When Graziano de Boni took over as CEO of Diane von Furstenberg in October 2023, he inherited a 53 year old company that had spent years operating at arm's length from its own identity, its business run largely through a Chinese distributor rather than in house. His answer over the following 16 months was not a dramatic overhaul so much as a return to fundamentals, treating the brand's own history as the raw material for its next chapter rather than something to be replaced.
Reconnecting instead of reinventing
De Boni has been direct about the philosophy behind the turnaround. We didn't need a reinvention, he has said, we needed to reconnect with what was already working. In practice that meant digging back into the archive and finding an asset hiding in plain sight, the wrap dress that has continued to sell for more than 50 years, along with a deep library of prints and fabrics that amounted to a design vocabulary the brand had stopped fully using. Rather than commission an entirely new aesthetic, his team has spent much of that time upgrading roughly 75 percent of the company's fabric library, leaning harder into natural materials like silk to bring the product back up to the standard the archive implied.
Taking the business back in house
The creative reset has run alongside an operational one. In 2025, DVF brought its operations back in house after years spent handing distribution over to an outside partner, a move aimed squarely at reclaiming control over how the brand is priced, presented, and sold. That has fed into a broader direct to consumer strategy built around a smaller number of exclusive retail partnerships rather than broad wholesale distribution, including a newly exclusive deal with Zalando to handle the brand's presence across Europe.
