Diane von Furstenberg: Wrap superstar

DIANE von Furstenberg's life reads like a fairytale but her success is no twist of fate.

wrap superstar

COLOURFUL, outsized, disembodied - lips are a recurring symbol in the world of Diane von Furstenberg. Pop art pouts appear in the company's branding executions, turn up on clothing and accessories, and even take comical form in a bright pink settee by Salvador Dali enlivening the designer's sprawling office. But while loose lips are ever-present, Von Furstenberg is no fan of idle chatter.

"So, what are we doing?" she asks pointedly, seated behind her long L-shaped desk. Before I can muster a response, she shifts her focus to her email, as though she were alone in her exuberant lair on this late summer day. After a period of awkward silence, the designer rearranges her posture, lowers her spectacles and admits, "Interviews are the least interesting part of my job." It's an inauspicious start to our meeting but, force field retracted, we proceed with the task at hand: The ABC of DVF.

At 65, Von Furstenberg has been parsing her extraordinary career for more than 40 years so it's understandable she is reluctant to recount it all again.

She first entered the fashion fray in 1970 with a suitcase full of sample garments. Three years later, with the wrap dress, she devised a fluid approach to dressing that resonated with an entire generation of women. By 1976, she made the cover of Newsweek for being "the most marketable female in fashion since Coco Chanel". In 1997, after a respite from the industry, she relaunched her global luxury lifestyle brand. DVF is now available in 70 countries worldwide and has 45 freestanding storesincluding one at Westfield Sydney, which opened in 2010.

This month, Von Furstenberg will make her first visit to Australia in more than 30 years, christening the penthouse suite at Hayman Island resort (for which she designed the interiors) and making the publicity rounds in Sydney.

The trip seems as good as any subject to begin with, an ice-breaker to allay the lingering froideur. What, if anything, does she recall about her first visit to Australia?

"Oh my god, I went there in 1981," she says, animatedly.

"I had this crazy idea of buying land and I went alone.

I remember driving a rental car on Highway 1 between Sydney and Brisbane, and feeling extremely free and independent. All I had was my American Express card in my back pocket. But, it turns out, I had fallen in love with a man in Bali, so I ended up stopping and talking to him on the phone more than anything. I never bought land."

The Australian reverie does the trick: Von Furstenberg's initial hesitation melts and, speaking in her purring continental accent, she begins to exhibit the candour, warmth and intelligence that make her such a compelling character. The owner of fashion's most famous lips is thankfully eager to share her thoughts.

Over the decades, the Belgian-born designer has seen her business soar, decline and rise again triumphantly, and she clearly relishes her phoenix-like stature. The flourishing empire now spans accessories, fragrance and home furnishings. Her wrap dress, which hangs in the Smithsonian and is also in the Costume Institute collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, remains a sought-after item for young women, with updated versions in lightweight fabrics, tailored silhouettes and modern patterns like snakeskin. "I've created a dress that has been truly timeless," she says. "That's never happened to a dress before." Today, Von Furstenberg wears a silk confection of steel grey and lime green, a chunky gold bracelet, a large watch, as well as numerous rings. At one point, she rests her legs on the desk, revealing a pair of zebra-printed flat sandals. She has the elastic body and feline grace of one who has practised yoga for many years.

As she converses, she frequently runs her hands through her lustrous tangle of hair. "Now I am very inspired," she continues, "because I've realised I've created something that can last after me and I want to give it one last push."

Arranged behind her are a trove of family photos. These days her two children, Alexander, 42, and Tatiana, 41, reside in Los Angeles with their respective broods, but she talks to them several times a day. "We're unusually close," she says.

Both of them sit on the board of directors of the privately held fashion company and Alexander is actively involved with the business. Recently, one of her granddaughters asked Von Furstenberg what she treasures most about her job. "I told her: 'I like to have ideas or dreams and make them happen.' I'm at the stage in my life where I have the maturity and connections to do so." The first email she sends each day is dedicated to making an introduction for someone who could prosper from it. As president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America since 2006, she has mentored neophyte designers and campaigned on behalf of the industry on subjects from under-age models to piracy. "I think philanthropy is not just about money but about encouraging people," she says.

That said, she is no stranger to making sizeable charitable donations. She sits on the board of Vital Voices, an organisation that supports female leaders and entrepreneurs around the world. In 2010, she established the DVF Awards to provide grants to some of those women. And, as a longtime resident of New York's Meatpacking District, she was at the forefront of the campaign to save the historic High Line railway. The one-time train line is now a spectacular public park elevated above the streets on Manhattan's West Side.

Eleven years ago, Von Furstenberg married her longtime intimate, Barry Diller, the media mogul behind IAC, an internet company with more than 50 brands. Together they are a philanthropic powerhouse. Through the Diller-Von Furstenberg Family Foundation, they have donated $US35 million to the preservation of the High Line. "I'm the godmother of the area," she says, smiling.

