It was perhaps the last place you’d expect to find a woman who’d spent most of the previous eight years imprisoned in a terrorist camp in the jungles of Colombia. But Betancourt’s presence signaled Diane’s steadfastness in the midst of fashion’s frivolity—her commitment to her feminist and political beliefs. Any top designer can attract a Madonna or a Rihanna. It takes a special sort of fashion star to get a Betancourt.
The photographers, though, were ignoring the heroic redeemed captive as they scurried around in search of a real celebrity. When one presented herself in the form of Sarah Jessica Parker, their flashbulbs exploded. Many of the more than one thousand fashionistas who’d gathered under the big white tent—as much to pay homage to Diane as to eyeball her new collection—joined the flash mob, their cell phones held aloft in a collective electronic salute.
In the next moments, scores of photographs of Parker streamed out over the Internet, all glittering eyes and tumbling blond curls in a pink flowered froth of a dress. In some pictures, a swath of the front row could be glimpsed with Betancourt at the edge, a quiet presence as irrelevant to the fashion circus as last year’s hot handbag.
Later, at a party in her studio, Diane sat at a banquette deep in conversation—in French—with her Columbian BFF. That Betancourt was alive at all seemed a miracle. That Diane endures is also a marvel. Against all odds, she’s survived Fashion.
WHAT MORE COULD DIANE WANT? At sixty-eight, it would seem she has everything—fame, fortune, houses, jewelry, cars, an airplane, a yacht, children, grandchildren, an adoring husband, a thriving business. And yet. “She wants to be as big as Chanel,” says her son, Alex. That is, as big as a billion-and-a-half-dollar-a-year company that’s lasted decades after the death of its founder. Chanel is what’s known in business parlance as a “brand with soul,” a phrase coined by ad consultant Laurence Knight to refer to brands that transcend their products and stand for shared values with a community of consumers. DVF has a way to go. “My mom’s brand as an icon is great. She’s like a little mini-god,” says Alex. “But the company’s brand is poor to fair.”
Alex believes his mother has been involved in too many projects that are “off brand.” In recent years she’s designed clothes for Gap Kids and housewares and linens for Bloomingdale’s, projects that did nothing to further all-important “brand awareness” because they had nothing to do with what DVF stands for, which is “the hot, independent, on-the-go woman,” says Alex.
He blames the misguided ventures on a lack of focus at DVF, which Diane also has acknowledged. “She’s had a bunch of women in this crazy office running around with no real strategy or any real structure or any real game plan,” says Alex.
He also doubts that his mother is well served by the squishy, New Age sensibility of some of her advertising. The qualities that have made Diane beloved by her friends and family and in the fashion industry—her generosity, integrity, and warmth—are reflected in her working motto, “Love is life is love is life.” She’s used the slogan in ad campaigns, and it’s emblazoned on some of her accessories, including an iPhone case. “What the fuck does that even mean?” asks Alex. “Is that glamorous?”
But Diane stands by the slogan. “I believe in the circle of love. All the generosity and love you put out into the world over the decades comes back to you. I’m benefiting now from being nice my whole life,” she says.
Alex and Tatiana have no interest in taking over DVF after their mother is gone. Tatiana, forty-three, works as a filmmaker. She says she “hates fashion” and could never function in its “volatile hierarchy. Oh, my God, how stressful. I’d die because you’re either in or you’re yesterday’s news.” Tanner Hall, Tatiana’s 2009 feature film debut, is the story of four girls coming of age in a New England boarding school and stars Rooney Mara of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fame. Tatiana cowrote and codirected the film with her girlhood friend Francesca Gregorini, daughter of Barbara Bach, once a Bond Girl and the wife of Ringo Starr. More than twenty years ago Gregorini, who is a lesbian, and Tatiana were romantically involved. That ended, and they remain friends. “I’ve been in love with both genders,” says Tatiana. “I think my tribe is the LGBT tribe, not necessarily because of my sexual orientation but because of the way I was raised.”
Currently single, Tatiana lives with her teenage daughter in a hillside house in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles that’s decorated in a bohemian mix of art and comfortable furniture.
