| Diane shocked even herself when she announced on the dais, "Most of you wear my dresses, but what you don't know is that 18 months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz." |
Inside the Diane Von Furstenberg Studio in Greenwich Village's industrial enclave are hints of the complex psyche of the woman whose signature name has influenced the fashion industry for over 30 years. All over the cavernous ground floor of the 19th-century carriage house are signs of Diane the designer, the author, thse mother and the cultural icon whose wrap dresses liberated and fascinated a generation of women in the 1970s and which continue to do so today as part of her current line, DIANE.
Near the reception area are plush sectional couches with Von Furstenberg's home furnishing books scattered across low coffee tables. A small decorative pool is lined with Moroccan tiles, and a tree snakes up the spiral staircase that leads to the second floor design studio. One wall boasts the famous Andy Warhol portrait of a glamorous 70s-era Diane. At the end of the room are racks of her fall, pre-spring and spring clothing lines, which her 25-member staff helps create. Another wall displays black and white family portraits of Diane, her ex-husband, Egon, her children, Tatiana, 27, and Alexandre, 28, and her daughter-in-law, Alexandra, who's also the creative director of the studio. It makes sense that the woman who claims she's a study in contradictions would have a decidedly multidimensional entree to her business and personal haven.
"Everything is a contradiction," Diane admits as she reclines on a cushioned lounge chair in the opulent living room of her third floor apartment above the studio. The 51-year-old designer is breathtakingly pretty, with high cheekbones and streamlined dark features. Her figure is trim and elegant in a leopard print DIANE wrap dress, still the perfect model for her clothes. "The fact that I love home so much and love to be on the road. The fact that I love my family so much and am so attached and yet I love to fly off. It's the way I like life -- you know when you eat too much sweet, you need a little piece of cheese.
"But the one thing that has been throughout my life and that I see more and more is, for me, the exhilarating feeling of freedom."
Freedom and the innate need to take risks. In speaking with Von Furstenberg at length, this motif repeats itself over and over. It's what she thrives on. She took a risk in writing her memoir Diane: A Signature Life (Simon & Schuster), a scary experience for a woman who's very private about her innermost thoughts, as she admits. But when it was done, and she looked at the book that contained her existence, she knew that overcoming her fear was worth it. It was an opportunity for people to get to know her, skeletons and all.
Her return to retail in 1997 after a several year absence was more well-received than she had hoped. The DIANE fall line received raves from The New York Times, which declared that "the fall collection has taken her signature wrap dresses to the next stage." From Man Ray and Dali-inspired designs to Romantic pastels and flowers and free- flowing Moroccan and Turkish prints, DIANE has once again made Diane Von Furstenberg a fashion tour de force.
It is her destiny to be a survivor, Diane says. As she writes in her memoir, her birth on New Year's Eve, 1947 in Brussels, Belgium, was nothing short of miraculous. "The Holocaust has shaped my character from inception. My birth was a miracle. Had my mother not been pregnant with me, she might not have recovered from her ordeal as determinedly as she did or even survived at all."
Lily Nahmias, Diane's mother, had spent 14 months being shipped to concentration camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbruck and finallyNeustadt-Glewe, where she was ultimately freed in 1945 by Russian liberators. At the time, she weighed a skeletal 45 pounds. Six months later, she married Leon Halfin, a major electronics distributor, who had spent the war in Switzerland. Within a year and a half, against her doctor's advice due to her weakened physical state, she became pregnant and gave birth to Diane.
Growing up in cosmopolitan Brussels, Diane says she never felt like a kid. "I didn't like the condition of being a child," she recalls in her lilting Belgian accent. "I didn't like dolls, I didn't like children's stories. I wanted to be a grown-up always." Though she acknowledged her Jewish heritage, it didn't play a very big part in the Halfin household, which Diane attributes to the fresh scars of her mother's Holocaust ordeal. "The families of my parents, they would practice, but we just didn't," she explains. "I think it may be a little bit because I was born after the war." The vestiges of her Jewish faith are the Kaddish prayer and fasting on Yom Kippur.
But her mother's experience in the Holocaust strongly influenced her identity. A powerful passage in A Signature Life tells the harrowing story of her mother's arrival at her first concentration camp. She had bonded with an older woman on the train heading for the sinister destination and when they reached the camp and stood on line for the guards to decide their fate, Lily quickly rushed over to the line to which her older companion was sent. When a guard spotted the 21-year-old girl, he hit her with a baton and threw her into a formation to the right. What she didn't realize through her tears was that the left line was being sent to the gas chamber: her life had been spared.
Commenting on the story, Diane explains, "I don't think there is a bigger lesson than that: that you never know. What you think is bad may be the best. And that has been absolutely the way I am. Whatever happens, somehow I always rearrange it and maybe I don't even remember whether I did it by design or by coincidence." Even in her bleakest moments, she's been able to transcend her situation and reinvent herself.
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Diane Von Furstenberg
