November 2011A look from the Diane von Furstenberg line.
The young girl announced “Dee Vee Eff, it is your 5 o’clock,” as she led me smiling into a captivating glass-sided penthouse lair above the Diane von Furstenberg flagship store on West 14th Street. A room of her own; a room with a New York City rooftop view of the Meatpacking District, an area revitalized, in part, by her 2007 modernization of a 19th-century warehouse. (The project was done by New York–based WORKac architects.) The office into which I’d been ushered was filled with a light that glanced on myriad shapes, textures, patterns and colors, settling a glow around the feline woman I’d long wanted to meet. It was love at first sigh.
Diane von Furstenberg was sitting behind a vast desk in a luminous lime yellow dress. Edged in a graphic black-and-white geometric band, the design is one of my favorites from her Spring 2011 fashion collection, encapsulating as it does her incomparable signature style that aligns sexuality with ease. It is 48 hours before she leaves for her yearly month-long vacation on Eos, the state-of-the-art wooden schooner she co-owns with her longtime friend and confidant, and her husband of 10 years, IAC founder Barry Diller, and she disarmingly admits to being exhausted, before focusing on the business at hand by taking mine and spritzing my wrist with her latest creation, the perfume “Diane.”
The action is provocative, the scent evocative. “Fragrance is about memory and addiction. It’s frangipani and violet,” von Furstenberg says, and as I greedily inhale the mystical commingle I am instantly transported to my idyllic girlhood in India, when I would hide up a frangipani tree in our parched garden. “And then, of course, a little bit of patchouli. Natural ingredients. That’s basically it,” she says, casually concluding with “Diane’s” pithy tag line: “Be the woman you want to be.”
A young von Furstenberg poses in her first ad campaign, photographed by her friend Roger Prigent.
With these few words von Furstenberg also invokes her very first ad campaign, in 1972, which featured a portrait of her sitting on a white cube and wearing her first favorite design. (Not the deservedly perennial wrap, which has sold so astronomically since its introduction the same year that it merited its own book — André Leon Talley’s 2004 The Wrap — but the equally iconic shirtdress.) From the start she had an instinctive ability to articulate feminine empowerment. “I was 23, and my friend Roger Prigent took that picture,” she tells me. “When I finished the session the cube looked too big and too white in the image. Without thinking — I still have the photos with the original pen — I wrote, ‘Feel like a woman, wear a dress.’ ” She signed her name underneath, forever personalizing — and personifying — the business.
The launch of “Diane” is important to her. “First of all it is my name, the name I have always had,” points out von Furstenberg (née Halfin). “Lately, all the perfumes that have come out have a beautiful celebrity with a beautiful bottle, but there is no soul. What young girls have forgotten is the power of perfume. People have used that since antiquity.” Ah, yes, just like Cleopatra, who used scents and spices to beguile political friends and foes. Working alongside legendary perfume guru Chantal Roos, von Furstenberg concocted “Diane” over two years, and has worn it herself for a year. “So I have put in this bottle all my experience, all my love, all my passion, all my seduction tricks, all of it. Can I give you one?” Who could resist, trick or no trick? Not I. Sigh redux.
“I have never met a woman who is not strong.”
Fashion legend Diane von Furstenberg at her Connecticut house, Cloudwalk, perched on a table by George Nakashima.
As I sip my ginger tea, my eyes survey the compelling profusion of objects, a life gathered, each telling a story or containing a memory: the portrait by Warhol, the Man Ray painting, the Anh Duong nude and the row of thriving white and fuchsia orchids along the windowsill that imbue the urban space with nature. “Nothing is more eclectic than here,” von Furstenburg says. “I like the casual elegance of ‘doing’ home things that look like they were picked,” referencing her vibrant At Home collection, which launched earlier this year. The informal range of textiles, ceramics and glassware in signature DVF colors and prints prompt pick-and-play; urge mix-it-up. Anyone wavering with indecision can look for confidence to von Furstenberg’s recent redecoration of several suites at Claridge’s, her favorite London Hotel.
“Everything around here is very personal,” she says of her collection of 20th-century furniture, which includes chairs by Knoll, Franz West and Michael Graves. There is also the Dalí Lips sofa, which brings to mind another DVF signature: the ubiquitous red lips on her marketing and advertising campaigns with which she seems to be kissing her customers. “I have a passion for big tables and clearly this is a huge table,” she says, looking along the 12-foot-plus Ruhlmann desk. “I found it years ago. I also have a Frank Gehry table in my conference room. For me, everything happens either in a bed or around a table.” Gulp. She continues, “This room here is everything. It’s my office but it’s also where I have lunch, sometimes dinner — it is a living room. Behind the partition is my yoga room where I’ll be doing yoga at 6pm.”