At forty-four Alex lives in LA with his fiancée, twenty-nine-year-old Ali Kay, the mother of his baby son, Leon. The couple have been together for more than a decade, since meeting at Mynt Lounge, a nightclub in Miami, when Ali was still in high school and Alex was married to Alexandra. Breaking up with his wife, he says, “was super hard. We were soul mates. We’d been together since we were fourteen. We had a perfect life, but I fell in love with someone else.” The perfect life included a townhouse on the Upper East Side and two children, Talita and Tassilo, born in 2001. (Alexandra left DVF when she and Alex broke up, but she and Diane remain close.) “I’ve had flings all my life. I’m my parents’ child,” Alex says. Most of his affairs were casual and fleeting, but the one with Ali became an obsession that ignited in Alex violent storms of jealousy.
One night in 2003, as he returned home to the Trump International on Central Park West, where he’d moved after separating from Alexandra, he saw Ali getting into the car of another man. “I really lost it,” admits Alex. “I proceeded to hit my car into his, dragged him out, and beat him up. I broke my knuckle on his head.” Meanwhile, his victim’s car rolled down Central Park West and crashed into a police sedan. The officer inside arrested Alex, who was charged with felony assault. Alex says he gave the victim enough money to buy a nightclub and the assault charge was dropped.
Afterward, Alex performed a court-ordered stint of community service and attended anger-management classes, which did not prevent him six years later from engaging in another scandalous (though less violent) confrontation with one of Ali’s admirers.
In the summer of 2009, after Alex and Ali had moved to Malibu, Ali met one of their neighbors, the former professional basketball player Reggie Miller. She embarked on a text-messaging flirtation with the onetime Indiana Pacers star. Her messages included pictures of herself in a bikini and lounging in bed. Alex found out and, as the New York Post reported, lobbed a flurry of threats at Miller, who had Alex slapped with a restraining order. Not to be deterred, Alex hired a plane that buzzed the Malibu beach trailing a banner reading REGGIE MILLER STOP PURSUING MARRIED WOMEN. Though Ali denied that she’d slept with Miller, Alex insisted she take a polygraph test. “She passed,” he says, grinning.
The incident did not stop Diane from using Ali as the face of the DVF brand in her fall/winter 2010 ad campaign. If she was appalled by Alex’s behavior, she never admitted it publicly. “My son was jealous. [Ali] was naïve. The truth is that, at the end, they’re madly in love with each other. It made them realize how much they care for each other,” Diane told Page Six Magazine.
Diane is unfailingly loyal to family—and those she considers family. “I remember a holiday at Cloudwalk where all her ex-husbands and boyfriends were there: Egon, Jas Gawronski, Barry, Alain Elkann, and even Paulo,” says Bob Colacello.
Of all Diane’s exes, Egon had a special place in her affections as the father of her children “and the first one to believe in me,” Diane says. She and her children were with Egon in Rome when he died at fifty-seven on June 11, 2004. Tatiana says her father had been suffering from cirrhosis of the liver brought on by an infection of the virus hepatitis C. (She denied rumors that he died of complications of AIDS.)
Egon had stayed married to his second wife, Lynn Marshall, though they lived separate lives. Diane arranged Egon’s funeral service in Rome. “He’d had a lot of shame and denial. He didn’t want to accept being gay,” says Tatiana. “But by the end of his life he’d come out as a gay man. He very much claimed it. He was an advocate (for gay rig
hts) in Rome,” where he’d lived since the mid-eighties, and where he headed an eponymous fashion house that produced women’s clothes reflecting a sexy, European sensibility—jewel colors, fitted silhouettes, plunging necklines. He sometimes presented his collections at outdoor shows, using Rome’s Spanish Steps as a runway. Once, during a finale, he sent out a transgender bride.
Even Egon’s mother, Clara, had come to accept his lifestyle, says Tatiana. She didn’t judge her son or her bisexual granddaughter. “When I was with Francesca and I told my grandmother I’d been shopping, she’d say, ‘Did you buy pants or a skirt?’” recalls Tatiana.
