Diane von Furstenberg Page 8

  But women adamantly rejected the length and campaigned to bring back shorter skirts. Buttons emblazoned with STOP THE MIDI began showing up on the blouses of miniskirted girls across the country. Protests erupted in several cities. In Dallas, 335 customers of the Sanger-Harris store signed a petition that read, “We object strongly to being suppressed into buying the midi exclusively. We like looking feminine and intend staying that way, even if it means shopping elsewhere.”

  The midi debacle illustrated an important new trend. Women were dressing to please themselves; the old arbiters of taste had lost their clout.

  ALEXANDRE WAS BARELY SIX MONTHS old when Diane found herself pregnant again. She didn’t let her condition slow her down. Mimmo Ferretti remembers Diane showing up at the factories in Como and Montevarchi hugely pregnant. “Diane totally charmed the workers, who called her ‘La Furstenberg,’” he says. “They’d do anything for her—rush orders, last-minute orders. Obviously, it was in Diane’s interest to charm them, but that’s the way she was.”

  Diane’s baby was due in February 1971. Her gynecologist had advised her to have another cesarean “because I had hardly healed from the last,” she wrote. “He gave me a two-week window, and I chose February 16.” One and six added up to seven, which she considered her lucky number. February also happened to fit nicely into Diane’s shipping schedule. On that day she delivered a perfect little girl, whom she named Tatiana. Her friends in Fashion thought the names of her children honored Alexander Liberman, the powerful Condé Nast editorial director, and his stylish wife, Tatiana du Plessix, whom Diane regarded “like parents.” But Diane says that’s not true. “I just liked the names, though I used to joke that if I had a third child, I’d call it Liberman.”

  At the same time she launched her business and gave birth to her children, Diane also oversaw the renovation of an apartment at 1050 Park Avenue, an elegant 1923 building. Diane combined two units on the third floor to create one large home and hired Parisian decorator Pierre Scapula to design a stylish setting for happiness. Until the renovation was complete, Egon and Diane lived on the twelfth floor, while Tatiana and Alexandre lived with their nanny in the smaller, third-floor unit, which sparked some disapproving comments in the press that the von Furstenbergs were indifferent parents.

  Entering the apartment felt like stepping into the foyer of Scheherazade’s lair, with the walls and ceiling curtained into a pleat-roofed tent in a dizzyingly patterned red Javanese print. (It was also reminiscent of Diana Vreeland’s famous “garden-in-hell” red salon several blocks away at 550 Park Avenue.)

  The décor rejected the “tous les Louis” interiors Diane had seen in Europe’s best homes—there wasn’t one Marie-Antoinette clock or regency commode. The living room had red lacquered walls and cushy banquettes covered in deep-pile velvet. Paintings by Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann, and Larry Rivers adorned the walls. Atop tables sat Fabergé boxes made from quartz, coral, rubies, and enamels. Navy blue straw blanketed the walls in the bedroom, and nine tone-on-tone paintings by Richard Anuszkiewicz, a founder of op art, zigzagged on a wall over the bed. A vicuña throw covered the bed itself, where every morning at eight the couple ate breakfast from trays brought in by an Italian maid, the papers spread out in front of them. Off the bedroom, a mirrored alcove held a writing table, a silkscreen print of Marilyn Monroe, and a huge white leather beanbag chair.

  Like Diane, the apartment had the veneer of high sophistication. It was designed to seduce, and Diane used it, as she used her beauty, her exotic accent, her title, and her clothes, to bewitch and bedazzle. The social world that Diane entered as Egon’s fiancée opened wide to her as his wife. Prince and Princess von Furstenberg had at least four invitations every night, and their own parties drew the top people from New York society, media, culture, and fashion.

  Though only twenty-three in 1970, Diane seemed older and intimidated many of her peers. Bob Colacello, the editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview, recalls “being kind of frightened of Diane for a long time. She seemed overwhelming to me, and so seductive. She was like a golden asp or something. She seemed sophisticated to the point of being jaded, and a lot of that was Egon. I think she felt she had to make herself very sophisticated to fit into Egon’s world.”

