Diane von Furstenberg - Wrap Stars
altn
Sat 11 Nov 2006
Wrap stars
JACKIE McGLONE
Diane von Furstenberg likes being Diane von Furstenberg. And who can
blame her? On the cusp of 60, she is every inch as glamorous as she was
when she was dating the likes of Richard Gere and Ryan O'Neal, and Andy
Warhol was making voluptuous silkscreen portraits of her in her wild
disco years, all curls, feline eyes and luscious red lips.
She has been a princess and a jet-setter, was the muse of Yves Saint
Laurent, is wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, after creating a
string of signature fashion and beauty empires, and she designed one of
the most iconic dresses of the 20th century - the wrap dress, which is
worn by every fashion luminary, from Sophie Dahl and Sofia Coppola to
Madonna, Lauren Bacall and Jennifer Aniston.
Oh, and she's a grandmother of three, who happens to be married to a
billionaire media mogul, one of America's richest men.
"I like being me," she often tells her husband, Barry Diller, the
magnate, who ran Paramount and was then responsible for the launch of
Fox TV, as they vacation on their yacht, or drive to Cloudwalk, her
Connecticut estate, from their home in New York.
"And, of course, he agrees with me. He also likes me being me," she
drawls.
Von Furstenberg is not being narcissistic, she claims, pushing a cloud
of tawny curls away from her face. Sometimes, she continues, she likes
to just talk to herself, because she has this really great relationship
with herself which gets better and better the older she gets.
"I need so much to be on my own. I need a lot of solitude, and I take a
lot. It's restorative. And that's really important. Barry understands
that because he needs to be alone, too. I don't think I could do any of
the things I do if I wasn't on my own. My life has always been my own
and I have cherished it, although it wasn't always this rosy. Today,
though, I am very happy and very proud of what I've achieved," she
says.
"Now I am very comfortable in my skin, very confident," she says. And I
would not argue with her, for she exudes feminine mystique from every
pore.
It was not ever thus. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she has
transformed herself from "a plain little Belgian girl, with black
frizzy hair" into a sort of divine diva, "Diane, the Huntress" - and it
has been quite a journey. She has fought - and won - a battle against
cancer, as well as triumphing over major business setbacks, including
losing her company and finding herself in a staggering amount of debt,
something that might have defeated many male tycoons, let alone a
single mother determined to create her own fashion empire while raising
two children alone. Her children - and now grandchildren - will always
be the centre of her universe.
Always, though, she has lived for love, forever falling in love because
there is a side to her, she insists, "that likes to think I would do
anything for love - the idea of the characters of Anna Karenina and
Emma Bovary is very appealing to me".
Indeed, she tells a story in her memoir, Diane: A Signature Life, which
was published in 1998, about how the offices of Rolling Stone were just
below her own "purple palace" on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, in New
York. All the magazine's framed covers were displayed in the office
lobby. She used to tease her friend Jann Wenner, the editor, about how
many flings she had had with his cover subjects. "'Just guess,' I would
tempt him."
"I love love," sighs von Furstenberg. "Being in love was, and is, an
essential part of living and breathing, though I realise now that my
relationships with men may seem very strange to others. I also realise
that I have been afraid of truly committing myself. I think, although I
hate to admit it, that it may be a fear of rejection. I like to be
needed, useful," she says.
Therefore, she says, she's been attracted to men who are reserved or
slightly tormented, which is why she often gravitated towards writers
or artists - she once dated Warren Beatty. "But I have never regretted
a single relationship or even a flirtation I've had. And almost all the
men I've known have remained friends. Sometimes it's hard to keep in
touch after the break-up of a relationship, but I try not to break the
dialogue. I've found that old boyfriends eventually are reassuring and
make the best and most loyal friends. So, yes, intimacy is very
important to me."
Nonetheless, sometimes, von Furstenberg confides, she can't believe the
odd way she has run her life. "Yet I've always loved being a woman, and
I have wanted to help other women to be like me, both vulnerable and
feminine, but to live their lives like men, to act in a hard, powerful
way, which is what I've done, while always staying refined and
sophisticated and, above all, alluring," she says.
Women must have "du chien", she continues, a French expression meaning
a sassy courage.
Dressed in an aubergine-coloured suede version of the wrap - "the suede
wrap is the most luxurious dress a woman can envelop herself in" -
accessorised with the chic and chunky solid gold jewellery she has
designed for H Stern, the starry Brazilian jewellers and high-profile
gem specialists, and which she's in Scotland to promote, von
Furstenberg is the epitome of sassy courage, although today she
resembles an exotic, purple orchid.
We meet in Edinburgh, after she has spent a morning doing yoga, reading
Voltaire, thinking about his essays, then visiting the Scottish
National Gallery and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, gliding
gracefully around the city in her Christian Louboutin shoes.
Over slabs of chocolate cake, our heart to heart continues. "Men would
sometimes make me suffer," she replies when I ask if her heart was ever
broken. "I have felt rejected and sometimes betrayed, but I don't think
you can feel love without some suffering. I'm not sure these men ever
knew I was suffering because I would rarely show it. I never get into
fights and have no memory for pain. In truth, the men I've loved and
cared for have never treated me as well during the relationship as they
have after."
BORN in Belgium, Diane von Furstenberg says her birth was "a miracle".
Her Greek-born mother, Lily Nahmias was 21 years old when she was freed
from a German concentration camp in 1945. She weighed just 49 pounds.
Six months later, Lily married Russian-born Leon Halfin, who went into
the electronics business. She ignored her doctor's life-or-death orders
not to get pregnant and Diane was born on December 31, 1946 - "the
daughter of a survivor, not a victim". She has one brother, Philippe
(54).