Toward the end of his life, Egon took his Brazilian boyfriend on a cruise with his friends Cedric Lopez-Huici and Marc Landeau. “We all knew Egon was dying. Sometimes he didn’t come to dinner,” says Landeau, who’d been in Asia with Egon in 1969 when the telegram arrived from Diane saying she was pregnant with their child. Illness, though, did not rob Egon of his signature charm. Everyone he met on the ship “was absolutely enamored of him,” says Lopez-Huici. “He always had a nice word for everyone, from the lady who made the bed in the morning to the person who carried the suitcase to the taxi.”
During the years Egon lived in Europe, Diane became deeply rooted in New York. In a way, Diane is New York, so closely identified is she with the city’s glamour and grit, its striving and sophistication. Still, she says she didn’t think seriously about becoming an American citizen until meeting Bill Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in 1992 and attending his inaugural the following year. For the first time she felt a kinship with an American president. “I liked the fact that he had been a Rhodes Scholar, that Gabriel García Márquez is his favorite novelist, that he always appears on the good side of things, and that we are the same age,” she wrote in her first memoir. She collected all the necessary documents for citizenship but was so intimidated by the requirement to list every trip she’d taken out of the United States in the previous twenty years that she gave up. It took her nearly a decade—and the incentive of tax benefits that came with citizenship after her marriage to Diller—to get around to tackling the task again. In July 2002 she finally became a US citizen.
THOUGH DIANE COMPLAINS FROM TIME to time that she’s tired and feels old, she shows few signs of slowing down. She travels so much, it’s hard to keep track of her movements—in Australia one month, Istanbul the next, then India and China. “I don’t like to stay away from China for more than six months at a time,” she says.
No sooner had she returned from trips to Greece and Sun Valley in the summer of 2014 than she was off to a Google camp in Sicily where she sat on a panel about fashion with Tory Burch, whose brand generated more than one billion dollars in sales last year. “She’ll talk about how to do it, and I’ll talk about how not to do it,” Diane said with a rueful smile on the eve of her departure.
Diane stopped skiing after she broke her shoulder on the slopes of Aspen in 2013. Two years earlier she’d suffered facial injuries when a skier rammed into her with his camera. She still enjoys vigorous hikes on her property at Cloudwalk—and sometimes takes an employee along to discuss serious business. She says she’s proud of her lines and wrinkles—they’re evidence of the rich life she’s lived, and though tempted at times, she has not erased them with a face-lift.
In 2010 the Connecticut Department of Health approved Diane’s application to create a cemetery at Cloudwalk for up to twenty plots. The space she’s set aside to spend eternity sits on a secluded hill at the end of the woods behind her house. She built a stone wall that encloses the space but leaves open the downward-sloping side, so in death, as in life, Diane and her loved ones can enjoy the view of the lyrical fields and watch the sun set behind the trees. “I don’t want to be cremated. I want my body to disintegrate into the earth. It’s the natural thing,” she says.
In 2006, the year she took over as president of the CFDA, Diane moved her New York home and business to a new location in the Meatpacking District, in three Victorian buildings on West Fourteenth Street that she merged into a six-story, thirty-five-thousand-square-foot home, office, studio, and boutique. Architects from the Manhattan firm of Work Architecture Company closed the gap between the two main structures with an airy, eighty-foot staircase. During the day, heliostat mirrors flood sunlight down from the glass-faceted structure on the roof—viewed from above, it looks like a giant diamond. The mirrors catch the light and blaze it up through waterfalls of Swarovski crystals, flooding the staircase and adjacent spaces in a sparkly glow.
The penthouse, or “treehouse,” as Diane likes to call it, is her private space. She works and entertains friends and associates on the floor below among her beloved leopard-print carpets, books, photographs, and paintings, including portraits of herself by Andy Warhol, Francesco Clemente, and the Chinese artist Zhang Huan. A pink, lip-shaped sofa by Salvador Dalí has pride of place against a pink wall.
