Unwrapped, eye-poppingly racy secrets of the woman who created sexiest the world’s dress
DiAnE von Furstenberg’s body-hugging wrap dress is an enduring fashion icon. Celebrities from the Duchess of Cambridge to gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna have been seen in her creations.
The designer once known as Her Serene Highness Princess Diane von Furstenberg is now dubbed the ‘Queen Mother of Fashion’, an international philanthropist and business powerhouse estimated to be worth $450 million. in an industry obsessed with novelty, the 68-year-old Diane has managed to stay immensely influential.
Time magazine recently included her in its list of the 100 Most influential People; Forbes has her in its list of the world’s ‘most powerful women’. Proving that she still has great cachet even with the latest wave of fashion figures, clothes designer victoria Beckham, who became a close friend after they met at a los Angeles school attended by the Beckham children and von Furstenberg’s grandchildren, has called her an ‘amazingly inspirational person — not just as a designer but as a woman’.
But there was a time when the ebullient designer was anything but ‘serene’. A tell-all new biography claims that von Furstenberg’s past life was even wilder and more amoral than she admitted in a supposedly candid recent autobiography.
As highly sexed as she was deeply ambitious, she slept with both men and women by the score, reveals respected biographer gioia Diliberto in Diane von Furstenberg: A life unwrapped. von Furstenberg co- operated with the book, giving the author access to her family and friends, and reassuring her that ‘i have no secrets’.
Certainly not any more. Whether it was tolerating group sex on her honeymoon with her aristocratic german husband, or the exhibitionist thrill of exposing her breasts in public, von Furstenberg’s fashion success went hand in hand with sexual excess.
Diane was the daughter of Belgian Jews: her mother was an Auschwitz survivor who gave birth to her just 18 months after being liberated from the nazi death camp. Her father, leon Halfin, ran a successful electronics supplies business, and her mother became a housewife.
GAP-TOOTHED, dark and frizzy-haired in a world of pretty blonde girls, Diane realised very early on she couldn’t rely on her looks, and had to develop other qualities such as charm and sophistication.
At 15, she was sent from the family home in Brussels to a girls’ boarding school, Stroud Court, in Oxfordshire, to improve her English. She lost her virginity in her first year there, to an iranian boy named Sohrab who was studying architecture at Oxford. She also had the first of many lesbian affairs with a school friend named Deanna.
Determined to rebel against her background, she embraced her mother’s advice ‘ not to be afraid or ashamed of sex’. ‘ Diane would sleep with many men — “one thing i don’t regret”, she says — and fall in love with a few of them,’ writes Diliberto. ‘The power of her style would derive from the heat of sex flowing through it.’
in the mid- Sixties, still in her teens, she got a job as a part-time receptionist with an impossibly rich American businessman in geneva, gaining her first entrée into a glamorous life of parties and nightclubs.
She was creating her own style even then, wearing peasant blouses and bell-bottom trousers, a cowboy hat and fingerless gloves with tiny silver bells attached.
A friend remembers her as ‘chubbier than she is now, and she wore this awful white lipstick’.
in lausanne, a close friend from london, the future socialite and British vogue journalist nona gordon Summers introduced her to a handsome young blond man who was to provide the
social advancement and adventure she craved.
Egone Prinzu Furstenberg was a bona fide german prince and, as the nephew of Fiat car boss Gianni Agnelli, extremely rich. He was also bisexual. He and Diane were both 19 and soon became lovers, much to the dismay of his snooty friends who were used to seeing him with aristocratic blondes. One of them recalls being appalled by her ‘theatrical make‑up . . . purple eye‑ shadow, dark nail polish’. Diane certainly matched her future husband with sexual encounters. Moving to the sexual free‑for‑all of Paris in the late Sixties where she was worked as a photographer’s assistant, she was ‘wild’, recalls Miss Gordon Summers. One unforgettable conquest was the film star Omar Sharif. In a crowded field, the actor was ‘the worst lay I ever had’, says von Furstenberg. She was funny and had a knack for making friends with powerful, well‑connected people, but still didn’t have the social cachet she needed to move in the highest circles. Her exuberant — some might say show‑off — behaviour may not have helped. She once went to see Liza Min‑ nelli perform in Paris, leapt in front of her and, says a friend, ‘actually got down on her knees to tell Liza how much she loved her and how wonderful she was’. Diane knew Egon was bisexual and appears to have accepted it with‑out complaint. As a prince, he was expected to produce an heir, and when she became pregnant, they married in 1969 and moved into a cottage on Sardinia’s jet‑set Costa Smerelda. A popular hangout with the likes of Princess Margaret, Elizabeth Taylor and richard Burton, ‘there was a lot of swimming, sunning, drinking, pot‑ smoking, and dabbling in group sex, instigated by Egon’, says her friend, Nona Gordon Summers. Although von Fursten‑ berg claims she never hosted any orgies, Miss Gordon Summers insists they took place, and that she herself was shocked by what she saw. ‘I was so upset, I rushed off to my room,’ she said. ‘I was crying and they were all laughing at me.’