The gleaming DVF offices, which take shape in two former meat warehouses, are the jewel in the crown of the neighbourhood. On the ground floor of the six-storey, light-filled building is the designer's flagship store, while floating above that is a showroom, event space and numerous workstations. The foyer is decked out with portraits of Von Furstenberg by Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente, among other artists, yet perhaps its most arresting feature is a sweeping concrete stairwell lined with steel cables and 3000 Swarovski crystals. It brings to mind a stairway to fashion heaven. Atop the building, enclosed in a faceted glass sphere, is a penthouse apartment where Von Furstenberg sleeps most nights.

As you might expect, given her legendary penchant for prints, her fifth-floor office is a riot of colour, texture and sex appeal, with grey leopard carpeting, zebra-print chairs and eclectic bibelot, like crystals and evil-eye baubles. A sizeable portrait of Von Furstenberg by Chinese artist Zhang Huan adorns one wall. Her face has been dramatically rendered in ashes but Huan doesn't capture her aquiline nose. "I look like Michael Jackson," she says, shrugging her shoulders.

But back to fashion. "When I first started I didn't know what I wanted to do but I knew the kind of woman I wanted to be," Von Furstenberg says, "and I became that woman through fashion. Through fashion I also allow other women to be the woman they want to be. That's my mission in life." She surrounds herself with a mostly female staff though in the past she has chosen male design directors for her ready-to-wear collection; she likes the creative tension it creates. For eight years, the designer worked with Nathan Jenden; in 2010 he was succeeded by Yvan Mispelaere, previously at Gucci, who stayed with the brand for three years. When he left last month, Von Furstenburg commended his "enormous value", adding that he had put together "a highly skilled design team".

Mispelaere's success in that area means he will not be replaced; Von Furstenburg will now take his reins.

Given the youth of her team, is she ever baffled by generational ideas? She shakes her mane. "If anything, they're squarer than I am," she says. As evidence of her au courant-ness, she points to her Twitter account, which has close to half a million followers. On it she dispenses nuggets of wisdom like "Resentment is toxic, forget"; "Integrity is a huge asset, protect it"; and "When you totally accept who you are, you live a fuller life." At what stage did she fully acknowledge who she is? "It's an ongoing process but I started young," she says.

Von Furstenberg has a steeliness that she credits to being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. In the spring of 1944, Lily Nahmias, her Greek-born, Jewish mother, was arrested in Brussels and transported between Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, for 14 months.

Released in late 1945, Nahmias weighed 22kg and was instructed by a doctor that she should not attempt to get pregnant. The following year, on New Year's Eve 1946, Diane Halfin was born. Her birth was a miracle of sorts, which informs the designer's survival instincts. "I owe her everything," Von Furstenberg says of her galvanising mother, who died 12 years ago. "She never wanted to be a victim. She never allowed me to be afraid, she always pushed me." Meanwhile, her Russian-born father, Leon Halfin, a distributor of electronic tubing, gave her unconditional love, which would make future relationships with men relatively easy. "I wasn't needy. When you're not needy, you get lucky. It's not very attractive to be needy."

As a child, she was the girl with frizzy black hair in a sea of poker-straight blondes. Aged 12, she was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, then to England at 15.

She studied Spanish at Madrid University in 1965, and dreamed of a life of travel and independence, in control of both her career and her romantic liaisons. As her friend Andre Leon Talley writes in The Wrap, an illustrated monograph of her eventful life, "The future princess of wrap took off like a cheetah-one of her favourite printsat high speed." Her life changed significantly when she encountered Prince Eduard Egon von und zu Furstenberg, a Swiss-born German aristocrat, during a holiday at Gstaad. They married in July 1969-she was pregnant with their son Alexander-and settled in New York.

Before embarking on her new life, Von Furstenberg began to design a dress line with the help of an Italian manufacturer. She started with simple shirtdresses that cinched at the waist and showed them in 1970 to Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, who encouraged her to mount a presentation for buyers. In 1973, when she launched the jersey wrap dress, it became the daytime uniform of working women, housewives and luminaries including Candice Bergen, Mary Tyler Moore and Gloria Steinem. Considered flattering to all sizes and shapes, it could be tossed into a washing machine and slipped in and out of in a breeze. It no doubt helped that Von Furstenberg was a tireless promoter of her line. She toured the country for department store appearances and helped women tie their dresses in change rooms. She appeared in her own advertising campaigns and became inextricably linked to her brand.

As the wrap dress thrived, Von Furstenberg's marriage unravelled. The couple's jet-set style and status made them society column regulars. In 1973, a scandalous New York magazine story questioned their unconventional relationship under the headline, "The Couple That Has Everything. Is Everything Enough?" The pair separated the same year.

Newly single, Von Furstenberg joined the Studio 54 set, with friends including Andy Warhol, Halston and Bianca Jagger. "It was the best pick-up place in the world," she writes in her 1998 book, Diane: A Signature Life.

At the club she often wore cowboy boots and carried a switchblade, not that she ever used it. This was the period she describes as "Diane, the Huntress", with Ryan O'Neal and Richard Gere among her conquests.