Recently she found a note written by Lily on the day she was arrested,
addressed to her parents.
She wrote: "... I don't know where I am going but I'm leaving with a
smile." Von Furstenberg continues: "When I found that, I realised that
I am the daughter of somebody who went to the camps with a smile and
that explains everything about me. If you were born a miracle, you've
already won before you do anything. It doesn't matter if you become a
jet-setter and marry a prince. It's about survival and it was my mother
who made me so strong and so fearless."
Her parents were together for 16 years and von Furstenberg says her
childhood was perfectly happy, but she couldn't wait to grow up.
Educated at boarding schools in Switzerland and England, she studied at
the universities of Madrid and Geneva. Then she met and fell in love
with a handsome young man, Prince Eduard Egon von und zu Furstenberg,
the son of an Austrian prince and Clara Agnelli, an heiress to the Fiat
fortune.
Diane fell pregnant. She telegrammed Egon suggesting an abortion, he
replied telling her to arrange their wedding. They moved to New York,
where their son Alexandre was born in 1970 and their daughter Tatiana a
year later. The jet-setting prince and princess became the most
glamorous couple in Manhattan, hanging out with Andy and Paloma, Loulou
and Yves, Mick and Bianca.
Meanwhile, von Furstenberg, who was not content to be just a socialite,
started her dress business in 1972, designing a simple shirtdress for
working women. Her wrap dress, invented in 1973, was an instant hit,
worn by everyone from Julie Nixon Eisenhower to Gloria Steinem. By
1976, more than five million had been sold and von Furstenberg was on
the cover of Newsweek by the time she was 29. "Feel like a woman, wear
a dress," she told women.
After seven years, her marriage to Egon broke up.
She met Diller shortly before that and they travelled incessantly
together, visiting Imelda Marcos in the Philippines and dropping in on
Francis Ford Coppola filming Apocalypse Now, as she recounts in her
memoir. Despite falling madly in love with Diller, von Furstenberg
continued her adventurous romantic life.
In 1984 she met Alain Elkin, an Italian writer and intellectual, gave
up her business in New York and moved to Paris. He didn't like her
spike heels, violent colours and avant-garde style, so she wore flat
shoes and tweed skirts. She helped found a publishing house and held
court at a literary salon, with the likes of Alberto Moravia and Bret
Easton Ellis, but she says she also came close to losing her identity.
She left her fashion business in the mid-1980s, after giving up control
of her signature brand to licensees. Her signature was worth millions
of dollars but she no longer had control of her own name. After almost
five years in Paris, she returned to New York and for the first time in
ten years she wasn't living with a man. Slowly, she began to reconnect
with the world of design.
In 1992, she made her debut on QVC, the home-shopping channel. She sold
1.3m (£681,000) of her Silk Assets collection in just two hours. Once
she sold 2,000 pairs of trousers in less than two minutes. She
introduced Diller to QVC and he eventually took control of the network.
"Suddenly, I went from has-been to pioneer again," she writes.
Two years later, her world went into a tailspin. She was lunching with
her friend Ralph Lauren, who had been diagnosed in 1993 with a brain
tumour that had turned out to be benign. She asked him about his
symptoms. He said he'd heard a little noise in his ear which wouldn't
go away. Von Furstenberg, too, could hear such a noise; and she had a
swollen gland in her neck. She went for a biopsy and an operation, and
tiny cancerous cells were discovered at the base of her tongue and in
her soft palate. She underwent eight weeks of radiation treatment and
devised her own healing techniques. Diller was her rock and support.
"It was so odd, really. I had never been sick before my bout with this
disease, I wasn't sick during it, and I haven't been sick since," she
says knocking on wood. "But it left a lasting impression, adding a new
dimension to life itself and the obligation to honour it every day."
Von Furstenberg passionately believes that her wrap dress empowered a
generation of women because it liberated them from fussy, uncomfortable
clothes in the 1970s - and that it still empowers their daughters today
since it's one of the most internationally ripped-off designs, after
she re-invented it so successfully eight years ago. This year alone,
her wholesale turnover is in excess of 120m (£63m). "My signature is
once more my own," she smiles.
When she takes the podium at the Edinburgh launch of her big, bold
jewellery collection, it's in front of an audience of freshly-coiffed
women - of all shapes and sizes - attired in her honour in countless
versions of her simple fabric dress, which she believes "looks good on
almost everyone".
On the third finger of von Furstenberg's left hand shimmers one of 26
diamond rings Diller gave her in 2001 to mark their marriage 26 years
after they first met, although he was so bedazzled by her he had been
proposing for decades. "For some reason marriage was not true to who I
was, but now I accept it and we're very happy. Barry is the pillar of
my life. We talk five times a day - but, then, I also talk to my
children, who live in LA, five times a day, too," she says, twirling
her diamonds.
She wears another ring on her right hand. Made of solid gold and set
with a huge crystal, it's the size of a knuckleduster. She lifts her
hand to display it. "This is my talisman," she announces. "A woman can
do serious damage with it - she could even hit someone with it. I call
it my power ring."
If only life were that simple. Somehow I think that it takes rather
more than a power ring to become the world's greatest wrap artist, or a
jet-set princess, or, indeed, a legendary seductress supremely
comfortable in her own skin at 60.
· Diane von Furstenberg's jewellery collection for H Stern is
available from Hamilton & Inches, George Street, Edinburgh, tel:
0131-225 4898, www.hamiltonandinches.com