Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  Profound social change was under way. It would reach deep into life, politics, and culture, and it would be symbolized by the new freedoms claimed by the young. “It is strictly forbidden to forbid,” read a notice tacked to a door at the Sorbonne. It became a rallying cry, one of the signature slogans of the era, along with “Live without limits and enjoy without restraint.”

  Sex was a key element of the new freedoms. Before 1968, says Cedric Lopez-Huici, Egon’s friend, “when you had a girlfriend, there was no sexual intercourse. You were going out with her, kissing her, doing everything but.”

  Now everyone was doing everything, joyously and without restraint. Diane was an enthusiastic participant. “Diane was wild. She slept with all sorts of people,” says Nona Gordon. “A lot of them she’s forgotten.”

  Every evening and weekend, every trip provided an opportunity for sex. Visiting Gordon at a film festival in Deauville, where the young woman was working as Omar Sharif’s personal assistant, Diane had a dalliance with the Doctor Zhivago star. “He was the worst lay I ever had,” she says.

  Diane sympathized with the rebel students and workers, but only “in the most superficial way,” she admitted. She was too busy having fun. Sometimes, though, Diane and her friends collided with the student radicals. One night a group of protesting students had pushed through the barricades to confront police near the club New Jimmy’s on boulevard Montparnasse. The writer Taki Theodoracopulos, who also was present that evening, recalled opening the door to see what was going on outside. A Molotov cocktail hurled by a rioter exploded in the foyer. Diane and her friends, who a moment before had been dancing to the jerky form of French pop known as yé-yé, poured out into the street, mingling with the rioters.

  At the hot nightclubs—Castel’s, Le Privé, New Jimmy’s, Le Sept, Le Pré Catalan—and the jet set watering holes from Gstaad to Saint-Tropez, the demimonde mingled with the jeunesse dorée and the children of the bourgeoisie. The currency was youth and style, qualities Diane had in abundance.

  Still, she lacked the pedigree to gain entrée to the “best” parties, les grandes fêtes hosted by such aristocrats as Jacqueline de Ribes and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. She did not have a “de” in her name; she was not rich; she was not beautiful in that delicate porcelain way of a faubourg aristocrat. “Diane was a plump, Jewish Belgian girl who was very funny,” says Taki. “She did imitations of how foreigners spoke French. She wasn’t at all glamorous. I never saw her at those very exclusive parties that used to take place in those days. She was a girl people knew, a middle-class girl.”

  But she was popular, and she developed warm friendships, particularly with women. “She liked women. She had genuine women friends,” says Taki. She harbored a powerful instinct to nurture and protect, and she was drawn alike to the neediness of men and damsels in distress.

  One night at a Saint-Tropez party in in one of those posh villas that had overtaken the curving shoreline like eucalyptus, Diane was strolling through the fragrant gardens overlooking the sea when she came upon a beautiful young woman sitting alone on a stone bench sobbing. Her name was Florence Grinda.

  Between sobs, Florence explained that her husband had left the party with another woman. Diane suggested they go for a drive in Grinda’s car (Diane hadn’t yet learned to drive and didn’t have a license). Although Diane says the two young women had met previously in Geneva, Grinda recalls that she “didn’t know [Diane] at all.” Still, she and Diane “went for a drive for about an hour until I stopped crying, and ever since we’ve been friends. I thought that was a very rare thing to do.”

  As it turned out, Florence was no ordinary girl married to an ordinary cad. She’d grown up on avenue Foch, the daughter of Gisèle and Jean Michard-Pellissier, a business lawyer who counted among his best friends Aristotle Onassis. Florence’s husband was Jean-Noël Grinda, a tennis star and fixture of the fast-living Parisian set that revolved around playboy photographer Gunther Sachs and his wife, Brigitte Bardot.

  Diane’s talent for making friends reflected her warmth and interest in others, but she also had a knack for getting close to people who had entrée to the worlds of power, money, and celebrity. “Once we went to a concert in Paris, or maybe it was a dinner, where Liza Minnelli was singing,” recalls Grinda. “Diane jumped in front of Liza and actually got down on her knees to tell Liza how much she loved her and how wonderful she was.”

