Diane von Furstenberg (15 page)

The clothes were like living things to her—like her two small children sleeping nearby with their nanny. When she held the soft, graceful garments in her hands, she felt she was holding her own sunny future.

That evening Diane flung the vicuña comforter aside and leapt out of bed. Standing in front of the black and white screen, she stared at Julie Nixon Eisenhower and suddenly realized: If a simple little top could do so much for a woman, what if she extended it to the knee and turned it into a dress?

RICHARD CONRAD AND SUE FEINBERG
tell a different wrap-dress creation story. They say
Conrad
came up with the idea after seeing Diane’s wrap top and skirt ensemble. “I knew we could cut our costs in half if we sewed the wrap top to the skirt,” because a one-piece garment is cheaper to manufacture than a two-piece outfit, says Conrad. “I suggested that to Diane, and the first one-piece wrap dress” was born.

Feinberg says she happened to be in New York that day and heard Dick Conrad say, ‘Let’s make it into a dress.’”

Among others who’ve taken credit for the wrap dress over the years is Clovis Ruffin, a designer who was known for creating clingy T-shirt dresses. After Ruffin died in 1992, Diane recalls, “his mother called me and said I’d stolen the dress from her son. The poor woman had lost her son, but I had to tell her, I did the dress
before
he became a designer.”

IT TOOK A GREAT DEAL
of trial and error to get the proportions of the wrap dress exactly right. In Italy, Bruna, Ferretti’s pattern maker, spent hours cutting different patterns and pinning them
together. Diane and Feinberg tried on a series of prototypes, “testing and trying” to get it to work, says Diane. “It was like a puzzle, to make all the pieces fit.”

The first wrap—in a wood grain print—was seen by buyers in September 1973. In April 1974 Diane launched the style, number T/72, in snakeskin and leopard prints. “It was nothing really—just a few yards of fabric with two sleeves and a wide wrap sash,” Diane later wrote, describing its allure. At a time of schizophrenic skirt lengths—from microminis to midis to maxis—the wrap was an elegant, flattering knee length. It didn’t have a zipper or buttons, so you could slip it on quickly and slink out of a bedroom “without waking a sleeping man,” as Diane often says. It wrapped around the body like a kimono and molded to the individual woman’s shape. The movement of the print enhanced a woman’s curves. You could wash it.

“We shipped it out, and the retailers went crazy,” says Conrad. The country was in the middle of a recession, and most other clothing lines were not selling well. “But salesgirls were literally fighting over who got to sell Diane’s dresses,” adds Conrad.

The wrap flew out of the stores, and the reorders poured in. Saks alone ordered fifteen hundred dresses. Conrad telexed Ferretti to stop the sewing machines, to take the print fabric slated for Diane’s other styles and sew them all into the wrap. They would offer the wrap in sixteen prints. They were betting the collection on one dress, and amazingly, “it worked,” Conrad says.

A typical wearer was writer Leslie Garis. “I had a black wrap dress that I always felt sexy in,” she says. “I remember how it defined my waist and was easy on the bust and hips. It moved with me. It gave me the illusion that my body was perfect.”

Leslie Bennetts, who traveled a great deal for her job as a reporter, recalls being “very grateful for the stretchy jersey fabric. You never had to iron a DVF dress, even when it had been crumpled up in your suitcase. But the most miraculous thing was that the dress was flattering to almost
everyone. I remember going with my ex-husband, who had remained a dear friend, to his high school reunion, where we spent the evening talking to a former classmate of his who had also brought her former spouse. Both she and I were wearing the same DVF wrap dress—I think it was a tan bamboo pattern—but we were polar opposites in physical type: She was a short, angular, pencil-thin brunette, and I was a tall, voluptuous blonde. Her ex-husband said, ‘You each look like the dress was made for you!’”

Because of Diane’s favorable terms with Ferretti, It cost only $16.57 to make the wrap dress, which Diane sold for $39.75 to the stores, which then marked it up to $75, about $350 in 2014 dollars. “We were making a sixty- to sixty-three-percent gross margin. If you were making forty percent, you were lucky,” Conrad says. “We had a license to steal.”

