A fashion lioness in winter: Diane von Furstenberg, 77, settles into her final act

VENICE – Diane von Furstenberg’s friends like to tease that, had she been on the cinematic Titanic from the 1997 film, she would have found a way to hoist Jack up from the freezing water onto that wooden door. Three days later, Jack in tow, she would have sashayed into a New York dinner party wearing that 56-carat blue diamond necklace.

The woman has a strong will.

I realised that the first time I met her in 1975, when I was a cub reporter at The Washington Star. At 28, von Furstenberg was already a sensation with the phenomenally successful US$86 wrap dress.

On a visit to Washington to promote her eponymous brand, the Belgian fashion designer was in a rush to get to the airport and asked if I could come down to her car for the interview.

I felt as if I was climbing into a cage with a panther when I got into the back of a black limo.

There she was in a dark mink coat, her long, dark hair spilling over her shoulders, her legs sheathed in black fishnets. She was nibbling from a box of dark chocolates. In her sultry Belgian accent, she offered me one. Her voice, as her late friend Andre Leon Talley, editor-at-large of Vogue magazine, said, “wraps itself around you like a cosy, warm cashmere muffler”.

That half-hour in her limo was a revelation. In an era when we were instructed by male “experts” to dress and act like men to get ahead, von Furstenberg insisted on living a man’s life in a woman’s body.

Her message was bracing: Meet men as equals, but do not imitate them. Ambition and stiletto heels can coexist.

I caught up with von Furstenberg recently to talk about a new Hulu documentary on her life, one darkened by the Holocaust, Aids, her bout with tongue cancer and her periodic business woes.

We had a marathon two-day conversation on the Grand Canal, punctuated by feasts, at her palazzo in Venice, Italy. The palace is owned by Cristiana Brandolini d’Adda, the 97-year-old aunt of her former husband, Egon von Furstenberg, a German prince and son of Italian socialite Clara Agnelli.

“Venice is a nice stage for the winter of my life,” von Furstenberg, 77, said.

Wearing a DVF silk print blouse and drawstring pants with vintage Hermes booties, she patted the space beside her on a Vichy 19th-century daybed, where she was stretched out like an odalisque, and said: “You want to come here?”

As American fashion designer Michael Kors noted: “She is a sublime flirt.”

Her husband, American businessman Barry Diller, agreed: “She cannot sit down without being louche.”

The princess of the wrap dress has been musing on how she plans to wrap up things.

She is soaking up the atmosphere of “the shimmering jewel in the sea”, as her friend, Thomas F. Madden, an American historian, calls Venice, while she plots to take back control of her struggling business.

Venice is the perfect frame for von Furstenberg. Madden has described it as “a place of contradictions – a city without land, an empire without borders”. And it is von Furstenberg’s contradictions that fascinate.

She wears a gold and diamond “In Charge” necklace and has numerous signs in her New York office with that exhortation. But, as Diller said, she is “the most in charge and the most vulnerable”. She was too shy to even call herself a designer until two decades after creating the wrap dress.

Fabiola Beracasa Beckman, the daughter of American socialite Veronica Hearst and a producer of the Hulu documentary Diane von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge, has known von Furstenberg her whole life, because Egon von Furstenberg and her father were friends.

“By all societal norms, she is a contradiction in every possible way,” Beckman said. “She’s the child of a Holocaust survivor who married a German prince. She’s an entrepreneur and also a seducteur. She’s a socialite and a very serious activist.”

Even von Furstenberg’s sartorial creation was at cross-purposes, designed to let women be sexy and practical. It had no zipper, she said, so that you could slip out of a lover’s room without waking him – “just like a man”. It was a dress to seduce a man while impressing his mother.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who co-directed the documentary with Trish Dalton, said she was drawn to her subject’s journey from outsider in Belgium to insider in Gotham.

“In school, she felt like she was the odd one out. She didn’t have blonde hair, didn’t have blue eyes. She stuck out,” Obaid-Chinoy said.

Young Diane was thrilled to go off to Switzerland and Britain to boarding school. At 18, she met Egon von Furstenberg. He initiated the middle-class Jewish girl into the jet set. They married when she was 22.

When von Furstenberg started her clothing line, her husband introduced her to American fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who boosted her business. The “princess” title helped.

The wrap dress became a quintessential symbol of the 1970s. Von Furstenberg made an enormous amount of money very quickly, only to lose it when her partners did not heed her warning that the market was glutted.

In the 1990s, when she realised young women were ferreting their mothers’ wrap dresses out of the closet, she revived the style for a lucrative second act – aided by her appearances on shopping channel QVC.

