With a new top executive and fresh creative team, the Belgian fashion designer is hoping to downsize her struggling company.
As she settles into her final act, Diane von Furstenberg looks back on a life of love, sex and money.
Her message was bracing: Meet men as equals, but do not imitate them. Ambition and stiletto heels can coexist. 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.
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. 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.
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.
She is also pulling together her archives in two buildings at Cloudwalk, her 18th-century farm in Connecticut. 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. Von Furstenberg says that the moment that most defines her life is when her mother was liberated from the death camp when the war ended in 1945. PHOTO: NYTIMES
“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.”
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