CEO Graziano de Boni on Building DVF for the Next Generation

CEO Graziano de Boni got the Diane von Furstenberg (DVF) job by way of a recommendation from Domenico De Sole. De Sole told von Furstenberg that she needed a CEO, and that she should talk to de Boni. So she did.

This was September 2023, three years after von Furstenberg had outsourced the brand’s management to Chinese licensee Glamel. Under Glamel, Gabby Hirata was CEO of the brand until June 2023.

But von Furstenberg was beginning to think seriously about the brand’s legacy beyond Glamel, says de Boni, whose CV includes stints as the US CEO of Valentino, Prada, and Giorgio Armani. In late 2023, de Boni went to China to get the lay of the land.

(He was working with DVF in a consulting capacity at the time, before coming on board full time shortly after.) By January 2024, the pair decided to take operations back in-house, a move that was completed in August 2024 following over six months of negotiations.

“To me, it was simple: our decision to bring operations back was fundamentally driven by the idea of how to set something like this up for longevity, for legacy,” the CEO says. He frequently jokes that he’s ‘CEO number 75’, referencing the brand’s “revolving doors” history of both top leadership and creative.

(He’s the fourth CEO in the last 10 years, over which period designers including Nathan Jenden and Jonathan Saunders have passed through in the respective chief design officer and creative officer roles; the title flip-flopped throughout the years.)

DVF’s rocky recent history means the business behind the brand was in need of refocusing, de Boni says. Though DVF’s name recognition looms large — as does von Furstenberg herself, who in 2024 was the subject of the documentary Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge — the brand itself has lost some of the limelight.

“I’m dealing with a heritage brand, an incredible 54-year-old brand that is alive and still super well known,” de Boni says. “[Von Furstenberg] has a brand that is loved and known, and a business that is tiny and irrelevant.

How do we work to build back the business to match the level of awareness that the brand name has?”

The answer, it turned out, was a new, front-facing creative director to inject a fresh approach into the brand. In May, DVF announced the appointment of designer Zankov as artistic director. Zankov has fast established his eponymous label as one of New York’s most exciting independent brands, first with knitwear, and in recent seasons, as a fuller wardrobe offering.

De Boni is confident that, under Zankov, the DVF brand can reclaim its place in New York fashion. “The desirability, the appeal that we needed was not there,” de Boni says. “Hence why Henry is here, plain and simple.”

The goal is to usher DVF into a new, lasting era that will set the brand up for both steady growth and staying power. “We’re going to be presenting something that we believe is very authentic, very respectful of DVF,” de Boni says. “But at the same time, something that, hopefully, is also unexpected, new, fresh — something that you wouldn't necessarily think of as DVF, yet is 100% DVF.”

Product matters

When he joined the company, de Boni had no intention of searching for an artistic director. He spent the first year re-establishing design, product development and production in-house in time for the Spring/Summer 2025 show.

At the time, the company quietly rehired Jenden, who joined for the third time after a tenure spanning 2000 to 2010, and a brief return in 2018. (Jenden is still with DVF, now working under Zankov.) When collection deliveries began on February 1, 2025, management of the business officially switched back to the in-house team.

Once this was complete, de Boni, together with von Furstenberg, decided that the product needed evolving. “Although we were fulfilling the other requirements of our decision of taking the business back in-house, we needed to make sure that the product and the quality reflected the authenticity of the brand — which was something that previous management was possibly not so keen on,” he says.

So they began to elevate the product with the design team, led by Jenden at the time, but the pair still felt the desirability element was missing. DVF needed to make a splash.

Speaking to one of the young members of the DVF design team (who, he notes, lives in Bushwick), de Boni asked her who, out of former staff, she liked the best. “I like her taste, I like her point of view,” he says. She asked if he’d heard of Zankov, who worked at DVF when Saunders was creative director in the mid-2010s.

He hadn’t, but they swiftly met, and de Boni brought Zankov on board in May 2024 to consult on the brand’s knitwear. Then came a collaboration with Zankov’s own brand for Bergdorf Goodman.

“It was very good and successful. The product was naturally very DVF, but also in an unexpected, contemporary way,” de Boni says.

The collab offered a hint at what one might expect from Zankov’s DVF at this morning’s show: sequined knits (hoodie included) sat alongside cropped trenches and clashing print silk separates, rounded out with an offering of pared-back black dresses — and, of course, some modernized wrap dresses.

The collab’s success was all de Boni needed to propose Zankov come on board full time. He was, after all, already considering Zankov for the role when he pitched the collaboration. “And he knows that,” the CEO smiles.

The new DVF woman

De Boni is optimistic about the prospect of refreshing DVF. “There’s an opportunity for us to show that there’s a way to take a heritage American brand and make it relevant again,” he says.

Though he’s on a mission to revamp, the CEO is cautious of the concept of elevation. “Everybody has been elevating everything, so I don’t want to use that word anymore. I like the idea of reclaiming our identity and reasserting our authenticity and with that, rebuilding our business,” he says. “I think we all have learned that preciousness doesn’t come from price.”

This is key for a brand that has, for 50-plus years, catered to the everywoman — or, at least, to many women. Sure, wrap dresses go up to $948, but the lower end of the style retails for $358 — far less than the majority of dresses on the floors of Bergdorf Goodman or Bloomingdale’s.

First introduced in 1974, the DVF wrap dress carries weight: its genesis was around that of second wave feminism, and it was a dress many women recall wearing for their first job interview, on their first day of work, to a graduation, among other milestones. There’s a reason it still sits in so many women’s closets.

“We have a tremendous responsibility, in that respect, toward Diane and what she’s built,” de Boni says. “We will be extremely careful in managing all of this, yet there is an opportunity to bring the business and the spirit of the brand back to the same level, the same way it was in the ’70s.”

To do so, the goal now is to reach more women. About half of DVF’s business is currently repeat customers, which is far higher than usual for a luxury fashion brand.

De Boni is working with Zankov to keep these women, while branching out to customers who might not have previously considered the brand. “If now I have the mother or grandmother as my customers, do I want to get the daughter?

Of course. But I don’t want to get the daughter and alienate the mother or the grandma,” de Boni says.

Part of this comes down to the retail strategy. After stripping back all wholesale operations in 2024 (due to most department stores only carrying the brand on a marketplace basis, rather than purchasing the DVF product), de Boni is slowly introducing the brand back to retailers. It’s now back in Bergdorf Goodman, and in February, the brand entered into a European distribution partnership with Brama Group, marking the brand’s return to the European market.

But the real key, the CEO believes, is to edge its way back into the creative conversation. This starts with Zankov’s first show — but de Boni isn’t thinking of today as a make-or-break moment for DVF’s comeback.

Instead, it’s a taster, and one that will indicate whether the brand is moving in the right direction. “You cannot just expect that, ‘Oh my God, I’ll do a fashion show all of a sudden I’m cool.’ No, no,” he says.

“I’ll be very happy if people simply say: ‘I like what you guys are doing.’”

He’s taking the growth ambitions for the business in similar stride. DVF remains family owned, so there is no pressure from investors or the public markets to grow in a hurry.

There’s no impetus to be a hundred-million or a billion-dollar business, de Boni says. First comes relevance.

“Do we want to grow? Of course we want to grow,” he says.

“But it’s much more important from a pure business point of view that what we do keeps building brand equity than anything else.”