The company’s next act is up in the air. Von Furstenberg said her empire was cresting in 2014, the year of the 40th anniversary of the wrap dress, as she and her executives pushed to make it even bigger. “The problem was the people I hired started spending too much money, opening too many stores and outlets,” she said.

The pandemic made everything worse. In 2020, von Furstenberg laid off 60 per cent of the corporate and retail staff in the United States, Britain and France, and closed 18 of her 19 US stores.

She is still selling clothes online, in her flagship store in lower Manhattan and in some department stores. But for three years, the bulk of her business was in the hands of her distributor in China, where the dresses are also made.

“Unfortunately,” she said, “I realised how important it is for the brand owner – me – to be able to control the design. So I’m in the process of taking the business back from them.”

With a new top executive and a fresh creative team, she is working on a plan to make the company smaller. She said it would be announced by the end of the year.

She is also pulling together her archives in two buildings at Cloudwalk, her 18th-century farm in Connecticut.

Von Furstenberg says the moment that most defines her life is when her mother, Lily Nahmias, a Jewish Greek immigrant working for the Belgium resistance, was liberated from the death camp when the war ended in 1945.

After 13 months in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck, the 22-year-old was down to 29kg, with blue tattooed numbers, 5199, on her left arm. She had to be fed every few moments like a bird.

A year later, she was married to a Jewish Bessarabian immigrant, Leon Halfin, who was in the electronics business. Against her doctor’s warning that she could not have a normal baby, she had Diane.

“And I’m not normal,” von Furstenberg said with a smile.

Her mother was tough on her. When the little girl was scared of the dark, her mother locked her in a dark closet to face her fear. “Today, she could go to jail for it,” von Furstenberg says in the documentary. “But she was right.”

That ability to look terrible news in the eye held von Furstenberg in good stead when, at 47, she got cancer at the base of the tongue.

The key, she said, is “not be a victim, not be angry, not say, ‘Why me?’ Just say: ‘This is what my situation is. This is what the doctor can do. This is what I can do’”.

In the 1980s, when von Furstenberg’s business was cratering, her mother, who had left her father for another man, went with her new partner on a business trip to Germany. Hearing a bunch of men talking loudly in German in the hotel sent her into a panic, and she was found crouching under the concierge desk.

“She went crazy,” von Furstenberg says in the documentary. Her mother ended up in a mental ward in Switzerland.

Stunned by coming to terms with her mother’s past, von Furstenberg fled with her children to Bali, Indonesia, fell in love with Paulo, a sexy Brazilian beach bum, and put out a perfume inspired by her experience, Volcan d’Amour.

She has been fretting about the portrait of her family in the documentary. When she is pictured living the high life at Studio 54 and working hard as a baby mogul, will she seem like she was an inattentive mother to her two young children?

Her son Alexander, 54, and daughter Tatiana, 53, who are involved in her company and foundation, make it clear in the documentary that their parents, the darlings of sparkly New York society, were distracted.

“I don’t know if you want to use the word ‘neglected’ or ‘free’,” Tatiana says. “But we were not infantilised or cared for as children. We cooked for ourselves. We travelled alone from a very young age.”

Then came the infamous 1973 feature by writer Linda Bird Francke in New York magazine christening the von Furstenbergs “New York’s reigning glory couple”. The pair came across, as Francke says in the film, as “Eurotrash”. Egon von Furstenberg talks about wanting to experiment with men and about a threesome with a woman the couple had met in Paris.

Von Furstenberg looked at herself in the story and did not like what she saw. She decided to get a divorce.

“I just realised I couldn’t be a couple,” she told me. “I did not want ‘we.’ I wanted ‘I’.”

Tatiana says in the film that amid the Aids crisis, her father’s promiscuity after the divorce scared her. When he died from complications from Aids in 2004, von Furstenberg was with him in Rome and closed his eyes.

In her 2014 memoir, The Woman I Wanted To Be, von Furstenberg wrote that when she got involved with Diller, who was the young, brash head of film and television company Paramount, his friends were incredulous because no one had known him to be with a woman before, and that made her feel special.

In the documentary, Obaid-Chinoy asks von Furstenberg and Diller about an Andy Warhol line: “I guess the reason Diane and Diller are a couple is because she gives him straightness and he gives her powerfulness.”

They are both adamant that this is no marriage of convenience. “There’s nothing fake at all,” von Furstenberg said. “It was real passion. My relationship and love with Barry, it’s beyond anything. It is totally, totally love. When I met him, he was very shy, he was very introverted, and he opened it all up and gave me everything with no reservation, and I fell in love with that.”

At the end of our Venice adventure, von Furstenberg was still curled up. I wondered how she liked always being described as feline.

“I would rather be a bird,” she said, “because I could fly.” NYTIMES