When you are Diane von Furstenberg, known to one and all as simply DVF, this is how you recruit your new designer: During the interview, you hang upside down off a stately chintz sofa at London’s Claridge’s hotel while your potential hire, Jonathan Saunders, lies stretched out beside you. You chat for an hour, maybe two, perhaps three—because, really, who’s counting when you’re having fun? Ebullient, fearless, colorful (both aesthetically and temperamentally), and never given to play by the rules: Saunders and von Furstenberg have more similarities than differences. “Jonathan’s confidence in his vision is impressive,” she says. “And the phrase hands-on was invented for him.” No surprise, then, that he got the job—freeing up the label’s founder to take a step back to focus on her philanthropic endeavors.

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Last June, Saunders, who shuttered his own label in 2015, decamped with Justin, his husband-to-be, and his equally beloved Staffie-mix dog to live in a foliage-covered West Village town house. Every day he went to work facing the same question: How to reimagine DVF, the label, so that it could be heard in today’s cacophonous world, especially given the noise it has made with one proto-feminist sold-by-the-gazillions wrap dress that DVF, the woman, created way back in 1974? His answer: Turn up the volume. What Saunders has done is a mood-enhancing mix of intensely hued graphic- and floral-pattered silk, knit, and crepe de Chine, scissored and spliced every which way. It’s an homage to what the label has always stood for—“effortless, optimistic, and sensual,” he says—without being too referential or reverential; that iconic dress is still present, but he has given it an imaginative new slant, slyly hinting at its diagonal closure through the use of color blocking, or by placing two contrasting patterns side by side on the bias. “I love women; I love understanding how they feel about how they dress,” says Saunders. “You want that emotional connection.” Like I said, they’re very alike.

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