A lifetime in fashion

Mumbai: She is now a fashion icon, but Diane von Furstenberg clearly remembers what it was like to begin that journey in 1970s America. She was the only female passenger on an early morning flight to Pittsburgh, and a male passenger leaned over to look at the newspapers she was reading and leered: “What’s a pretty girl like you doing reading the Wall Street Journal?” It was January 1976, and Furstenberg had very good reason to be reading the WSJ – she was on its front page.

“I didn’t tell him I was on the cover, and that remains one of the best satisfactions of my life,” von Furstenberg told listeners at the opening session of the Mint Luxury Conference, where she recalled her historic career in American fashion design in her keynote address, ‘The Mystique of Design.’ “But I do tell the story every time I’m asked to speak,” she added, amidst laughter.

Von Furstenberg’s style is embodied in one of the most easily recognizable pieces of fashion in the world: the wrap dress, with its bold prints and clinging, changeable silhouette. Introducing the designer, luxury consultant and Mint Lounge columnist Radha Chadha called it “sensuous and beautiful.”

“It reminds me of the sari,” Chadha said. “It makes you stand tall and proud, brings with it a sense of adventure. It covers you up, but like the sari, it makes you show your hand.”

“There’s something about it that lets the body take over,” von Furstenberg agreed. “You could wear it to your children’s school and be proper. You could be not so proper. I’ve sold millions of those dresses.”

In the 1970s, a young von Furstenberg, recently married and fresh off the boat from her Belgian upbringing and Italian apprenticeship with designer Angelo Ferretti, began making dresses. Diana Vreeland, the powerful editor of Vogue, became a cheerleader and unofficial advisor. Von Furstenburg started so small that she functioned as her own first model. But the advertisement she took out, in Women’s Wear Daily, which featured her wearing one of her own dresses, perched on a white cube on which she had scribbled the words “Feel like a woman, wear a dress!” would go on to make history.

Eschewing high fashion, the Von Furstenberg brand consistently catered to the high street. “I knew the kind of woman I wanted to be – independent, not letting a father or husband pay the bills,” von Furstenberg said. “And as I went on the road with my cosmetics and with clothes, and met women and struck up relationships with them, I realized I had become the woman I wanted to be, by helping other women become who they wanted to be.”

supriya.n@livemint.com