By the end of the'70s, Von Furstenberg had licensed her name to a dizzying array of merchandise and the market for her wares became oversaturated. She turned her attention instead to cosmetics and home furnishings, finding success in both arenas, and to matters of the heart.

"I love love," she concedes in her autobiography. "I realise now that my relationships with men may seem very strange to others." In 1980, she met Paulo Fernandes, a Brazilian art dealer in Bali, who inspired a fragrance, Volcan d'Amour, and who would be on her mind in Australia. Four years later, she relocated to Paris to be with novelist Alain Elkann.

Here she founded Salvy, a French-language publishing house. In 1989, she moved back to New York and attempted to pick up the pieces of her fashion business.

Once you left New York, I ask Von Furstenberg, did you consider your career in fashion as being ... "Over?"

she interjects. "Yes, I did. When I came back here it was one of the hardest times of my life because I realised what I had created was gone, and that the brand was so much a part of my identity. I got cancer on the tongue and I felt it was linked because I couldn't express myself."

Chemotherapy helped with the cancer and the designer slowly began to build her business again. The catalyst for her transformation from a "has-been to a pioneer", as she says, was Silk Assets, a line sold exclusively on the homeshopping network QVC. Von Furstenberg was incredibly adept at selling clothes on television at a time when few designers had conceived of such a thing.

No matter what travails she has endured, the one constant in her life has been Diller. They met at a party in 1975: she was 28, he was the 32-year-old chairman of Paramount Pictures. "We fell madly in love, it was very passionate," Von Furstenburg says now. "It was very unexpected. He was a young tycoon and I was a young tycooness." But, after five years, she walked away and into the arms of another man. "I did," she says, regretfully.

"I was ... everybody was ... we were very free."

However, they stayed friends, holidayed together, and Diller became a father figure to her children. "We somehow always knew," she says, "because he loved me like my father, unconditionally." They married in 2001 and Diller gave her 26 diamond wedding bands for all the years they had known each other. He is evidently obsessed with numbers, social occasions and jewellery. For her 29th birthday, he gave her 29 diamonds in a Band-Aid box. For her 49th birthday, 49 diamonds.

Nowadays, they lead a life of chic power coupledom, sailing around the globe on Eos, Diller's 305ft yacht, several times a year. He resides at an apartment in the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side, and the pair spends weekends together, either at her country house in Connecticut or at his Beverly Hills estate. Von Furstenberg also likes to escape to her apartment in Paris and hike in far-flung places such as Nepal and Bhutan with French shoe designer Christian Louboutin. When the latter sued Yves Saint Laurent earlier this year in a tussle over red soles, she sat devotedly next to her friend in court. In New York, she attends a flurry of events and meetings by day and enjoys her solitude by night. "I do like to be alone," she says. She's penning another book, a volume of reflective essays, entitled The Woman I Wanted To Be.

Moments later we have climbed a set of stairs and are inspecting the designer's master suite. Her majestic bed is surrounded by a bamboo pavilion with linen drapesit's somehow fitting that Von Furstenberg sleeps in what resembles an enormous wrap dress. A curved wall separating the bedroom from the bath area, with its freestanding teak tub, has been painted with a clouded sky. Striking table lamps, poetic statues, Balinese antiques and a slew of books decorate the space. She flings open a glass door to her expansive terrace planted with natural grasses and we gaze at breathtaking views of the Hudson River and at tourists strolling along the High Line. I tell her she has accomplished so much, but she corrects me.

"Not just accomplished. I've lived, discovered, travelled, moved. I should be twice my age."

It's true that the arc of her life reads like an improbable fashion fairytale and one that British writer Camilla Morton will be exploring in her next illustrated book, The Tale of the Empress's New Clothes. The subject of age leads to a discussion of cosmetic surgery, something the designer has consistently refused. "The truth is I'm happy I didn't," she says. "Sometimes I see women looking at me, thinking 'Why didn't she do it?' But at least I am me, I have my bones; yes, you have wrinkles and you droop, but I don't know..." She trails off. "Recently I was in Paris and I had a bouquet of roses in my apartment. A week later, they were fading, some of the petals turned brown. And I stared at those flowers and I thought, 'They're still beautiful.' They're different but there's still character. Every wrinkle you have is a souvenir, your face is a map of your life."

Back downstairs, Von Furstenberg dials a number and requests a copy of her autobiography, lickety-split. Earlier she was little distraught that I hadn't read it before our meeting but the truth was I couldn't locate a copy in time.

"I'm going to give you a book," she says, playfully. "You passed the test." When an assistant delivers it, she scribbles a note on the title pages. When I stand up to leave, she turns back to her computer screen, repositions her glasses and announces, "Thank you. That was not so ... " As she searches for the right word, I stop dead in my tracks at the door. "Painful." Later I check the inscription in the book.

It reads: "It was lovely to meet you. More like this. Go for it and enjoy. Diane." She punctuates the message not with a set of cartoon lips but with a heart.