Celebrating 50 years of Yours
You’re in good company if you’ve got a jersey wrap dress in your wardrobe and there’s one woman to thank for it…
Style and comfort don’t always go together so it’s little wonder that the jersey wrap dress created by Diane von Fürstenberg has stood fashion’s test of time.
It’s 50 years since the humble Belgian-born designer revived the iconic figur-eflattering frock in 1974.
A year earlier she’d separated from her German husband, Prince von Fürstenberg, who was the reason she entered the fashion world in the first place.
Not wanting to be “a plain little girl who got married beyond her deserts”, she began designing women’s clothes.
On arrival in New York, high-profile Vogue editor Diana Vreeland declared her designs “absolutely smashing” and got her included on the calendar at New York Fashion Week.
The rest is fashion history. The DvB brand was created and the dresses, equally popular with the stylish Studio 4 disco crowd and the rich Park Avenue set, were soon flying off the hangers at the rate of 25,000 a week. By 1976 more than a million of them had sold and Diane was gracing the cover of Newsweek, where she was described as “the most marketable woman since Coco Chanel”.
Everybody loved the dress, from Jerry Hall, who showcased it aged 17, to Cybill Shepherd who wore it in the 1976 film Taxi Driver.
Being stretchy jersey and produced in a multitude of bold colours and prints, it was comfortable and allowed women to look effortlessly chic and confident in minutes, yet could be worn for any occasion. If you couldn’t afford to buy one, you could always make your own thanks to a collaboration with Vogue sewing patterns.
Over the decades, it’s flattered the frames of pop princesses from Madonna to Amy Winehouse, stars including Sarah Jessica Parker, royals such as Spain’s Queen Letzia, and former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Fashion experts say its appeal lay in the
