As Oscar Wilde said: Only shallow people don’t judge by appearances. In other words, if we want to understand a public figure, we pay attention to what they are telling us through their image, because fashion is a powerful means of communication. Especially when this personality tends not to break free from official discourse or, what is the same thing, from silence. It works – like now – every time Letizia Ortiz wears a standout piece of clothing. The last picture of the Queen took place this week at an event organized by Banco Santander, where 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 meanings: first, it was designed by the Galician company Adolfo Domínguez; Second, it is a wrap dress, a dress that criss-crosses at the waist, representing the emancipation and liberation of the feminine condition. This is his story.
Photo: @Getty Images
It happened in New York in 1974. In the early 1970s, a young Belgian woman, married to Prince Egon von Furstenberg, stood out in Manhattan’s social circles of fashion, power and creativity. Her name was Diane and although she had already spent several years of her career, first as a model, then as a designer, one fine day she invented the garment that catapulted her fame into the stratosphere. So relevant was this piece that it went down in history as the third to “free” women, after Paul Poiret stripped their corsets from them around the turn of the century and Gabrielle Chanel disguised them as men a few years later. This is the brief history of how the wrap dress (or wrap dress in its translation) defined a generation and is still influential half a century later.
Photo: @Getty Images
The key to this story lies in the day Von Furstenberg saw Julia Nixon Eisenhower on TV wearing a tie-waisted bodice and skirt. This silhouette stuck in her head, as did the idea of the wrap dress. In hindsight, her inspiration was pure zeitgeist: Diane was recently divorced, surrounded herself with women with interesting lives, was spending less and less time at home, had responsibilities during the day and went out at night, and she 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 when women enjoyed equal rights for the first time (after the 1970 change in Congress) and when women’s fashion was on the rise was a garment that represented all political, economic and sexual changes. Previously, these were the pants that had been borrowed from the men’s closet. Diane was keen to design a garment that would play the same liberating role from an all-female perspective. And so, in the midst of all these connections, the wrap dress came about. When von Furstenberg presented the garment to the world, he did so with this phrase: “Feel like a woman, wear a dress”.
Diane iconicly appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1976 wearing a twig cape that became a timeless classic 🎞️ #DVFArchives pic.twitter.com/pCUfw01uMy
— DVF – Diane von Furstenberg (@DVF) June 3, 2021
This light and comfortable dress, which crosses the silhouette at the waist, quickly became a bestseller and during this decade its workshops in Italy produced an average of 20,000 units per week and sold five million units. “Her success has helped pay the bills and educate my children and allowed me to make a name for myself in the fashion world; I’m not saying that figuratively, it literally gave me power and independence,” the designer said years later. In Diane’s words, this dress is “a friend, an accomplice garment that’s just as useful for commuting to work as it is for going out to flirt and for ending up in bed with a man.”
Photo: @Getty Images
In 1976, Diane herself posed in her wrap dress (which she still makes in myriad colors and patterns to this day) on the cover of Newsweek, celebrating her iconic status. Since then, many women of royalty, celebrity, power circles and on foot have worn this dress: by Cybill Shepherd into taxi drivers too Madonna, Michelle Obama, Jerry Hall, Paris Hilton or Kate Middleton. However, his favorite is Ingrid Betancourt: After six years of kidnapping, the first dress she bought was a wrap dress. “It gave a new meaning to the sense of freedom that I’ve always defended and that it brings to the female body.”