  Chief among Diane’s glamorous new friends was Marisa Berenson. Just as a decade later Diane would stand as a vivid representation of the seventies in New York, Marisa embodied the Parisian beau monde of the sixties. Already a famous model when Diane met her in 1968, Marisa was an ethereal gazelle of a girl with long chestnut hair and huge, glittering green eyes. Marisa had been born modeling—she first appeared in Vogue in 1947, when the magazine ran a picture of her baptism. “My whole life has been lived at Condé Nast,” she jokes.

  Also at Hearst. At age five, Marisa and her younger sister, Berry, landed on the cover of Elle in matching red dresses with sashes in shocking pink—a color made famous by their famous grandmother, the couturiere Elsa Schiaparelli. Like dazzling Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Marisa represented “the exact furthermost evolution of a class,” so that most women seemed plain and dull beside her.

  On her mother’s side, Marisa was descended from a famous Neapolitan astronomer; on her father’s side, she was related to art historian Bernard Berenson. Her father, Robert Lawrence Berenson, was an American diplomat of Lithuanian Jewish descent. Her mother was Countess Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha de Wendt de Kerlor, known as Gogo, the daughter of Schiaparelli.

  Sent off to boarding school at age five, Marisa had led a childhood of both loneliness and lavishness, of motherless bedtimes and holiday tea parties where little girls were served by footmen in white gloves. She had emerged from this overstuffed yet undernourished background to become a star of the Parisian youthquake.

  Neither Diane nor Marisa remembers how they met, perhaps at a party in Paris. Though they’d been raised in remarkably different circumstances, there was much to draw them together. Both had fierce wills and a determination to be independent. Marisa also had a vulnerability that appealed to Diane. For her part, Marisa found Diane a refreshing change from the snooty French girls she met modeling. “We became instant close friends,” she says.

  Marisa and Diane dressed to be noticed, piling on the makeup and costume jewelry, bangles, Tibetan chains, and thick belts covered with huge stones. Their look was eccentric and eclectic. “We’d go from being hippie chicks to very glamorous to very dressed, to very undressed,” says Marisa. “There wasn’t just one look. It was an explosion of self-expression.”

  One favorite look of theirs combined teeny hot pants with platform shoes and Yves Saint Laurent jackets. They would dress up, iron their hair—they were both tormented by unruly tresses that frizzed at the least excuse—and head out to the restaurants, cafés, and clubs.

  At the time, Marisa was living in her grandmother’s grand hôtel particulier at 22 rue de Berri, a residence that had once been home to Princess Mathilde, Napoléon’s niece. The interior was a jumble of treasures that the couturiere had collected over the years. Many were works by the famous artists she’d befriended in the twenties, including a Salvador Dali compact that looked like a telephone dial. She also owned tapestries by François Boucher. Feathers and jewels instead of flowers sprouted from Schiaparelli’s vases.

  On her way out for the day or evening, Marisa tried to avoid “Schiap,” as the designer was known by her intimates. Schiaparelli disapproved of what she considered her granddaughter’s eccentric outfits and makeup. “My grandmother didn’t think I was elegant at all,” says Marisa. “She’d look at me leaving the house, and she’d say, ‘You’re not going out in that!’ I’d have on a miniskirt or mini-shorts, and she just thought it was so vulgar.”

  Diane knew that Marisa had a very famous grandmother “who was a tyrant,” but she never met
Schiaparelli. The couturiere was always upstairs, and Diane was always downstairs, she recalls.

  The friends loved movies and would sometimes see two or three in one day. After spending an afternoon in a darkened theater, the two young women, dressed to the nineteenths in microminis and bangles or gossamer tops and low-slung bell-bottoms, would saunter into La Coupole in Montparnasse for oysters, and everyone would stare—exactly as they’d hoped.

  Their style was startlingly new. The sixties were a turning point for fashion, marked by the ascendance of individuality and the decline of couture. In just one year, from 1966 to 1967, the number of couture houses in Paris plunged from thirty-nine to seventeen. The next year, Balenciaga retired, bemoaning that there was no one left to dress. His clients were dead or dying, and so was their way of life, with its rival salons and grand balls, ladies’ maids and drivers in livery. With the student and worker protests soon to be followed by the resignation of Charles de Gaulle, who had dominated French politics since the end of the occupation, a spirit of openness and change infused all levels of Parisian society.