The Diane von Furstenberg empire includes fashion, accessories, a home collection and the recently launched fragrance “Diane.”
The newly launched DVF home line includes tabletop and bedding, swatches of which are seen here.
“Lets see….” von Furstenberg looks around and then down at her desk. “The object I have with me at all times is my camera,” and she picks it up and snaps away. “I used to write in my diary; now I keep a vision diary, for reminders.” She sits back and swings her bare brown legs up to rest diagonally on the desk, ankles crossed, and nods toward a rather forbidding life-size cast bronze sculpture of a man with the top of his head lopped off, reminiscent of an empty jagged-edged eggshell. She continues, “It is the oldest thing I have in this room — other than myself!” (Von Furstenberg is an inspirational 64 years old.) “When I first came to New York, in 1970, I bought it with my husband.” (Her first, Prince Egon von Furstenberg, whom she divorced in 1972.) “It is by Californian artist John Battenberg. I called it — though I don’t think it is the name — The Empty Man. I kind of like the idea of an empty man in my office.”
Renowned for her love of female strength, von Furstenberg reveals volumes as she succinctly elucidates her take on the opposite sex. “Well, we are two different animals so it is almost no comparison,” she says. “It’s funny because what I love about men is their sensitivity, their shyness, their depth and their loyalty.” I question “loyalty” on behalf of both sexes who have grappled with the ramifications of testosterone. “Well, I don’t know anymore,” she accedes, “I think Viagra has changed so many things.”
Diane, Chuck Close’s penetrating portrait of von Furstenberg, taken earlier this year. © Chuck Close, courtesy The Pace Gallery
“It’s interesting,” she continues, “because on one side women have become stronger and on the other they haven’t. Lately, women have become objectified. But I have never met a woman who is not strong. Sometimes they don’t show it, or there is a brother, father, or husband or whatever…” She trails off, pensively. “But if a tragedy happens, the strength comes out. So I think I encourage women to show their strength before the tragedy.” I think of the astonishing Chuck Close photograph of her taken for the May 2011 Harper’s Bazaar, shortly after a hideous skiing accident at Aspen when a novice ploughed into her. Von Furstenberg required surgery, and quelled media speculation of the plastic variety with, “I don’t want anybody else’s face. I don’t want a younger face. I just want my old face back.” As Bazaar’s Editor in Chief Glenda Bailey pointed out, the image powerfully reveals both her fortitude and her vulnerability. Multiple laugh and tear lines etch her face, a personal skin map. It is a thing of beauty.
“The advantage of being older is that you have a past,” she says with enviable sangfroid. Hers originated in Belgium, where she was born to Leon Halfin, a Romanian immigrant, and Lily Nahmias, a Greek-born Holocaust survivor of indomitable spirit yet physical frailty. In her fascinating 1998 autobiography Diane: A Signature Life, she writes, “My birth was a miracle.” She lives her mother’s lessons every day; a learned determination shapes her own life. Between founding her first fashion company in 1970, a re-launch in 1997, and today’s expanding global luxury lifestyle brand, her will to create an independent role has never waned.
Last year, von Furstenberg redesigned 20 suites at Claridge’s in London using custom-designed fabrics and furniture that are as unapologetically bold as her clothing line.
“The advantage of being older is that you have a past,” says von Furstenberg today.
With two now-adult children, Tatiana and Alexandre — “for whom I became a woman,” she says — and a trio of grandchildren to nurture, she also oversees the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation, which supports a range of causes close to her heart, including the innovative local High Line Park and the DVF Awards, created to honor courageous women worldwide who have battled adversity to effect change.
Von Furstenberg tells me she has a “magic” coin of her father’s on her desk. “He escaped to Switzerland during the war and he had these gold coins in his bag. They do bring good luck,” she assures. Nothing of her mother though, but then the Nahmias spirit is within her; it needs no other materiality. “Today is my mother’s birthday,” von Furstenberg says, smiling hesitantly into the now mellow end-of-day sunlight. “She would be 91.” A rustling sound from behind the lattice partition infiltrates the “Diane”-scented stillness. Now she sighs, saying: “I think I will have to do restorative yoga today.”