After being apprised of the sales numbers in October 1975, Diane sent Conrad a telegram from Paris:

darling dick, i cannot believe the figures, and each of us are responsible for it . . . i love you so much. diane

The wrap hit America like a tsunami in matte jersey. Thousands of women of all ages, sizes, occupations, and ethnicities bought the dress. You couldn’t enter a restaurant or walk down an avenue or go to a PTA meeting anywhere in America without seeing a flattering “Diane” dress in bold, printed jersey. Once, while having her hair styled with Fran Boyar at an East Fifty-Seventh Street salon, Diane and her house model gazed out the picture window, counting the number of women in a wrap who passed by. “I can’t remember the exact number, but it was an outrageous amount,” Boyar recalls.

The wrap was everywhere at the 1976 political conventions, worn by Republicans and Democrats alike. Celebrities from Dina Merrill and Gloria Steinem to Bella Abzug and Candice Bergen wore it. Cybill Shepherd,
playing the role of a campaign worker, wore a wrap in the 1976 hit movie
Taxi Driver
. When several society swans showed up at Le Cirque one day that year wearing the same model in a green and white print, the city’s gossip columnists treated it not as an embarrassing coincidence but as evidence of the women’s membership in an exclusive club—the sisterhood of the little wrap dress.

Most journalists writing about the dress, however, didn’t actually call it “the wrap,” a moniker that took a while to catch on.
WWD
mostly referred to it as “the Diane dress,” and Bernadine Morris, chief fashion critic at the
New York Times,
called it “the wrap-around dress.”

The wrap fulfilled Diane’s idea of the true purpose of fashion—to enhance a woman’s natural allure. Too many male designers, she believed, exploited and distorted women with their ridiculous, misogynistic styles. “Women are too intelligent, to bright, to be told, ‘You’re going to wear a feather in your behind,’” Diane said. She designed with women’s bodies in mind—she knew how she wanted to look and how her style would appeal to others. The nation’s women repaid her by anointing her a celebrity, the most bankable female designer since Coco Chanel. By the mid-seventies, at the height of the wrap’s popularity, Diane was selling twenty-five thousand dresses a week.

Her friends in the heady world of high fashion cheered her on and embraced her as an integral part of their social world. “I’d always see her with the best people,” says André Leon Talley, the imposing fashion authority and
Vogue
contributing editor. “I’d met her at Le Jardin,
the
disco before Studio 54 opened, and she’d come in with Yves Saint Laurent and [his partner] Pierre Bergé. When Saint Laurent had his first big couture show in New York at the Hotel Pierre, Diane was in the front row with Bianca Jagger and Nan Kempner, et cetera, et cetera.”

Mostly, the high-end design brigade was generous in commenting on Diane’s work. “She knows her customer. She understands women and the power of femininity,” says Oscar de la Renta. After all, Diane wasn’t
competing against the Lagerfelds and de la Rentas of fashion, whose clothes were far more expensive than hers.

Privately, the fashion world’s reaction to her success was more guarded, partly because they considered her more of a merchandiser than a designer, and partly, perhaps, because they were jealous of her success. French couturiers such as Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld “loved Diane as a person; she was such an amusing girl. But, no, I don’t think they loved her as a designer,” says François Catroux, an interior designer based in Paris and a close friend of Diane’s.

Some Seventh Avenue observers called her a fake and a fad. She wasn’t
really
a designer—she merely copied the colorful little dresses she saw in Europe. Her name wasn’t even her own. Her princess title impressed ordinary people, but it was laughable to real aristocrats, her critics said. The insults got back to Diane and fed her insecurity. When interviewers asked her about her talent, her answers were as humble as a denim skirt. “I don’t pretend to do original things,” she told one interviewer. And to me, she said, “I didn’t call myself a designer until recently.”

Her reluctance to take credit for creating original fashion perhaps reflected her sense of inferiority compared with such friends as Yves Saint Laurent, Halston, and Oscar de la Renta. It also perhaps reflected her acknowledgment that others were at least in part responsible for some of the work marketed under her name. “She took credit for everything that was done by everyone else,” says DeBare Saunders, her jewelry designer in the seventies.

The snarky comments and her own self-doubts pushed her to strive harder. She was tough on herself. She always worked best when she knew people didn’t believe in her. Then she had something to prove.