  And yet. Marie-Laure Noailles, a descendent of the marquis de Sade, patron of the surrealists, and star hostess of Old Paris, lived on in her hôtel particulier on the Isle St. Louis, a remnant of the world of French sophistication and privilege that was closed to Diane. Marisa had been born to this world, and through her, Diane would glimpse it. “I knew everyone there was to know,” Marisa says.

  In addition to the old guard, Marisa introduced Diane to the new international elite—a mixture of pop singers, fashion designers, photographers, movie directors, and Hollywood stars—many of them from working-class backgrounds. This group intersected and mingled with the jet set crowd of socialites and aristocrats.

  Some of the people Diane encountered with Marisa she’d already met while studying in Geneva. Egon had introduced her to others. “We were all Eurotrash,” says Mimmo Ferretti. “We were not like the children of rich Europeans now who are sent to America to study. We were all taking drugs and carousing, but we were the most fun, and we are all still together, still friends—those of us who are still alive.

  “It was the best time since the belle époque,” he continues. “We had a choice—live in the moment or settle down and go to work. I lived in the moment. If you were to meet someone who was in Paris in the belle époque, you’d say, ‘Oh, you met Toulouse-lautrec!’ And if the answer was ‘Oh, no, I was too busy working and getting married and having three kids,’ you’d look at the guy like he’s crazy. He missed it all!”

  DESPITE THE “HEDONISTIC PLEASURE” OF being young in Paris, as Diane wrote in 1998, on some deep level she remained an outsider. She would never be a true Parisienne. She would never be part of le gratin (the upper crust). She could sometimes tag along with Marisa to the homes of aristocrats, but the world of the Faubourg St. Germain with its inscrutable rules and Proustian intrigues would remain closed to her.

  Of course, Fashion was all about exclusion, and no one understood this better than the French, going back to the days of Louis XIV. When the Sun King began wearing a special coat with slashed sleeves, he passed a law that prevented anyone but his courtiers from donning copies of it. Only he and a handful of others could wear red-heeled shoes, a symbol of their power to crush their enemies under their feet.

  Later, Marie-Antoinette, perhaps history’s most famous clotheshorse, decreed that only she and her closest friends could wear le grand corps, a jewel-bedecked corset that was tighter and meaner than anything worn by ordinary women. Le grand corps was so constraining that one princess passed out every time someone at court told a joke. She could never get enough oxygen to laugh.

  If Diane had stayed in Paris, it’s unlikely she would have become a famous designer. As a Belgian, the French fashion establishment would never take her seriously. With the exception of the father of haute couture himself, Charles Frederick Worth, only one non-French designer at that point had ever succeeded in Paris couture—that was the Chicago-born Mainbocher, who happened to have French ancestors and a very French name, Main Bocher, which he collapsed into one word.

  The models, photographers, and fashion journalists Diane met through Koski and Marisa were living the kind of über-glamorous life she coveted. She grew restless working as Koski’s assistant, and in the summer of 1968 she abruptly quit her job. “I didn’t wait for my month’s salary. I took Albert’s radio, charged a plane ticket to him, and left,” Diane recalled.

  “I guess she knew I wouldn’t mind,” says Koski. “I was very rich, and her salary wasn’t so extraordinary. It was a very relaxed company, and a very relaxed time.”

  Now Diane was free to travel with Marisa. At the Mare Moda fashion weekend in Capri, the friends “stayed in a pretty hotel and dressed up and went to wonderful parties,” Diane recalls. “I met Valentino and [his partner] Giancarlo Giammetti, and Italian playboys. Both Marisa and I ended up having a romance with Italian playboys.”

  At Mare Moda, Diane also ran into Angelo Ferretti, the flamboyant owner of thriving textile factories in Italy, whose son Mimmo was a friend of Egon’s brother. Ferretti invited Diane to apprentice with him, to learn everything she could about clothes manufacturing. It would turn out to be the most important relationship of her early career. “I was looking for my door to be independent, and Ferretti opened it for me,” Diane says.