  In her quest to know everyone who was anyone, Diane had little time for little people. “As Interview started to become a more viable publication, and as she started to think that maybe I had something, we became friendly,” recalls Colacello. “And I started to see that side of her that’s more earth mother than Weimar Republic cabaret singer.”

  “I got the feeling that she’d singled me out,” says Jann Wenner, the founder and pubisher of Rolling Stone. “She thought, ‘Oh, he’s an interesting guy, and he’s doing something really important and valuable.’ Diane loves that—important people, powerful people doing big things. She gave me a book called The 100 Most Important People, or some such thing, inscribed with a message to the effect that I should aspire to this group, that this was my destiny. Of course, I was flattered.”

  The von Furstenbergs’ parties were legendary for the relaxed atmosphere, the abundant food, and the exciting mix of people. “They invited whoever was happening, whoever was intellectually stimulating,” says Howard Rosenman. Guests ranged from Diana Ross and Halston to Susan Sontag, Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger, and Christina Onassis. It was as “up there,” in Warhol’s phrase, as it got. Many guests were high in another sense—alcohol flowed, and drugs were consumed freely in the apartment’s back rooms.

  “We were smoking pot, taking a little coke, or not so little,” recalls Colacello. “We drew the line at heroin. Coke was not seen as self-destructive. It let you drink more and stay up later.”

  Thousands of miles away, the Vietnam War raged and the death toll soared. No one at the von Furstenbergs’ parties was destined to die in combat in Southeast Asia, though some would eventually lose their horrific battles with drugs and AIDS.

  The fashion crowd in general opposed the war and the presidency of Richard Nixon, who took office in January 1969, “but it was a group that cared more about style and beauty and fun and pleasure than it did about politics,” says Colacello.

  When Fashion did intersect with politics, it tended to be in frivolous ways. In the late sixties, at the height of the Age of Radical Chic, Diane’s friend Valentino did a floor-length trapeze dress in jade silk printed with ferocious, rhinestone-eyed black panthers—the hipster designer’s sly salute to the Black Panther Party. “It was an amazing dress,” says one wearer, Chicagoan Helen Harvey Mills, who got hers at Marshall Field’s 28 Shop. “But I never would have worn it if I thought I was making a political statement.”

  THROUGHOUT THE VON FURSTENBERGS’ MARRIAGE, Egon led a separate life in the city’s gay bathhouses and backroom bars of the far West Village. Diane knew about his gay activities and tried to accept it. “Egon was never really gay,” she says. “He was bisexual. He was promiscuous, and not just with men.” In the world he’d grown up in, sexual fidelity was for the dull and ordinary, the bourgeois. “Only maids are in love,” Egon’s uncle Gianni Agnelli told his sister Susanna, when she was pining for her absent boyfriend. Love was something for “cheap magazines.”

  One Sunday morning Mart Crowley, whose hit play, The Boys in the Band, was enjoying a long off-Broadway run, took Howard Rosenman to meet the von Furstenbergs at a brunch at their apartment. Rosenman was astounded to see that one of the hosts was the handsome blond man he’d partied with the night before at the Continental Baths, where men socialized wearing nothing but little white towels. Egon and Rosenman “looked at each other and burst out laughing,” Rosenman recalls.

  Egon introduced himself to Rosenman, then turned to Diane and said, “This is the guy I was telling you about.”

  Diane’s need to be independent was deeper and stronger than her need for fidelity; it was almost a physical requirement, like breathing. The open marriage she shared with Egon allowed her to maintain her cherished indepe
ndence. It also fed her sense of self as a naughty siren. She had affairs, too.

  John Richardson puts a more calculating spin on Diane’s acceptance of Egon’s gay affairs. “Egon had an aristocratic circle and a New York social circle, and he also had a big gay circle. That’s where Diane was very clever in taking advantage. It probably helped her [career] enormously; the gay community is rather involved in the fashion world. And Egon was so popular. Everyone who met him liked him. He was an incredibly nice man with beautiful manners,” Richardson says.

  Diane, on the other hand, in the minds of the New York social elite, “was slightly taken as a joke at first,” says Richardson. “She wasn’t exactly princess material.” In part that was because she was Jewish; in part it was because of her bourgeois Brussels background; and in part it reflected her raging ambition, which was seen as unseemly to those who’d been to the manor born. She was a climber, “passionately interested in her own glory,” Richardson continues.