When the couple moved to New York, Diane threw herself into a fashion career, using an initial $30,000 investment to begin designing women’s clothes. She had no training, but exploited her husband’s fashion world contacts, visiting a clothing factory in Tuscany where she learned about the manufacturing process and made her first samples.
In New York, she found an early champion in Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, who declared her designs ‘absolutely smashing’. Initially, there were three basic looks: trousers with tunics, floor‑length dresses, and shirt dresses that tied at the waist.
Setting up a showroom in Manhattan, von Furstenberg used her royal title shamelessly.
She had another lucky break when a Los Angeles boutique took 60 of her dresses. Two were bought by the actresses Ali McGraw and Candice Bergen, who were photographed wear‑ ing them at Hollywood parties.
Her husband ‘led a separate life in the city’s gay bathhouses and backroom bars’. His infidelity not only allowed her own affairs, but was also tolerated by her — some friends insist — because many of Egon’s gay chums were important players in the New York fashion industry.
Some still sniffed at her bourgeois origins and her ‘raging ambition’, but Diane was soon mingling with a New York elite that included designer Oscar de la Renta, Anjelica Huston, Mick Jagger, Diane Ross and Jack Nicholson.
THEvon Furstenbergs soon became New York’s most talked‑about couple, fuelled by her taste for outrageous costumes that left little to the imagi‑ nation. She liked to reveal her breasts in what she wore, and occasionally posed topless for magazines.
Once, wearing a ballgown with two suspender‑like straps that barely covered her breasts, she so distracted a Texas oilman sitting next to her that his furious wife demanded to have a word with her in the ladies’ room.
But nothing embarrassed the princess. As art historian and friend John Richard‑ son put it, her ‘most brilliant invention was herself . . .that’s what she’s all about’.
Like her mother, von Furstenberg was obsessed with astrology, and would only sign business contracts on certain days. In previous lives, she believed, she had been a Brazilian slave girl and a successful general.
Although fashion historians have since questioned whether she actually invented the wrap dress, citing precedents in women’s sportswear, she has received all the credit.
Her first, available in snakeskin and leopard prints, was launched in April 1974, when Von Furstenberg was just 27. It proved an instant hit, and was worn by Republicans and Democrats alike at the 1976 political conventions.
Early celebrity converts included feminist Gloria Steinem. The actress Cybill Shepherd wore one to play a political campaign worker in the 1976 film Taxi Driver.
Diane was also a genius at diversifying through licensing her name. Soon, it was on a dozen products — from a DVF scarf to a DVF watch and sunglasses.
She branched into cosmetics after her then lover, the actor Ryan O’Neal, ridiculed the sea of make‑up pots in her hotel room. Embarrassed, she claimed she had been thinking of buying the company that made them — later realising that wasn’t a bad idea.
In 1976, she was reportedly employing 100 people in a business that was making $133 million a year, selling 25,000 wrap dresses a week.
As her marriage fizzled out, she collected ever more famous lovers, recording each in her diary with ‘our bodies met’. They included actors Warren Beatty and Richard Gere. She slept with Beatty and Ryan O’Neal over the same weekend while staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. She’d had a ‘fantasy’ about sleeping with both stars, she said, and so ‘it just happened’.
At a Manhattan party in 1974, she met husband number two — the billionaire media mogul Barry Diller, though they did not marry until 2001. Diller, who has also faced long‑running claims that he is gay, fell in love with her ‘blindly’ and ‘unconditionally’, says von Furstenberg, who insisted she adored him in return. Sceptics have always assumed their relationship is platonic.
By 1989, Diane’s annual income had slipped to $1million as her brand became passé. Her career reignited through the uncool medium of the home shopping TV channel QVC, on which she would appear to sell her new clothing ranges.
By the mid‑Nineties, her flag was flying high again, in some part thanks to many millions invested by Diller. Today, she even stars in a fashion reality TV show called House Of DVF, in which eight young women compete for a job as ‘brand ambassador’ in her company.
She defeated cancer in the Nineties, and at 68 shows little sign of slowing down in her quest for fashion greatness. ‘She wants to be as big as Chanel,’ said her son, Alex.
One gets the impression that even that won’t be enough for this truly irrepressible woman.
DIANE von Furstenberg: A Life Unwrapped by Gioia Diliberto. Published by Dey Street Books, at £18.62.