From her terrace, Diane looks out on the High Line, a lush green ribbon that unfurls high above the gritty pavement of Manhattan for twenty-two blocks from Gansevoort Street to Thirty-Fourth Street. Her vision helped create it. She was an early supporter of turning the derelict elevated railway into a public park, and she and Diller, through their family foundation, have funded $35 million of the $170 million cost of the project.
In November 2014 the couple announced that their foundation would also fund a substantial portion of a proposed $150 million-plus open-air performing arts center on the ramshackle wharf at the end of Fourteenth Street, near Diane’s headquarters.
Like her fashion, those headquarters reflect Diane’s personality, her boldness, openness, and strength. “What defines me is the relationship I have with myself. I’m completely self-reliant,” she says.
Diane is sitting behind her immensely long desk dressed in a black leather jacket and black denim pants printed in her classic chain-link pattern. She’s spent the afternoon visiting the ateliers of young designers. Nurturing the next generation of talent is a key part of her job as CDFA president. She enjoys this enormously, but it’s been a jam-packed week preparing for the debuts of her E! reality show and a new memoir, The Woman I Wanted to Be, and she’s exhausted. An assistant brings her a small bottle of Kors energy drink. She downs it in two gulps and regards my outfit—a black and white shirtdress and a black wrap sweater. She nods approvingly, impressed that I’d had the style chops to pair that particular dress with that particular sweater. A moment later, though, she tempers the compliment. “Actually, that’s the way we showed it on the runway.”
My sweater was reminiscent of the wrap top Diane had done in the seventies, the one that had led directly to the wrap dress. “You know, [my design team] didn’t want to do that sweater. I had to insist,” she said.
It turned out to be a big hit, just like the “Amelia,” a wrap dress with a jersey bodice and flared skirt that Diane also had to insist be done her way. The design team wanted to give it a blouson top. “A blouson on a wrap!” she exclaims in disbelief.
Such incidents suggest it might be unwise for her to relinquish design responsibility to a successor, as she’s hinted to the press she might do. (The most likely candidate is Michael Herz, her artistic director.) No one has the pulse of DVF like, well, DVF.
While we talk, the sky beyond the tall windows in Diane’s office turns from pink to deep blue. It’s time to go. “Don’t let her look at her phone while she’s driving,” says Ellen Gross, Diane’s assistant, as we step into the elevator.
Soon we are floating through the streets of Chelsea in Diane’s beautiful car—a rich, leaf-green Bentley. A few weeks earlier Diane got into a fender bender while on her phone, and now she sets it on the console between us and tries not to look at it. We pass the new Whitney Museum of American Art and the Diller-von Furstenberg Building, which serves as High Line headquarters, then the offices of IAC, Diller’s company, a ten-story, one hundred-million-dollar structure that resembles a clipper ship with undulating sails of c
urved glass.
The Kors energy booster kicks in, and Diane grows hungry. Violating Ellen’s dictate, she picks up the phone and calls her cook to order dinner. “Some soup would be nice,” she says as she turns onto the highway.
Now Diane is speeding north toward Cloudwalk, passing telephone poles and suburban lights, then silent country trees black against the navy sky, leaving behind her the fittings and the sample rooms, the mood boards and the photo shoots, the loud, urgent call of New York Fashion.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Diane von Furstenberg for not slamming the door in my face—metaphorically, that is—when I suggested to her I write this book. At first, Diane was understandably ambivalent about my project. Given her fame and her importance to fashion and the social history of New York, however, she knew a DVF biography was inevitable. Whatever qualms she might have had about what I would write seemed outweighed by her sense that I was the right person for the job. I’ve tried to honor that trust, and the New York fashion we both love, by writing a fair and balanced, yet also vivid and lively, portrait.
Diane has been extraordinarily generous with her time, spending hours talking to me on the phone and at her homes in New York and Connecticut. She also shared with me pictures, letters, and excerpts from her diaries, and introduced me to scores of her family and friends.
I’d like to thank everyone quoted in the book who graciously welcomed me into their homes and offices and shared their stories with me; those who talked to me over the phone, in many cases in multiple, lengthy conversations; and those who patiently answered questions in emails. I could not have written this book without you.
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