Diane von Furstenberg learned to harness power of voice
As the fashion designer embraces being 70, she prepares for ‘third act’ and reflects on a full life
Camera crews and caterers swoosh past the hostess in a glittering silver gown as another team rips the plastic cover off the pink carpet. It is the breathholding hour before the fourth Suzanne Rogers Presents charity fundraiser, a luncheon held Thursday at her mother-in-law Loretta Rogers’ capacious Forest Hill mansion.
Amid the bustle, the guest of honour, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, strides into the drawing room for a portrait and chat, without handlers and with a stunning blue stole.
She extends a heavily beringed hand with regal flair then takes things back down to Earth, finding the coffee pot for herself. “I’m starving,” she tells me, grabbing the banana bread from the spread so often put out for interviews and so seldom touched by fashion people and plonking it into her coffee.
Simultaneously grand and relatable is von Furstenberg’s brand: this is the princess who sold her signature wrap dresses and their sexy, empowering vibe to the masses in the ’70s (and then again in a remarkable ’90s comeback).
Still as iconic a beauty as the Andy Warhol images of her or the Studio 54 shots back in the day, von Furstenberg’s vitality is like a jolt of electricity, you can almost see it shimmering in the air around her. As the honouree of the luncheon, she is here to do a Q and A conducted by her old pal, larger-than-life front-row fixture André Leon Talley, a longtime contributor to Vogue.
The luncheon, for 120 of the city’s top swells, is a more intimate format for Suzanne Rogers Presents.
The previous events, held every few years, featured fashion shows by Zac Posen, Marchesa and the late Oscar de la Renta.
To date, close to $2.5 million has been raised for children’s charities, Rogers’ philanthropic focus, along with her Canadian fashion initiatives.
The glitzy event is being held in a massive tent decorated with Rogers’ signature pink-and-white motif, lit by chandeliers and bedecked by a flotilla of flowers. Attendees include boldface names such as event chair Sylvia Mantella, a bunch of Bitoves, Teresa De Gasperis, Lisa Eaton, Vanessa Mulroney, Kimberley Newport-Mimran, David Dixon as well as David and Kate Daniels, among Toronto’s social and business elites filling the $25,000-plus tables.
Von Furstenberg’s own charity initiative, the DVF Awards, is now in its eighth year. Held at the United Nations in New York, the event puts its founder’s feminist chops into action, “celebrating, honouring and exposing women who have had the strength to fight, the power to survive and the leadership to inspire.”
Most of her recipients are unknown and do unheralded good work all over the world.
“I always said when you are successful at any level, you can pay your bills. And you have a voice,” she tells me. “So, I give my voice to these people who give voice to other people and it’s a wonderful chain of love.”
Often stereotyped as a creature of high society — raised in wealth in Belgium, then married to a German aristocrat, Prince Egon von Furstenberg — behind the scenes, she was shaped by dramatic adversity. Her parents, both Jewish, had escaped the Nazis separately until1944, when her resistance-fighter mother was captured and sent to Auschwitz.
Her parents reunited after the war and von Furstenberg was born in 1946, a miracle baby to a mother who had weighed just 59 pounds when the camps were liberated the year before. Von Furstenberg grew up with wealth, and the images she draws of her elegant parents are set against sleek U.S. convertibles and sable coats. But it was sable covering an iron will. As she relates often in her 2014 memoir The Woman I Wanted to Be, her mother instilled in her the mantra: “Fear is not an option.”
Always armed with a quip, von Furstenberg wrote in her earlier memoir, 1998’s Diane: A Signature Life, that most fairy tales end with the girl marrying the prince, but that is where her story began. The marriage yielded her children Prince Alexander and Princess Tatiana.
She kept the name, divorced the prince and moved on to the next phase of her life, a pattern of matterof-fact resilience with which she has plowed through several setbacks. She wanted to earn her own money and make her own choices. So, she arrived in the U.S. with a suitcase of samples and pluck: by 1976, a million wrap dresses had been sold and she had landed on the cover of Newsweek. She has documented her ups and downs with a frankness ahead of its time.
“I am actually a private person in private life and I don’t confide things in girlfriends. I believe you need to talk to yourself. So, why is it that I have always opened myself so much to people I don’t know? Like, I would always tell things to people I don’t know that I would never tell people in my life.
“As a young woman in my early 20s,” she answers her own question, “I was a young, European, kind-of-good-looking princess selling inexpensive dresses in department stores. I would travel everywhere and began doing interviews,” she says. “Now, you read my book, so you know so much about me, but these people had pre-conceived ideas about who I was. I’d read the articles and that’s not me. So, by being very open, I realized the effect it has and how people react to it and how you can help others — and then, all of a sudden, using my voice is a great thing.”
Von Furstenberg is particularly inspiring on the subject of moving past failures. Her advice?
“Just to acknowledge it. Not to be delusional is the important thing. You have obstacles and it didn’t work. But you just have to, on a daily basis, accept whatever the reality is and see what you can do to improve it, to change it, and very often, something good will come out of that and you won’t even remember that it started with a failure.”
This message is what Rogers hopes her guests will take away. “Diane takes the ups and downs and keeps on going,” she says. “She is like an onion, there are so many layers. Her message is powerful because she has lived her life with such passion.”
In 2001, she married media mogul Barry Diller and today, von Furstenberg is embracing 70. “I prepared for it for a year, because I want to be ready for this third act of my life. I have lived very fully and there isn’t a subject I can’t talk about. I’m from Europe, my mother lived through the Holocaust, I’ve survived cancer, I have children and grandchildren. I’ve lived the American dream. I also failed a few times. I should be150. It is so fun now to use my voice to inspire things and make things happen.”
She pauses to look up at the giant painting of a sailboat on the mantel above the giant fireplace and notices a sculpture beneath. “The sculpture looks like the painting, do you think they know that?” she asks as she coolly plucks a stray piece of pineapple from her white jacket.
Of course, it did not have the nerve to leave a mark.