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As Oscar Wilde said, only superficial people do not judge by appearances. In other words, if we want to read a public person, let’s pay attention to what she is telling us through her image because fashion is a powerful communication tool. More especially when that personality tends not to get out of the official discourse, or what is the same, silence. It works —as right now— cEvery time Letizia Ortiz wears an outstanding garment. The last image of the queen has happened today, in an event organized by Banco Santander in which the guests ranged from Ana Botín to María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, Sandra Ibarra or Father Ángel. Letizia has chosen a blue dress with two important connotations: first, it is designed by the Galician firm Adolfo Domínguez; second, it is a wrap dress, a dress that is crossed at the waist and represents the emancipation and liberation of the feminine condition. This is her story.
It happened in New York in 1974. In the early 1970s, a young Belgian married to Prince Egon von Furstenberg, she stood out in the social circles of fashion, power and creativity in Manhattan. Her name was Diane and although she had already spent several years in her career, first as a model, then as a designer, one fine day she devised the garment that launched her fame into the stratosphere. That piece ended up being so relevant that it has gone down in history as the third to “liberate” women, after Paul Poiret removed their corsets at the turn of the century and Gabrielle Chanel dressed them as men a few years later. This is the brief history of how the wrap dress (or wrap dress, in its translation) marked a generation and continues to be influential half a century later.
The key to this story is in the day that Von Furstenberg saw Julia Nixon Eisenhower on television in a top tied at the waist combined with a skirt. That silhouette didn’t leave her head and neither did the idea of her wrap dress. His inspiration, seen with perspective, was pure zeitgeist: Diane was newly divorced, surrounded by women with interesting lives, who spent less and less time at home, who had day commitments and went out at night, and had just bought a 16-room apartment on Fifth Avenue in an impressive demonstration of power and emancipation. It was the golden age of Studio 54 (where Diane herself coincided with Bianca Jagger, Brooke Shields or Cher), the years in which women enjoyed equal rights for the first time (after the Congressional amendment in 1970) and in which women’s fashion had sought a garment that represented all the political, economic and sexual changes. So far this was the pants, which had been borrowed from the men’s closet. Diane was eager to design a garment that played that same liberating role from a wholly feminine perspective. And so, in the midst of all that context, is when she created the wrap dress. When Von Furstenberg presented the garment to the world, he did so with this phrase: “Feel like a woman, wear a dress” (Feel like a woman, wear a dress).
Diane iconically appeared on the 1976 cover of Newsweek wearing a Twig wrap and it became a timeless classic 🎞️ #DVFArchives pic.twitter.com/pCUfw01uMy
— DVF – Diane von Furstenberg (@DVF) June 3, 2021
Quickly, this light and comfortable dress that crosses the silhouette at the waist became a bestseller and in that decade it produced an average of 20,000 units a week in its workshops in Italy and sold five million units. “Their success helped me pay the bills and my children’s education, and allowed me to make a name for myself in the fashion world; I’m not saying it figuratively, it’s that it literally gave me power and independence,” the designer recounted years later. In Diane’s words, this dress is “a friend, an accomplice garment that is just as useful for going to work as it is for going out to flirt and ending up with a man in bed.”
In 1976, Diane herself posed in her wraparound dress (which she continues to produce in countless colors and patterns to this day) on the cover of Newsweek, enshrining its iconic status. Since then there have been many women of royalty, famous, belonging to the circles of power and ordinary people who have worn this dress: from Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver to Madonna, Michelle Obama, Jerry Hall, Paris Hilton or Kate Middleton. However, his favorite is Ingrid Betancourt: After six years kidnapped, the first dress she bought was a wrap dress. “That’s when the feeling of freedom that I always defended that it provided to the female body took on a new meaning.”
Source: Elpais
