What Happened To Diane von Furstenberg’s Wrap Dress?

A pandemic, the demise of “girlboss” culture and new values around what’s “flattering” have made the wrap dress seem outdated to some.

By Amanda Sanders’ estimate, she owns more than 100 Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses. She has been collecting the style since the 1990s, after she graduated from college.

Sanders, 51, liked that she could “throw on a dress and look so polished and put together,” she said during a phone interview on a recent Friday afternoon as she was walking around Saks Fifth Avenue, where she was, in fact, wearing one of her wrap dresses (blue snake print, maxi length). “It almost felt like cheating.”

But in recent years, she has struggled to find the style in stores in New York City, where she lives.

“Now you have to seek it out,” said Sanders, a former costume designer who is now an image consultant. “Most of the better designers don’t make wrap dresses. I don’t come across them as often as I should.”

Diane von Furstenberg popularised the design in the 1970s, though she wasn’t the first designer working in the United States to be inspired by early Asian wrap-style closures. In the 1940s, Claire McCardell was also known for her utilitarian “popover” style. In her book What Shall I Wear?, she defined “popover” as “something that goes over anything. It is an apron one day, a bathrobe the next, a dinner dress, if necessary with lots of beads.”

Von Furstenberg’s version was softer, stretchier and sexier, with snug arms and a tie-cinched waist. The hem typically fell below the knee. The V neckline pulled back the curtains on cleavage. The dresses were covered in prints: orange ikat, red leopard, brown with geometric shapes.

They were ideal for working women, hailed as both office-appropriate and “flattering”. After the initial 1970s boom — think Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver (1976) — the wrap dress enjoyed a resurgence from the mid 2000s to mid 2010s, when workplace empowerment again became a cultural focal point. Michelle Obama and Kate Middleton, among that era’s most influential dressers, made it part of their wardrobes. It telegraphed competence and femininity. If you bought Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In when it came out in 2013, you probably owned a wrap dress.

“Specifically, I’m seeing the kind you might connote with 2010s business casual,” she said — with slinky fabric and ditsy prints. Sometimes the stores miscategorise them, Martin added, as robes instead of dresses. In 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, Vogue suggested wearing them as such.

Danielle Vermeer, the chief executive of a thrifting app called Teleport, once found a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress priced at US$5 at a secondhand store. The abstract black-and-white print was part leopard, part oil spill. In 2022, she consigned it with the RealReal, which sold the dress for US$40 and paid her US$12. (A new DVF wrap dress today starts around US$378.)

“Post-pandemic,” said Vermeer, who is 35 and lives in Washington, “I think there’s been more of an openness to try different styles in an office or professional setting. In the 2010s, I was working in offices that were very masculine and very formal, especially my first couple jobs. I would wear wrap dresses or pencil skirts and button downs. That was the uniform. But now, for those in their early 20s, the attire for that sort of office has really shifted.”

Workplaces are more casual, filled with workers more interested in dressing to express their style.

“I still love them because they’re super chic and easy to put on,” Vermeer said of wrap dresses. The following day, she sent a photo from a Salvation Army in Chicago, where she had come across a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress for US$29.99. (“Not my size but it’s in excellent condition,” she said in a text message.) “But I can see for a 23-year-old today that it might seem very ‘Girlboss,’” she said, a moniker for ambitious young women of the 2010s who embraced corporate feminism and fell almost as fast as they rose.

Allison Bornstein, a stylist known for helping people identify their personal style keywords — and who offers FaceTime appointments with people who are, among other things, trying to clean out their closet — had another theory about younger people’s aversion to the style.

She said the form-fitting wrap dress might have been sold to “a generation who was going for the wrap dress less because they loved it and more because it made them look thin.” What if younger generations, more eager to embrace body positivity or neutrality, don’t care about what is flattering?

“They obviously want to look good, but that means something different to them,” Bornstein said.

To her, traditional wrap dresses just look “outdated”, she said.

Yet there is still hope for the style. Hoyle carries versions from the Brazilian brand Farm Rio at her store, Rabecca Onassis Boutique. They are not obvious wrap dresses; they have other design elements, like oversize puff sleeves or a high neck, which catch the eye before one even realises the waist is wrapped.

“There’s a way to do a wrap dress that is so seamless,” Hoyle, 32, said, “that you do not even know that you’re wearing a wrap dress.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Jessica Testa

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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