Diane von Furstenberg.

Diane von Furstenberg has come to the door of her hotel suite in a negligee. It’s not a standard way to greet a virtual stranger, but then thanks to the bits of time we’ve spent together over the last few days- eating at big dinners with her assembled relations and guests, running into each other in the hotel lobby, walking through town to her appoointments as she pepares for the unveiling of her retrospective at Moscow’s Manez Exhibition Hall- she feels a little like a stranger to me as a stranger can. It’s no so much the mount of time we’ve spent together that has made things that way, in fact, so much her unique lack of guard,manifest in the way she happily perches on the street to change her shoes, for example, or the way she openly tells me personal stories about losing her virginity when she was 15 at boardi ng school in Oxford, and deciding to leace her first husband to „be my own wman and sleep with whoever I wanted“. So at the end of our trip I have found myself at her doow, with a pushy, voderline-nosey ,e,ber of hotel staff in tow, and she has opened it. Her trademark wild, auburn hair is slightly dishevelled and tumbling down aroung her shoulders, her refined, angular features are glowing out from behinda full face of serious make-up, and she’s wearing a black, silk, kind-of-pretty-much-see-through negligee. „I think we’ll be fine,“ she ripples in her Belgian-American twang, dismissing the concierge. „And yu, come in. I’ve been waiting.“


She ushers me in and sits me down on a sofa in the man room in her suite. There’s a faing bumbling coming from a room to the side, which I assume to be generated by her husband of nine years, Barry Diller, the 67-year-old media giant responsible for the success of InterActiveCorp, Paramoung and Fox. Von Furstenberg flits into that room, announcing that „she had probably best put something on“, and tells Barry that she has company, before springing back out with a little black casmere thing thrown over her shoulders, curling herself up on the sofa next to me and purring:“Finally.Let’s do this.“ Needless to say nothing about this experience so far has been all that ordinary.
But then Diane von Furstenberg is not all that ordinary. Certainly not ordinary is the fact that at 62 years of age(63 when you read this), and after rollercoaster of a life involving dynastic marriages, public divorces, business booms, business crashes, bouth of cancer and a penomenally successful comeback, this granfmother of three remains as strining today as she is in the sultry portraits of her by Ara Gallant, Helmut Newton and Andy Warhol, the magazine covers and shots of her naked and smouldering that accompany the clothes in her exhibiton. In part it’s because without the aid of any surgical nips and tricks she has the same body and sane elegant features that she did 30 years ago. Mainly, though, it’s because she has this unfaltering, bulletproof sense of self which she assigns to a brief that she constantly reiterates: „ I am, without a doubt, my own best friend.“
However, despite all of that, when we sit down to finally „ do this“ she seems anxious, and not just because this whole encounter may or may not feel a little bit Mrs Robinson. Before I even ask a queston, she starts firing off her own:“Did you stay for the lecutre? What did you think? Did it go well? Did the kids get it?“ She’s talking about the lecture she had giver earlier that day at Lomonosov Moscow State Univeristy, where she told a room full of Russian jouralism students the Diane story: the on ewhere, in a nutshell, she is born in Belgium to a Holocaust-survivor mother, meets Price Egon von Furstenberg at the age of 18, marries him and becomes a princess in 1969, moves to NYC, has two kids, meets Diana Vreeland, launches her business in 1970, invents the silk jersey wrap dress and becomes overnight success, finds herself on the cover of New York Magazine in 1973 along with the headline ! The couple that has everything-is everything enough?“ , decides it isn’t, thanks all the same, divorces Prince Egon, makes her business boom then loses track of it and has to sell up, moves to Paris with a writer, plans a comeback in 1992, returns to NYS, uses the unlikely medium of QVC to sell a funny, inexpensive like called Silk Assets, shifting 1.3 million dollars worth of it within two hours, and rises Lazarus-like on the back of some crinckle-silk-chiffon basics until she fully relaunchers her brand DVF in 1997.Phew.




It’s quite a story and she tells it well. In answer to her barrage questions of course it went down well with the kids. A room full of russian teenagers sat stunned and mesmerised as she worked her way through it, and it was quite obvious that she was like nothing they had ever seen. „Well no, I’m not.“ She concedes when I tell her that,“but then none of us are like anything people have seen before. It doesn’t mean that I don’t question myself. When I do something like that talk I have to go to the bathroom when I finish, lock the door and say,“OK, you’ve done it now.“ In same way, when I arrive home, or in a hotel room, I’ll take a deep breath and say, „Honey, I’m home!“ U have that kind of relationship with myself, but I am still very critical.“
It’s an unlikely confession: she must surely be aware that to a room full of Russian teenagers her life and her way of being seem magnificently alien, and seductive, in all senses of the world. „Oh absolutely,“she agrees. „In fact as I said to the kids today, I know that the only man I could never seduce was y bank manager! I think the thing you’re talking about, that people react to, is the sense of fearlessness that I have. When I was little girl my mother would say to me, „Fear is not an option!“She would shut me in the closet until I realised there was nothing to be scared of, and t was the biggest gift to me; it is the thing she gave me that made me who I am, and it is the thing that I want to give to other people. Especially young people. I really, really do not envy young, and I don’t understand Peter Pan syndrome, when people say they don’t want to grow up. How can you not want to grow up? I always thought the condition of childhood was a sad, sad thing.“
She talks a lot about youth and age: about how she loves her children but didn’t really like them during their school years, how happy she is with feeling old, and how she never really felt young. Although she insists that her mother, who was liberated from the concertration camp at Ravensbrück 18 months before Diane was born, never thought of herself as a victiim and never spoke of anything negative about her ordeal, she explains that her awareness of that kind of suffering coupled with alienation she felt growing up in Belgium( „a sad, sad country“) left her feeling that she was never really a child. „ I had a boyfriend once who told me something I loved,“ she explains. „He said to me,“Some people are their own ancestors.“ In a strange way I feel like that. I love that sentence.“
Eventually, it transpires that she’s thinking about age because of the exhibition, and because she is being reminded of how youthful she was when she first found success(she was worth over 60 million dollars when she was 28). She’s a bit worried, she claims, that the fact that she’ll be presiding over a room a room full of pictures of herself at the opening later that night might make her seem ever-so-slightly egotistical. If it were anyone else it would. But Diane, because her life, her brand, and her appeal all depend on her personal legend, it somehow seems OK. Her old friend Andre Leon Talley, who curates the show for her, sums it up perfectly:“ Diane is an extraordinary lady- she is very smart, very intelligent, and she knows who she is. She invented her brand and she invented herself at the same time; her brand is her invention of herself. She always say she became the woman she wanted to be, and she’s done it with dignity and intergrity, for decades.“
It makes sense, and when I tell her that I am talking to her for an issue of a mazine that is full of fashion legends, so a bit of audacity is par for the course, she eases up. „ I guess I do feel like a legend at this point,“ she muses. „Look what I’m doing! For me to say, „Oh no, I’m not,“ and to be doing this show would be stupid. I’ve had a life, and I’ve lived it, and I have a story to tell!“ With that, her phone rings and she announces that it’s time to go, but nt before she offers a final thought. „When you’re young, you can play with your beauty, play your youth, you can seduce,“ she says, as if she can’t let me go without telling me. „You could do all of them, but you should never bank on that.By the time you get to 40 you have to have myth about yourself, even if it is just that you give the best parties or make the best food. I think everybody can be legend as they get older. I think that in one way or another everybody should feel like a legend.“

milline naine!!!

Text: Isaac Lock