Yahoo Lifestyle Wrap Star: Diane von Furstenberg Celebrates 40 Years
There aren't many dresses that have an actual birthday. Most shapes morph into being slowly; they don't burst onto the fashion landscape with opinions and a big personality practically sewn into their hemlines. But Diane von Furstenberg's wrap dress is different. Like its creator, it's exceptional: a true fashion one-off. The DVF (as both the designer and the dress are better known) is a garment with a smouldering attitude. It has become a stretch jersey symbol of women's liberation in the 1970s. A dress that's sexy, womanly and way bigger than the sum of its simple parts. And this year it turns 40, with absolutely no apologies.
To understand how the wrap dress came to represent much more than what it is - a slinky, flattering garment - you need to take a trip back to 1969. Revolution was in the air. Around the world, millions of people had just watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon; long-haired flower children were about to converge on a louche music festival called Woodstock; in London and New York, women in flirty miniskirts filled the streets. And in Italy, a young designer named Diane Halfin had just begun sketching a new design: a top that crisscrossed the body. "First it was a wrap top inspired by what ballerinas wear with a matching skirt," explains von Furstenberg of her famous creation.
The Duchess in a monochrome DVF dress.
Back then the Belgium-born designer was working in a textiles factory in Rome. She was pregnant, engaged to Prince Eduard Egon von und zu Fuerstenberg and due to move with him to New York. It was only once she arrived there - and saw that the mood was turning towards dresses - that she decided to rethink her creation. In the early '70s, the "wrap top" became the "wrap dress".
In 1974, with the blessing of legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland (who had been privy to a trunk load of DVF's jersey designs), von Furstenberg launched her iconic dress.
It was almost wilfully simple in design. Essentially it was - and is - a sporty dressing-gown; it wraps around the body, creating a deep V-shape at the front which accentuates the cleavage, and a split which occasionally reveals some leg. It's the ultimate in comfort, but the effect is sexy. It's a win-win item - functional and dynamic.
However, reaction from the industry was initially tepid. As von Furstenberg said earlier this year: "Nobody ever thought my dress would be important ... People said, 'Well, she's not really a designer.'" But the woman her- self - possibly with hindsight and most definitely with her trade- mark confidence - refutes that idea: "The truth is I made a dress that was immortal."
Emma Stone in a DVF dress.
It's a bold claim, but she's right. While the place of the wrap in pop culture is now well established, in the '70s shoppers took to the design with unprecedented gusto. Its popularity was such that in March 1976, Newsweek laid aside its political agenda and featured the glamorous designer wearing a twig-print wrap dress on its cover, emblazoned with the words "Rags & Riches". By 1976, more than one million had been sold, and von Furstenberg was earning $25,000 a week. She told Women's Wear Daily this year, "It made me live the American dream aged 26. That's pretty major."
The dresses appeal owes much to its association with its creator, a fabulously glamorous woman who was apt to party the night away in 1970s Manhattan. Meanwhile, the dress itself had no zips or buttons and didn't require a man to help the wearer in, or out, of it. It represents glamour and self-confidence, with a large dollop of Studio 54 sex appeal. This nudge-nudge, wink-wink appeal is something the designer has always embraced. Explaining it to a French journalist, von Furstenberg once said, "Well if you're trying to slip out without waking a sleeping man, zips are a nightmare."
For those who have worked with her, the connection between the appeal of the dress and the designer is obvious. "She's a force of nature," says Paula Reed, creative director of Mytheresa.com. "She has an infectious laugh and a naughty sense of humour. Any woman who says she invented the wrap dress so she could make a silent getaway from a man's bedroom is someone you know has great stories."
Despite its fascinating history, this isn't a dress that has stagnated, yet it did have some time away from the limelight. During the 1980s, the dress looked out of step with the trend for skirt suits and power dressing, and by 1983 the designer was divorced and had lost control of much of her multimillion-dollar business. But in 1997, 50-year-old von Furstenberg returned to relaunch the design that made her name - and it was again an instant hit. Second time round, the goal for the label was, according to its creator, "to show the world it hadn't been an accident the first time round".
Kate Hudson wears a DVF dress.
The wrap dress's ability to cut across generations and social boundaries, as well as the perimeters of day and nightwear, has kept the design in demand. It was the dress Michelle Obama wore for her first White House Christmas card, and the piece that Colombian activist Ingrid Betancourt wore when freed from six and a half years in captivity.
Reed sums up the dress which can happily claim to be modern, feminine and 40: "It's easy to wear, easy to pack, easy to dress up or down, easy to wash and affordable to buy. Iconic is an overused word in the fashion dictionary, but the wrap dress truly is an icon of the modern woman's wardrobe."
