashion, Diane von Furstenberg has been looking for a graceful exit. She is 71, and she has designed a lot of frocks. But the one that matters most is the classic wrap dress, a few yards of slinky jersey that manage to flatter not all but most figures. It’s not cheap, but it isn’t terribly expensive. It has a knack for being appropriate in a multitude of situations. And it comes with its own empowering narrative: that women can have dominion over their own reality with a single sexy, authoritative dress.
That’s a heck of a lot more than most fashion brands have done for women.
The dress landed her on the cover of Newsweek in 1976. It made von Furstenberg — who married and divorced a European prince and dazzled this city’s disco society — even richer and more famous. It gave her independence.
But now, von Furstenberg is ready to be done with fashion. “I don’t want to do another color palette,” she says. “I’ve had three acts. The first was the American dream, the young girl coming to New York, the wrap dress, blah, blah, blah. The second: I started over. Now, I’ve been thinking, now is the time for the third act. How do I turn this into a legacy, so the legacy will last after me?”
The cultural powerhouse known as DVF has a new goal. “I became an icon,” von Furstenberg says. “Now I want to be an oracle.”
Getting out is hard. It’s not just a matter of deciding what will become of a business that she founded in 1972 and resurrected from the dustbins in the late 1990s. She has considered selling it. She may yet take on an investor. Her granddaughter, Talita von Furstenberg, will definitely go to work for the company.
The hard part is emotional, existential. It’s extricating DVF the woman from DVF the brand.
“To let go is the easiest,” she says. Pause. No, delete that. “I’m not letting go. I’m transitioning into something else.”
Ultimately, she would like to focus even more on philanthropy. The Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation, which she set up in 1999 with her media billionaire husband, Barry Diller, has helped underwrite this city’s High Line park, the District of Columbia College Access Program and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. She also sponsors the DVF Awards, which support female entrepreneurs and leaders from around the world. The Council of Fashion Designers of America, which she has chaired since 2006, honored her Monday with the Swarovski award for positive change at its annual gala at the Brooklyn Museum.
“Diane is so much deeper and more global than people might assume based on the world of fashion,” says activist Gloria Steinem, a guest at this year’s DVF Awards. “She’s someone I’d like to precede in the world and say, ‘Pay attention to this woman!’ “Von Furstenberg wants to declare older women valuable. Enviable. The culture has long glorified and romanticized the so-called council of wise men. She would like to be one of the culture’s wise women — a confidently mature woman who uses her experience and resources to guide younger leaders.
She’s not interested in making peace with her age or defying it. Frankly, she’s confident she looks pretty good. Von Furstenberg wants to get at something deeper: Age as power.
This is hard. Even for her.
Von Furstenberg has long considered her mortality. Even as a young mother, she worried about a premature death. “When you get to my age, it’s serious,” she says. “When you get to be 70, then it hits. You’re closer to the end.”
“I want to be able to enjoy (life),” she says. “The third act is about fulfillment.”
From star to co-star
In 2016, von Furstenberg announced she had found an heir — Scottish designer Jonathan Saunders, whom she hired as chief creative officer. Saunders had an impeccable fashion pedigree — far more so than von Furstenberg, who had always operated on gut instinct and an intoxicating sense of female bravado.
She put him in charge of everything — from ready-to-wear to advertising. She seemed to have stepped back. For his debut presentation, an informal tableau vivant, she made a point of not arriving until the final minutes. For his spring 2018 runway show, she stood in the audience with the guests, commenting on ensembles that she particularly favored, many of which she was seeing for the first time.
But then Saunders resigned in December 2017. The brand, she recalls him telling her, “is so much about you.”
“I think he did some very good work,” von Furstenberg says. “He’s wonderful with prints and color.” But he was uncomfortable, she says, being a man overseeing a brand built on the philosophy of women being in charge.
So in January, von Furstenberg turned to designer Nathan Jenden — or more specifically, returned to him.
Jenden, now 47, originally came to work for her in 2001, not long out of fashion school, when she chose him to reinvigorate the brand. Her once white-hot label had cooled considerably after she’d sold off the beauty arm in the mid-1980s, moved to Paris and left others to run day-today operations. She had returned to find a new generation enamored of vintage wrap dresses but not much of a company to be proud of. She dabbled in mass market sportswear, collaborated with Avon and hawked her wares on QVC, becoming its star saleswoman.
Jenden impressed her with a trial-run project called “rebel princess.” In their 10 years together, she says, he helped the business grow from $2 million in annual revenue to $250 million.
He left in 2011 to work on his own line, which von Furstenberg helped finance, and later worked for Bebe, the mall brand that is akin to postadolescent sex stitched up in polyester and spandex.
“He had to leave to appreciate me,” von Furstenberg says with a smile. While she deliberately stayed in the background during Saunders’ tenure, she is once again the star, or at least the co-star.
She’d have preferred to turn the creative reins over to a woman. But this is OK. “I have a woman CEO,” she says.
Honesty’s ‘easy for me’
Many women find it impossible to accept a compliment. They deflect or respond with selfdeprecating humor. If you tell von Furstenberg that she looks terrific, she will accept the compliment with a nod. There’s pride
in her sleek figure, the chiseled jawline, those toned legs, that tousle of hair which she tends to run her hands through as she talks. She is a perfect advertisement for her brand.
“Now everyone talks about authenticity and honesty. It’s easy for me. I’ve never lied — not about (my business) going up and down. I’ve always shared it,” she says.
She’s the daughter of a concentration-camp survivor, the mother of two, and a feminist who started calling herself Ms. instead of princess once she saw Steinem’s groundbreaking magazine.
Her headquarters in the Meatpacking District is a scrapbook of her life, a place where the 1970s still simmer. Warhol’d images of her decorate the walls. A pink neon sign reads “in charge.” On the top floor, von Furstenberg keeps an apartment.
The company has shrunk significantly since its heyday. The goal now is to transform a legacy label into a nimble, 21st-century brand focused on e-commerce. For the first time, von Furstenberg wrote a business plan.
‘What fashion can do’
At the ninth annual DVF awards in April, Misty Copeland wept on stage. The history-making ballerina was overwhelmed by the accomplishments of her fellow honorees: advocating for refugee children, providing creative industry jobs to keep young Salvadoran men out of gangs. And Justice Sonia Sotomayor was sitting right there in front of her, about to receive a lifetime achievement award.
Von Furstenberg “is really showing people what fashion can do, and what she can effect, and the importance of being a strong woman,” Copeland said earlier.
When the designer launched the awards, she hesitated to put her name on them. She didn’t think her name carried enough gravitas or prestige. She wasn’t giving away millions of dollars. But putting $50,000 in prize money in the hands of someone like Jaha Dukureh, whose NGO fights female genital mutilation, is transformative — for both the recipient and the donor.
That night, von Furstenberg was wearing a black mesh dress embroidered with pink flowers and a pair of vertiginous black heels. It was a room filled with women wearing DVF. A room that fashion helped make possible. When she stepped to the lectern, she had to lean forward to reach the microphone because it was positioned too low — a gaffe she tut-tutted repeatedly through the night, for in her eyes it was no small thing. It was distracting and annoying; the stage manager should have known better.
Von Furstenberg isn’t rude. She’s persistent and unapologetic. She is a wise woman, and this is her third act. And she wants to make sure it’s just right.