DVF Returns to the Runway After a Decade — With Henry Zankov, Not Diane, at the Helm

Diane von Furstenberg opened New York Fashion Week on September 10 with its first runway show in almost a decade, staged on the High Line above the brand's Meatpacking District store. Von Furstenberg wasn't the one showing the clothes. Henry Zankov was, in his debut as the house's artistic director.

Zankov isn't new to the building. He was DVF's design director of knitwear from 2014 to 2018, launched his own label, Zankov, in 2020, and built it into one of the more closely watched names in New York — runner-up for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2023, then CFDA's Emerging Designer of the Year in 2024. DVF named him artistic director in May.

Diane von Furstenberg

The Spring 2027 collection leaned on jersey, crinkled chiffon and bias-cut silk, including sheer floor-length dresses, with the wrap dress — the piece that made von Furstenberg's name in 1974 — reworked rather than repeated. Zankov told W Magazine the idea was wrapping the body rather than making wrap dresses: wrap tees, a wrapped trench, scarves wound around the body. Archival animal prints ran through skirts and dresses, from an animal-print pencil skirt to leopard-print maxi and mini dresses.

Diane von Furstenberg

Color did most of the remaining work: a patchworked suede trench, that raspberry red wool suit, bright color-blocking where a safer collection would have gone neutral. Describing his hopes for the house to W Magazine, Zankov framed it around seduction, with clothes as tools for expressing how you feel inside and for dressing for yourself rather than for the world.

Diane von Furstenberg

The way DVF made the hire matters too. Gucci, Marni and Balmain all brought in designers from outside the house in 2025. DVF, like Fendi with Maria Grazia Chiuri, went back to someone who had worked there before: a designer who spent four years on its knitwear team before leaving to build his own label, rather than a marquee name from a rival house. It's a smaller bet than a headline poach, resting on the idea that fluency in the house's codes matters more than a famous signature.

A comeback show after nearly a decade off the runway would have been the story on its own. Handing it to a designer who already knows the house, instead of restaging von Furstenberg's own history, is the bigger one — a bet on continuity over borrowed name recognition.