Diane’s journals and diaries, which are written in French, reflect her fears and insecurities. “She was scared. She describes her malaise,” says Linda Bird Francke, who was privy to some of these entries while she worked with Diane on her memoirs.

Andy Warhol, who generally preferred transvestites to real women
and could be especially catty about strong women like Diane, rarely had anything good to say about her or her clothes. At a party one night in 1980 he complimented a friend, Sondra Gilman, on her “beautiful bright yellow dress” and asked her who designed it. “You’ll fall over if I tell you,” she said.

It was Diane von Furstenberg. “I did fall over,” Warhol wrote in his diary, before grudgingly admitting that the dress “really was pretty.”

When Bernadine Morris of the
New York Times
saw the wrap dress for the first time, she says, “it reminded me of the housedresses my mother wore when she worked around the house. It was a housedress, dressed up in nice fabric.” The wrap dress wasn’t revolutionary, she adds. “It was a minor big trend. There just aren’t that many new ideas in fashion.” Maybe two, she says. “Dior’s New Look and [Yves Saint Laurent’s] trouser suit.”

It’s rare for one particular dress to cause a sensation, though there are at least a couple of examples of the phenomenon in fashion history. In 1922 the French fashion house Premet put out a black satin slip dress with a white collar and cuffs. Called “La Garçonne,” after the year’s best-selling novel of the same title about a free-spirited tomboy who sleeps around, it sold more than a million copies, including knockoffs. Ten years later, Macy’s reportedly sold a half million copies of the white evening gown with ruffled sleeves created by the Hollywood designer Adrian for Joan Crawford to wear in the movie
Letty Lynton.

Diane did not invent the idea of a garment that wrapped. The Romans had togas, after all. Before Diane’s wrap, a number of variations of the style had appeared over the years. In the 1930s Elsa Schiaparelli designed a beach cover-up that wrapped around the body and tied at the sides. During World War II, Claire McCardell did the first version of her famous “popover” dress, conceived for active women who worked in and outside the home. In unassuming fabrics like denim, the dress was meant to be “popped over” a pair of trousers, a bathing suit, or underwear. It could also be worn as a coat. Vicky Tiel designed a mint-green mini
wrap that was worn by the Swedish model Ewa Aulin in the 1968 movie
Candy
. Bonnie Cashin made a wool wrap coat in 1950, and Stephen Burrows did a long-sleeved wrap dress in red jersey in 1970. Halston, too, produced many wraps—tops, coats, and dresses in jersey and his signature ultra-suede.

What Diane did was mold the wrap in comfortable, alluring jersey in colorful bold prints and make it a staple of a woman’s wardrobe. Now, after forty years, Diane no longer feels the need to downplay her achievement. “Who else has done a dress that’s been popular for so long?” she says. “People think that the wrap dress was an accident or just plain luck. What they don’t realize is how I took my frustrations and aspirations, transformed them into a positive force, and poured it all into that little dress.”

Diane’s wrap was “a climax to the American sportswear wrapping tradition,” according to a description of it at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a green and white dotted wrap from the seventies in its costume collection. Diane “translated the style into 1970s fabrics and colors, generally brighter, bolder and more synthetic (and stretchy) than the early examples of which the silhouette and design principle are indebted.”

The American wrapping tradition grew largely from the work of women designers who were infused with a spirit of democracy and feminism. Wrapped garments relinquished control to the wearer. They were fluid, not fixed. They could be worn loose or pulled taut. They conformed to an individual’s body and style and could accommodate a variety of shapes, sizes, and sensibilities.

Part of the early appeal of the wrap was that it was supposed to be washable and drip-dry. Not all wraps, though, turned out to be colorfast. Customers complained that the dye in some of the prints ran when water hit them. Though Conrad insisted the problem affected only “one tenth of one percent” of the dresses, Diane soon changed the labels to read “Dry Clean Only.”

The necessity for dry cleaning did not slow the wrap’s explosive growth. Though America was in a recession and many Seventh Avenue manufacturers were losing money or going out of business, within a year Diane had sold several millions of dollars’ worth of wraps. “The stars were aligned” to make the dress a smash, says Feinberg. “If Diane hadn’t met Ferretti, and he hadn’t bought a factory that happened to have a merrowing machine, she never would have made as much money as she did.”