Diana Broussard is a creative force of nature. She’s a true pioneer in fashion design, from Calvin Klein’s eponymous underwear for women to the latest in wearable tech—exclusive, sleek handbags with customizable video displays. She has worked with some of the biggest names in the business, including Dior and Gucci, and started her own line in 2004, yet she is as modest as a shopgirl and serves customers personally in her store on Christopher Street.
Empowering Women
Diana’s mission is empowering women. She likes the personal connection of meeting her customers and having the opportunity to really dress women. She says, “My goal is to make women feel powerful by looking good and helping them with their potential, to look modern and cool. Today it’s important to have your own point of view.”
Jewelry Elevated to an Artform
Diana’s jewelry is carried in stores in Paris, London, Moscow, and Japan. Her famous colorful chain-link Nate necklace was a break-away success. She explains, “These are power statement necklaces. Put it on and you’re dressed. It’s bold, but it’s not bling. And that’s why it’s now carried at MoMA and MoMA Japan and that’s been really fun.” Her jewelry is also selling in the Boca Raton Museum of Art and the MAD Museum in Chicago. They’re buying more than the chains, so that’s cool.” Diana continues to design statement jewelry and specializes in resin Plexiglas. Now she’s looking into recycled resin, because of what’s happening with the environment.
Her new collection just arrived from Italy, and brings some playful surprises, including rings and earrings which have little 18th century animals inside, made of gold. She’s also doing a signet ring, and jewelry with swans and bunnies embedded in Plexiglas.
TechWare for Power Women
Diana was a key speaker at the Diversity Woman Leadership Conference in Maryland in 2018, where she won an award for leadership in bringing technology into fashion and empowering women by thinking outside of the box with her business. She created the dbChronical™ – a beautiful handbag that incorporates video and audio technology. She recalls the moment of inspiration, “I wanted to bring video to fashion, and I worked with David Lang at one point, who’s a Pulitzer-Prize winning composer, so you can personalize the bag to the outfit. Next I want to do one that’s more of a tote and use an LCD screen that’s flexible as opposed to rigid, so that will be wired flatter, and probably have an app as well, so you can do wireless as opposed to USB to connect it to the video.” She is working on sourcing the flexible Plexiglas, which is hard to purchase on a small scale for prototyping.
Starting Out as a Designer
Diana grew up in Dallas, Texas, sewing her own clothes, playing the flute, and studying the stars through a telescope in the back yard. Her father was a physicist designing microchips for NASA, and when he suffered a stroke, she canceled her Julliard plans and decided to study textile chemistry locally. After her first degree, she decided to go into fashion design, came to New York, and got a second degree in fashion design at FIT.
Her first job in New York was as a fashion illustrator, then her big break came when she got a job at Calvin Klein. She thought she was going to design ready-to-wear for him, but she got assigned to underwear. She recalls, “He said, ‘I want you to design underwear and sleepwear.’ I said I’d never designed underwear, but CK said ‘I don’t care, I want your taste, so bring your fashion sense to the lingerie.’” She did what the man said. “I designed transparent ones and the classic logo waistband that Kate Moss and Christy Turlington wore. We started doing all these separates, which nobody had done before. Previously, you had to buy the camisole with the pant at Bloomingdales for sleepwear. Now we wanted interchangeable items, so we forced them to buy that way.” After Diana had been there for two years, he wanted her to design shoes, so he sent her to Italy for shoe training, and then she did some jewelry for him. “He made me this multi-functional designer.” She worked with him for seven years and designed some of the original eponymous CK underwear for women.
Flying Solo
After seven years at Calvin Klein, Diana got poached by Dior, where she designed shoes and men’s leather goods under John Galliano. She was in Paris for two and a half years, and then worked for Gucci designing shoes for men and women, flying back and forth from London to Florence every other week. The hectic pace burned Diana out, and she returned to New York.
She began freelancing for other people while she started her own brand. By 2004, she was wholesaling her shoe collection to Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman. She opened a shop at 22 Christopher Street in 2007, and started making chain necklaces that coordinated to the shoes. She showed her jewelry in Paris, and all of a sudden everybody wanted it. Diana says, “It kind of took over my business!” Everyone from Russian Instagram influencers to the editor of Elle magazine in China loves her jewelry, and Diana now has 77K followers on Instagram.
Radiating Summer Fun
Her creative force is continuously radiating, and this summer she designed hats just for fun, to have something new to put in the store window. She said “It’s fun with the hats and how people responded. I had them in the window and people wanted to buy them. I think you have to bring in some special items to give something refreshing to the store, so something that I feel would be fun for me, let’s present it to the others… To be able to have a boutique in NYC!” That’s really something, and Diana has won a place in the hearts of West Villagers with her welcoming presence.