Diane von Furstenberg (37 page)

In November 2014 the couple announced that their foundation would also fund a substantial portion of a proposed $150 million-plus open-air performing arts center on the ramshackle wharf at the end of Fourteenth Street, near Diane’s headquarters.

Like her fashion, those headquarters reflect Diane’s personality, her boldness, openness, and strength. “What defines me is the relationship I have with myself. I’m completely self-reliant,” she says.

Diane is sitting behind her immensely long desk dressed in a black leather jacket and black denim pants printed in her classic chain-link pattern. She’s spent the afternoon visiting the ateliers of young designers. Nurturing the next generation of talent is a key part of her job as CDFA president. She enjoys this enormously, but it’s been a jam-packed week preparing for the debuts of her E! reality show and a new memoir,
The Woman I Wanted to Be,
and she’s exhausted. An assistant brings her a small bottle of Kors energy drink. She downs it in two gulps and regards my outfit—a black and white shirtdress and a black wrap sweater. She nods approvingly, impressed that I’d had the style chops to pair that particular dress with that particular sweater. A moment later, though, she tempers the compliment. “Actually, that’s the way we showed it on the runway.”

My sweater was reminiscent of the wrap top Diane had done in the seventies, the one that had led directly to the wrap dress. “You know, [my design team] didn’t want to do that sweater. I had to insist,” she said.

It turned out to be a big hit, just like the “Amelia,” a wrap dress with a jersey bodice and flared skirt that Diane also had to insist be done her way. The design team wanted to give it a blouson top. “A blouson on a wrap!” she exclaims in disbelief.

Such incidents suggest it might be unwise for her to relinquish design responsibility to a successor, as she’s hinted to the press she might do. (The most likely candidate is Michael Herz, her artistic director.) No one has the pulse of DVF like, well, DVF.

While we talk, the sky beyond the tall windows in Diane’s office turns from pink to deep blue. It’s time to go. “Don’t let her look at her phone while she’s driving,” says Ellen Gross, Diane’s assistant, as we step into the elevator.

Soon we are floating through the streets of Chelsea in Diane’s beautiful car—a rich, leaf-green Bentley. A few weeks earlier Diane got into a fender bender while on her phone, and now she sets it on the console between us and tries not to look at it. We pass the new Whitney Museum of American Art and the Diller-von Furstenberg Building, which serves as High Line headquarters, then the offices of IAC, Diller’s company, a ten-story, one hundred-million-dollar structure that resembles a clipper ship with undulating sails of curved glass.

The Kors energy booster kicks in, and Diane grows hungry. Violating Ellen’s dictate, she picks up the phone and calls her cook to order dinner. “Some soup would be nice,” she says as she turns onto the highway.

Now Diane is speeding north toward Cloudwalk, passing telephone poles and suburban lights, then silent country trees black against the navy sky, leaving behind her the fittings and the sample rooms, the mood boards and the photo shoots, the loud, urgent call of New York Fashion.

Acknowledgments

I
’d like to thank Diane von Furstenberg for not slamming the door in my face—metaphorically, that is—when I suggested to her I write this book. At first, Diane was understandably ambivalent about my project. Given her fame and her importance to fashion and the social history of New York, however, she knew a DVF biography was inevitable. Whatever qualms she might have had about what I would write seemed outweighed by her sense that I was the right person for the job. I’ve tried to honor that trust, and the New York fashion we both love, by writing a fair and balanced, yet also vivid and lively, portrait.

Diane has been extraordinarily generous with her time, spending hours talking to me on the phone and at her homes in New York and Connecticut. She also shared with me pictures, letters, and excerpts from her diaries, and introduced me to scores of her family and friends.

I’d like to thank everyone quoted in the book who graciously welcomed me into their homes and offices and shared their stories with me; those who talked to me over the phone, in many cases in multiple, lengthy conversations; and those who patiently answered questions in emails. I could not have written this book without you.

During my research in Paris, Isabelle Taudière provided a beautiful apartment, delicious meals and bright conversation, and mapped out Métro routes to my closely scheduled interviews. At the Musée Juif de Belgique in Brussels, Philippe Blondin and his staff spoke to me at length about the Nazi Occupation of Belgium and introduced me to documents in their archives about Diane’s family. For research and translation help, I’m also indebted to Régine Cavallaro, a journalist and author in her own right.

Thanks to Denise Oswald, who edited this book with perception and thoughtfulness, and to everyone at HarperCollins who helped bring it to publication. Thanks also to Jennifer Joel—who rocks a wrap dress better than any other literary agent in New York—for her loyalty, intelligence, and unfailingly astute judgment; to Susan Vermazon Anderson, the shrewdest of photo editors, for her invaluable help in selecting and securing photos for the book; Clare Fentress for her precise and careful fact-checking; and Devi Vallabhaneni for being my rabbi on all things related to the business side of fashion.

