What do you wear to an interview with Diane Von Furstenberg, the acclaimed fashion designer who invented a dress so renowned it’s still being talked about fifty years later? Von Furstenberg, 77, launched her famous wrap dress in America in 1974 and told me, by “some magic thing, it took off”. That magic appears to be a combination of fashion flair, drive and timing. It was an era of liberation, as women pushed to be taken seriously in the workplace.
The dress was flattering but office-appropriate. The stretchy jersey fabric and wrap design “moulds your body and makes you look ‘proper’ but at the same time sexy,” Von Furstenberg said. She had already created a wrap top modelled on a dancer’s cardigan, with a matching skirt and trousers.
But during Watergate, she was excited to see President Nixon’s daughter, Julia Nixon Eisenhower, on TV defending her father over the political scandal. “She was wearing my wrap top with a skirt. I thought, ‘oh look’, I was so proud.
And then I thought, ‘you know what, we should turn it into a dress’. In the years since, Madonna, Jerry Hall, the Princess of Wales and generations of regular working women have worn versions of the dress. Oprah Winfrey remembers saving up for it as a young reporter.
The designer is now the focus of upcoming Disney Plus/Hulu documentary, called Diane Von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge, revealing what drives her. She tells me she didn’t know what she wanted to do for a career, “but I kne.
