Diane von Furstenberg’s famous curls fill the Zoom screen, before her video sharply cuts out. “We’ll speak with the camera off,” she announces theatrically, “because I am still in bed.”
It is 11am her time the 74-year-old inventor of the wrap dress is at the country home in Connecticut that she sort of shares with her husband, media billionaire Barry Diller. This house, she explains, is one which she bought for herself pre-Diller, when she was just 26 and was divorcing from her first husband, Prince Egon von Furstenberg.
Ergo, the property is all about her, and she describes the decor as “grand comfort” with exclusively “huge” furniture. “In this house I’ve had everything: different boyfriends, different husbands, small children, big children, small grandchildren, big grandchildren,” she says. “It’s where I’ve written my diaries, my books. Everything here is about my life, so it has been a privilege to be stuck here [during the pandemic].”
One of Von Furstenberg's special talents is delivering a constant stream of new mantras. Every other sentence she utters is worthy of being captured on a "Live, laugh, love"-style poster or, indeed, a scatter cushion. She has released a new book, Own It, this month, a collection of her greatest isms. At frequent points in our conversation she coins another: "Own your imperfections; they become your assets."
Her ethos when managing the public fallout to her business struggles during the pandemic? “Own your vulnerability, it becomes your strength.”
Despite releasing the book and developing a high street homewares collection for H&M, the last year has presented some serious challenges for Von Furstenberg and the eponymous fashion business she founded in 1972. She is an impossibly rich woman, but her long-earned reputation, being relevant, and staying in business without needing her husband to bail her out, clearly still matter to her.
In July 2020, she spoke of the “painful months” of the coronavirus crisis that led to her restructuring, and making 60 per cent of her staff redundant.
A New York Times article described a pre-pandemic growth strategy doubling the number of global bricks-and-mortar DVF stores between 2013 and 2015 as having backfired, with all but the New York flagship shuttered to focus on selling online and on smart licensing deals with her extensive archive of prints.
“It’s about making sense and not being delusional,” Von Furstenberg says matter-of-factly, nine months on, the finances somewhat stabilised. “In many ways, the fashion business was overgrown, and, when you have a brand, the pandemic just made you realise that you have to scale down and go back to your core. Which is what I did.”
Von Furstenberg, whose catwalk shows were once a New York Fashion Week highlight, presented a more concise spring 2021 collection without the fanfare. Easy-to-wear, colourful printed dresses (including plenty of wraps) rightly dominate. Her trademark jersey fabrics have been adapted into loud loungewear, too, for her target “woman in charge” who is now working from home.
While she thinks that, for a lot of brands, catwalk shows will eventually come back, Von Furstenberg has decided to cancel hers indefinitely, and has been experimenting with alternative formats since 2016.
“Doing big shows that the world sees immediately, but you cannot have the clothes for six months, is not the way to go any more,” she says. “Everybody wants things now thanks to social media, and people want to grab what you show as soon as you show it.”
There is no need to ask what motivates her now; she wants to pass on a legacy, not a brand in turmoil. After years of toying with semi-retirement and employing a string of stand-in creative directors (the 19-month tenure of Brit Jonathan Saunders was the most exciting of the five designers in 10 years), Diane finally has a successor in mind. Her 22-year-old granddaughter Talita von Furstenberg is interested in running the business.
“She and I are very close,” Von Furstenberg says. “She’s always wanted to take over. She did a mini collection this summer, and now she’s finishing university. Then we’ll see.”
TVF is, like DVF, a princess. Her mother is Alexandra von Furstenberg, nee Miller (sister of Pia Getty and Marie-Chantal, Crown Princess of Greece) and her father is Prince Alexander von Furstenberg, Diane’s eldest son from her 1969 marriage to Swiss-born Prince Egon.
Diane’s personal life is extraordinary and movie-worthy, a story which has long drawn fans into her world beyond just wanting to buy the clothes. Born in Belgium in 1946 to Jewish parents, Diane arrived just 18 months after her mother had survived imprisonment at Auschwitz.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.She went to boarding school in Oxfordshire then studied economics at the University of Geneva, where she met Egon, heir to the Fiat fortune. By 25, she was separated, a mother of two, living in Manhattan and contemplating starting a fashion business her fairy tale taking an unorthodox plot twist encouraged by a friendship with Gloria Steinem.
“It’s funny, I was a princess and then, when I separated, I became Ms,” she says. “Gloria had invented the term Ms, she taught me what that meant. Gloria was my idol.”
In 1974 Diane launched the wrap dress, a slinky jersey design loved as much for its comfort and versatility as for Diane’s of-the-moment message that you could seduce, untie and drop it to the floor with ease. In 1976 she was on the cover of Newsweek; by 1979 annual sales reached $150 million.
Von Furstenberg’s tales with the Studio 54 set from this time are legendary: the parties with Andy Warhol, Halston and Bianca Jagger, the affairs with Richard Gere, Omar Sharif, Warren Beatty. Von Furstenberg can be famously, fabulously indiscreet when she wants to, or fiercely loyal.
“Was I really a party person?” she asks coyly. “I can tell you that I gave the best parties in the world, I knew that. When I arrived in the 70s and in the early 80s, I had a lot of great parties that I don’t remember. I’ve had such a full life, I couldn’t pretend I was a day younger.”
She still knows everyone in Manhattan and, yes, still loves a party. She and Diller are Democrat supporters, and Diane is on the board of her close friend Hillary Clinton’s Vital Voices organisation. “Hillary is an extraordinary woman,” she says. “I met her as First Lady and I became closer to her when she was secretary of state. Now I am on the board of the organisation that she created. We are close because of that. It’s very unfortunate how it all turned out for her. I just felt like Hillary has been misunderstood.”
Being surrounded by friends is something that Von Furstenberg says she has missed dearly over the last year. She quietly marked her 20th wedding anniversary with Diller on February 2, a marriage that came to be in unconventional circumstances after 25 years of on-and-off affairs.
“It was going to be his birthday and I thought, okay, for your birthday, I will marry you,” she says. “My husband deserves most of the credit [for the longevity of our marriage]. Certainly 60 per cent, maybe 65 per cent. He has been incredible ever since I met him and we were together and then not together.”
The past year has undoubtedly been one of the toughest yet, but as she herself points out, “DVF will go on”. Her brand has survived recessions before. In debt in the 1980s, she sold up and stepped away briefly, before making a comeback via a huge QVC deal in 1992. “I’ve been lucky in my life, as I’ve always tried to be very honest,” she muses of her resilience. “Mostly with myself. Because if you are honest with yourself then you’re honest with others.” That’s another one for framing on the wall.
– Telegraph Media Group
