It’s a Wrap

Fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg has spent the past 20 minutes posing for photos throughout her jewel box of a store inside the Shoppes at the Palazzo. She curls up like a kitten on a hot pink ottoman in the center of her store. She poses in front of the silver DVF that invites customers into the store.

Around her stand a bevy of salespeople dressed in her famous wrap dresses and a hunky security guard in a black suit at the door. Fans of the 61-year-old von Furstenberg see that it's her, it's really her, and ask for photos to be taken with her as the security guard keeps uninvited guests from entering the boutique, the first for von Furstenberg in Las Vegas. And this night is her coming out party where she will greet the potential new customers who have made the simple dress with no buttons or hooks, just tails that wrap around the waist to give nearly everyone the perfect hourglass shape, one of the mainstays of their closets.

But first, the faceless white mannequin in the main window is just not right. Von Furstenberg adjusts the frock she designed and then fiddles with a sign hanging in the window until it looks just right.

How she finds time to attend to such details one could never know. Aside from running her company, Diane von Furstenberg, and designing looks for every season (spring, pre-fall, fall, holiday, resort, pre-spring, spring...), she just added handbags and shoes to her collection. H Stern Collection started designing chunky bracelets and rings for von Furstenberg in 2004. And, then she's the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, a task that has her in front of the top designers and editors who call America home.

Not bad for a designer, who while technically has been around since 1970 when she created the wrap dress, only jumped back into designing 10 years ago. By 1975, her wrap dress rocked the fashion world and landed her on the cover of Newsweek.

"I was so young, in my early 20s," said von Furstenberg, recalling how she launched her company on $30,000 and samples she made at a factory in Italy where she had done an internship. "I had just moved to this country. I very much wanted to be independent. That's all I knew."

What she created can only be described as a phenomena that meant more than the dress alone. Women discovered that a dress could give them confidence and the freedom to show off their assets.

"What was interesting was that I was becoming the woman that I wanted to become -- independent -- while I was giving other women these little dresses that would allow them to be themselves and to feel good about themselves and to be confident," von Furstenberg said. "From the very early on I had this amazing dialog with women."

At the height of her popularity, von Furstenberg sold the brand and disappeared to Europe for 10 years. The failings of the DVF brand brought her back to the States in 1998 to relaunch the company that had made her famous.

"I was very sad because it had a spirit, and it lost it," von Furstenberg said of her company at the time. But she had started from nothing once. "So I started again, first again with the wrap dress because I realized that the young hippier models and actresses were buying the old dresses in vintage shops. Nine years later I have a big business."

Her name is now synonymous, again, with the wrap dress, whether people mean the design, the jersey fabric or the rich patterns, which started with animal prints. Von Furstenberg, who recently starred in a commercial for American Express, really does carry a camera with her to capture her inspirations, a leaf here, a flower there.

"As I said in the commercial -- and now when I say it, I feel like it's so fake -- when you are confident, you look good."

Her world travels inspired the look of her boutique as well. While all 28 stores have the same jewel box look with white walls to showcase the bright colors and patterns of her clothes, mirrors on the ceilings and a soft, feminine softness to them, each conveys its own personality.

And really, the store is the only place to find the entire DVF collection. This season, she added handbags and shoes to her latest collection. "I want to make shoes that are beautiful, but really comfortable," she said. "I make clothes that empower women. I don't want to them to be not being able to walk 10 blocks."

And even though the wrap dress fell on hard times in 1978 when von Furstenberg left her company in others' hands, she feels that this time around, it has staying power. In February, she attended an Oscars party hosted by the likes of Madonna and Demi Moore, each wearing golden wrap dresses from her fall 2008 collection.

"They both wanted to look like Oscars," she said. "If it's good enough for Madonna and Demi, it's definitely still good."

Contact Image Editor Susan Stapleton at sstapleton@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2909.