  ANGELO FERRETTI’S FACTORIES SAT IN a nest of textile companies in Parè, near Como, Italy, thirty miles north of Milan on the shores of Lake Como. The area swarmed with billionaires, duchesses, and movie stars who lived in extravagant villas high in the hills, and with artists who peddled their work to the textile manufacturers. In his mid-forties, Ferretti played the role of big-shot businessman—bossy, volatile, and flamboyant. A tall, bulky man, he wore bespoke suits and owned a yellow Maserati that he drove suicidally fast through the Italian hills. He also had a black Rolls-Royce that he drove to work and parked smack in front of the factory’s main entrance, blocking the door. Though reckless in most of his habits, he was almost comically fastidious about his clothes. If he noticed a wrinkle in his trousers when he arrived at work, he’d give the pants to a seamstress to press, then wander around the premises in his underwear, greatly enjoying the reaction of his workers. “He was like a king,” recalls Sue Feinberg, the designer who would later oversee production of Diane’s clothes at Ferretti’s factory outside Florence.

  “Today he’d be in jail for the way he treated his employees,” adds Diane, noting that he screamed “Imbecile!” at them whenever he was dissatisfied with their work, which was a great deal of the time. No doubt he’d also be in trouble in this environment-conscious age for what Diane says was another Ferretti practice: dumping his toxic, leftover dye in Lake Como.

  People whispered that Ferretti had won his Como factories in a poker game. Actually, he’d bought them after World War II with loans from relatives, including his father, an officer in the Italian army. A combination of business acumen, luck, a stellar product, and a cadre of diligent, talented workers enabled him to keep his family and his mistresses in style, in villas and swank apartments, jewelry and fast cars, despite a gambling habit that should have ruined him.

  Most of his weekends were spent at the roulette tables in Monte Carlo, where he lived rent-free in a three-room apartment, courtesy of the Hotel de Paris Monte-Carlo. In Paris, he stayed at the Plaza Athénée on the tab of the city’s premier gambling club, Le Grand Cercle. A diabetic, he traveled everywhere with a cooler of insulin.

  Diane immediately felt at home in Como. Her grandfathers and grandmothers, her uncles and aunts, had owned and worked in textile firms and clothing shops. In Italy, as in Diane’s family, textiles were more than cloth. They came from the blood and soil of the people. Many of the workers in Ferretti’s factories had learned the crafts of weaving, dyeing, printing, pattern making, and sewing from their parents, in a long line stretching back generations.

  Angelo Ferretti’s success was built large
ly on a new cotton-jersey fabric he developed. “It was article six-oh-three-oh; I still remember the number,” says his son Mimmo. “We were the first to do it. We put together two different kinds of yarn, and, wow, it worked. Instead of shrinking ten percent, it shrank only five percent, and it held all its color.” It would become the fabric of the wrap dress and play a huge role in Diane’s success.

  Ferretti had some designer accounts—he made shirts for Ferragamo and Louis Féraud, for example. Mostly, though, he used his gorgeous cotton jersey for “horrible stuff, really schlocky things like you’d find at Monoprix or UPIM [the European equivalents to Target],” says Feinberg. Among them were tens of thousands of T-shirts. Until Diane came along, she adds, “I don’t think Ferretti realized what he had.”

  Still, Diane learned a great deal from Ferretti: how to spot designs that would translate into good prints for fabric, how certain colors worked together harmoniously, and the various techniques for dyeing. “Ferretti had thousands of prints,” says Diane, who spent hours going through them, and quickly she developed her “own point of view.” Designs that “had some movement to them,” particularly ones that evoked nature—animal skins, tree bark, leaves—sparked her imagination the most and would become signatures of DVF style.

  DIANE SPENT THE FALL OF 1968 traveling back and forth between Ferretti’s factories in Italy and her mother’s apartment in Paris. At the time, Egon was living in New York, where he had enrolled in a training program at Chase Manhattan Bank. He and Diane had broken up, though they remained friends, and when he brought his new love, an Italian girl, to Paris for a visit, he asked Diane to arrange a dinner party for her. Diane complied. Through Florence Grinda’s connections she “borrowed a dress from Lanvin” for the dinner, Diane recalls. “It was at Maxim’s, and we were maybe twelve people. I remember Marc [Landeau, Egon’s close friend] taking me home afterward, and I was really down.”