Free Diane von Furstenberg by Gioia Diliberto Page A

represented Lauren Hutton, Janice Dickinson, and Beverly Johnson, Cooper turned her down flat. At a lissome five feet, seven inches tall (she’d shed the chubbiness of her late-teen years), Diane’s figure was in the modeling ballpark. She also had high, chiseled cheekbones and large, wide-set eyes, which made her extremely photogenic. Her face, though, was too strong and mature-looking for American magazines, which at the time favored softer, less exotically pretty women.
    Still, Diane’s ambitions focused increasingly on fashion. In Europe it was easy to find affordable, well-designed clothes in comfortable knit fabrics. Diane herself looked good in these clothes, and she sensed that American women would like them, too. The problem was, they weren’t available in the United States. Diane noticed on her many shopping excursions with Egon that American department store fare tended to be either expensive copies of French designers, hippie bell-bottoms and peasant dresses, or schlocky polyester wear. She greatly admired the colorful, fluid designs of Halston, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo and Stephen Burrows. As “a boy-about-town,” Diane says, Egon knew these designers and gained access for himself and Diane to their studio backrooms. Here Diane saw firsthand how New York fashion was made. Designs by the likes of Halston, Sant’Angelo, and Burrows, however, were expensive and out of reach for most women. Diane sensed an opportunity.
    She knew nothing about designing. “What I did know . . . was that the world of fashion was fun, glamorous, very cool and I loved it,” she wrote. She would discover that it was also hard work.
    In the spring she returned to Italy. Ferretti had bought another factory, this one a sprawling cement building on the outskirts of Montevarchi, an ancient market town nestled in the Tuscan hills. During the Renaissance rule of the Medicis, Montevarchi flourished as a center of the wool and silk industries. After the unification of Italy in 1870, it became a hub of sartorial manufacturing—first of felt hats, then of shoes and women’s and children’s wear.
    Diane struggled to absorb as much as she could about the manufacture of clothes. At night, after the workers had gone home, she stayed behind with the pattern maker and, using whatever remnants of fabric were around, made her first samples. The first garment she designed was a green jersey dress with a seven-meter-long green and red sash.
    In May, when his training program at Chase had ended, Egon joined his friend Marc Landeau, who’d just graduated from Columbia Business School, on a two-month tour of Asia. On the way, he stopped in Italy tovisit Diane. They spent a romantic weekend in Rome, and soon afterward Diane discovered she was pregnant. She considered having an abortion, which was illegal in Europe at the time, as in the United States. She’d known girls in Geneva who’d had abortions, though, and she had the name of a doctor who performed the procedure. Lily convinced Diane that she had an obligation to tell Egon of her condition, so Diane sent him a telegram in Hong Kong:
i am sorry to disturb your journey, but it is impossible to decide alone. result of the analysis was positive. i am thinking of the dr. s. solution. i await your decision. love you more than ever. diane.
    Landeau recalls the exact moment Egon received the news. “We were in this little hotel early one morning, when a porter came up to the room with the telegram. Egon hesitated only a moment, then rushed out to send a telegram back to Diane.” She’s kept it all her life:
marriage will occur the 15th of July. organize it as rapidly as possible. i rejoice. thinking of you. love and kisses, eduard egon.
    “Egon wasn’t the most monogamous of persons,” says Landeau. “But Diane was his girlfriend, and Diane turned him on, and Diane was his family. If he was going to have children with anyone, it was going to be with Diane.”
    Afterward, Egon and Landeau went