  Nevertheless, the society connections were a great boost to Diane’s fledgling business, as they have been for designers throughout history. Coco Chanel used her aristocratic lovers and famous friends, including Jean Cocteau, the arts patron Misia Sert, and Sergey Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes, to build her business. The turn-of-the-twentieth-century couturier Paul Poiret, who is generally credited with ridding women of disfiguring S-shaped corsets, threw over-the-top parties attended by the gratin of Paris, and won reverent coverage in the press. Going further back, to eighteenth-century France and the birth of couture, dressmaker Rose Bertin grew rich thanks to the patronage of her most famous client, Marie-Antoinette.

  Equally important to Diane’s ambitions were a group of designers she met during her first years in New York: Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, Stephen Burrows, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, and Halston. Not only were they at the forefront of a fashion revolution resulting in a distinctly American style of dressing, they were also becoming celebrities themselves. In New York in the seventies, they were the pilot fish of sex and glamour and a new kind of fame that was available to all, even if it lasted for only fifteen minutes.

  New York served as ground zero for the action, though the cash-strapped city was scarred by graffiti and filth and wounded by poverty and crime. At the same time, a glitter of fresh ideas swirled up. Downtown, the new genre of performance art, blending theater, dance, music, and visual art, allowed artists to create in real time before an audience. Uptown, Saturday Night Live, produced by Lorne Michaels at NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center, forged a new kind of ensemble-based television. Abstract expressionists, pop artists, rock musicians, independent filmmakers, and New Journalists, writing in a novelistic style, thrived in New York’s hothouse of innovation. In Fashion, much of the creativity blazed from gay culture, which only recently had come into its own following a long suppression. Most of the celebrated male designers were gay, as were large numbers of the support staff of the fashion industry.

  LIKE HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK fashion nurtured a top clique—a group of insiders who ruled as the arbiters and stars of cool. This is what Bob Colacello called the New Seventies Society. It included designers—Halston, Diane, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, Oscar de la Renta, Fernando Sanchez, Calvin Klein, Stephen Burrows; pretty young women, including Bianca Jagger, Anjelica Huston, Elsa Peretti, Marisa Berenson, and her sister, Berry Berenson; and celebrities from music, film, and publishing—Mick Jagger, Diana Ross, Jack Nicholson, and Truman Capote.

  Diana Vreeland, who’d become a consultant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute after being ousted from the editorship of Vogue in 1971, was queen and Halston was king.

  Born Roy Halston Frowick to a middle-class family in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1932, Halston grew up to be a strapping six-footer, slender and handsome with chiseled cheekbones, a full head of sandy hair, limpid green eyes, and a soft, girlish mouth. He got his start, like Coco Chanel and Rose Bertin, making hats, and in the mid-sixties he turned to fashion, designing small collections for Bergdorf Goodman. In 1968 he opened his own atelier at 33 East Sixty-Eighth Street, overlooking Madison Avenue, and for his first collection he showed twenty-five simple outfits in jersey, wool, and Ultrasuede. The next morning at nine thirty, Babe Paley, the brightest jewel of the Beautiful People—BPs in WWD parlance—was waiting at his front door to order an argyle pantsuit. Halston was launched.

  In the seventies he blossomed into a pop culture superstar. During the day, dressed in a black turtleneck and narrowly cut trousers, a cigarette held vertically aloft in his long fingers, Halston worked at his red lacquered desk, surrounded by pots of orchids. At night he went out to clubs and parties with the Halstonettes, his entourage of models in identical Halston outfits. He attended opening nights with Liz Taylor and binged on scotch with Liza Minnelli at the Pines on Fire Island. He was a bold-faced name in the nation’s gossip columns, the subject of New Yorker cartoons and Top Ten songs.

  The public did not see the dark side that Diane knew close up—the cocaine addiction and the endless parade of male prostitutes he ordered up to his room at night. His behavior distressed Diane, who greatly admired Halston’s talent.

  Diane and Egon were regulars at Halston’s parties in his coldly stark modern house on East Sixty-Third Street. The cathedral ceilings, floating staircases, and gray flannel seating platforms provided the background for evenings of free-flowing drugs. Fashion insiders, pretty girls, celebrities, and hustlers mingled with grand dames, including Martha Graham, who enjoyed Halston’s patronage, and Betty Ford.