I was lucky to write part of
Diane von Furstenberg: A Life Unwrapped
at a guest house overlooking a sunny, bricked garden in Savannah, Georgia, where I was a visiting writer at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I’m grateful to Paula Wallace, the founder and president of this wonderful school, for making it possible.

I could not get through the long process of writing a book without my irreplaceable posse of friends. (You know who you are.) My husband, Richard Babcock, has been at my side through every stage of this project, as he has been for thirty-five years. I’m eternally grateful for his wisdom, his wit, his patience, and, mostly, his all-enabling love. I couldn’t bear life without him or our son, Joe.

Notes

This is a heavily reported book, based on scores of interviews. Other sources include newspapers, magazines, books, and documents in archives.

From the moment she started her business in 1970, Diane von Furstenberg has been regularly written about in
Women’s Wear Daily
, which has covered the fashion industry since the early twentieth century. Myriad other newspapers and publications from
The New York Times
to
Vogue
and
People
have covered her fashion openings and other activities and written profiles of her. I’ve drawn on these sources, as well as accounts in books and in the archives at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. For the chapter set during World War II, I’ve drawn on documents in archives at the Musée Juif de Belgique and the Services des Victimes de la Guerre in Brussels.

Short phrases and quotes that Diane has repeated often have not been included. Abbreviations for frequently cited sources are as follows:

         Diane von Furstenberg: DVF

         Alexandre von Furstenberg: AVF

         Egon von Furstenberg: EVF

         Tatiana von Furstenberg: TVF

Prologue

3
     
“You’ve got it all wrong”:
Diane von Furstenberg to the author, August 1, 2014.

4
     
“I have clarity again:
Ibid., March 18, 2012.

4
     
“What is your sign?”
Julie Baumgold, “Diane von Furstenberg and Her Jungle Romance,”
New York,
May 4, 1981.

5
     
“She’s a terrible”:
Alexandre von Furstenberg to the author, June 17, 2013.

5
     
“I never get”:
Diane Von Furstenberg,
Diane: A Signature Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), p. 160.

5
     
“The vibrations”:
Olivier Gelbsman to the author, September 9, 2011.

7
     
“Let’s wait until”:
DVF to the author, November 5, 2009.

8
     
“I have no secrets”
Ibid.

10
     
“Like Tolstoy”:
Ibid., October 3, 2014.

Lily

11
     
“turned life into gold”:
Philippe Halfin to the author, August 30, 2011.

13
     
“My father was not”:
Ibid.

14
     
“I think a lot
”: Lily Nahmias to her parents, May 19, 1944, DVF private collection.

15
     
“Do you smell”:
Diane von Furstenberg,
Diane: A Signature Life
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), p. 36.

16
     
“the worst of the worst”:
Rochelle G. Saidel,
The Jewish Women of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) p. 153.

16
     
“a huge mountain”:
Ibid., p. 157.

17
     
“wasn’t a fashion person”:
Diane von Furstenberg to the author, July 31, 2014.

17
     
“Lily was extremely”:
Mireille de Hanover to the author, September 2, 2011.

17
     
“My mother always”:
Halfin to the author, August 30, 2011.

18
     
“Wouldn’t it be more interesting”:
Diane von Furstenberg,
Diane von Furstenberg’s Book of Beauty: How to Become a More Attractive, Confident and Sensual Woman
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977) pp. 54–55.

18
     
“Lily had post-traumatic”:
Tatiana von Furstenberg to the author, June, 15, 2013.

18
     
“She had a lot of pain”:
Ibid.

18
     
“It must have been”:
Ibid.

18
     
“If I hadn’t been born”:
Diane von Furstenberg,
The Woman I Wanted to Be
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 22.

18
     
“He never stopped working”:
Halfin to the author, August 30, 2011.

19
     
“never saw limits”:
Ibid.

19
     
“There was very little”:
DVF to the author, October 2, 2104.

19
     
“He didn’t want”:
Von Furstenberg,
Woman I Wanted to Be,
p. 24.

19
     
“He loved Diane intensely”:
Halfin to the author, August 30, 2011.

20
     
“I really thought”:
DVF to the author, October 2, 2014.

20
     
“We met at school”:
Didier Van Bruyssel to the author, September 2011.

20
     
“I always wanted to be”:
David Colman,
Interview
, September 13, 2012.

21
     
“But you’re Jewish”:
Halfin to the author, August 30, 2011.

21
     
“She never talked”:
Ibid.

21
     
“about little things”:
Von Furstenberg,
Diane,
p. 36.