  The von Furstenbergs often ended up at Halston’s house after an evening that started, say, by socializing with the old guard at an uptown charity event, then moved to partying downtown with the hipsters at a club like Max’s Kansas City, a favorite of rocker Patti Smith, who’d arrived in New York around the same time as Diane.

  The von Furstenbergs had the looks, money, style, and decadence to rise to the top. Soon they were the most talked-about couple in New York. Diane dressed to be noticed and photographed—during the day in Saint Laurent skirts and blazers, hippie-chic dresses from Ossie Clark, and romantic crushed-velvet pants and ruffled shirts by Jean Bouquin, the French designer who epitomized Saint-Tropez cool. At night, she dazzled wearing dresses in diaphanous fabrics with plunging necklines and armholes that showed a good deal of her breasts. She liked to reveal them, posing topless occasionally, once for Francesco Scavullo for the cover of Town & Country, though the picture, with a clothed Egon, was cropped to show only her sculpted shoulders and chunky David Webb necklace.

  Nudity was “an important part of the seventies. From 1969 to 1980, everything—art, music, literature, politics and (as we know now from lawsuits against the Catholic Church) religion—involved people taking their clothes off,” wrote humorist P. J. O’Rourke in his foreword to New York in the 70s, a collection of photographs assembled by Allan Tannenbaum, photo editor of the now defunct SoHo Weekly News.

  As Tannenbaum’s photos attest, public nudity was glorified, an expression of the unbridled sexuality that pulsed through pop culture. It could be found at private parties and downtown clubs, at political demonstrations and performance-art installations. The New York cable show Ugly George provided one of its strangest expressions. Tricked out with zany video gear, a man calling himself Ugly George prowled the city streets, accosting young women and asking them to expose their breasts for his camera. A surprising number of women agreed to follow Ugly George to secluded spots in alleys and doorways, and sometimes even returned with him to his apartment.

  THE VON FURSTENBERGS TRAVELED OFTEN, following the seasons with other migratory jet-setters, from New York to Saint-Moritz to Cortina to Sardinia to São Paulo and back. The press alternately ridiculed and fawned over Diane as a “princess,” but mostly fawned. At the time, the title had a certain cachet. These were the glory days of “international white trash,” a phrase coined by writer Anthony Haden-Guest to describe the hordes of hard-partying, hard-spending Europeans, many wi
th dubious aristocratic titles, who washed up on the shores of Manhattan. They were fleeing the stuffiness of old European society, unstable economies, high taxes, and kidnappings. “I didn’t have to carry a gun in New York like I did in Italy,” says Mimmo Ferretti, who worried that his family money made him a target for kidnappers.

  In New York, the up-all-night, no-job-to-go-to Europeans—good-looking, sophisticated, and gorgeously dressed—found freedom, excitement, and acceptance. They were sought-after guests at fashionable dinners, parties, restaurants, and clubs. The Europeans gave New Yorkers an excuse to admire old world glamour and status and, as the revolutionary spirit of the sixties waned, made it “all right to be stylish and irresponsible again,” as Bob Colacello wrote.

  Most of the reporters who covered Diane’s first fashion opening, in April 1970, focused on her link to European royalty. A New York Times piece in which Bernadine Morris, the paper’s chief fashion writer, referred to Diane as “the Princess” was typical. Other journalists emphasized her status as a society star. In her New York Post column, Eugenia Sheppard, for example, described the parties Diane and Egon had recently attended and didn’t even mention Diane’s collection until the third paragraph.

  The stories reflected a fundamental fact: Diane was the product. Her most “brilliant invention was herself,” says John Richardson. “That’s what she’s all about.” Diane re-created herself as a beautiful, on-top-of-the-world princess, and this, combined with her natural “style and charm and charisma,” as Macy’s chief, Terry J. Lundgren, put it, was what drew people to her and her brand.

  “I did make it all up,” Diane says. “But I’m not an imposter!” The invention comported with her deepest sense of self, of the strength, discipline, confidence, courage, and sophistication she strove to achieve.