"Diane" is the frank and compelling story of an extraordinary woman
and her adventures in fashion, business, and life. "Most fairy
tales end with the girl marrying the prince. That's where mine
began," says Diane Von Furstenberg.
She didn't have to work, but she did. She lived the American
Dream before she was thirty, building a multimillion-dollar fashion
empire while raising two children and living life in the fast
lane.
Von Furstenberg's wrap dress, a cultural phenomenon in the
seventies, hangs in the Smithsonian Institution. "No one was making
a little bourgeois dress, so I did," she told "Newsweek" in her
1976 cover story. The dress achieved such popularity that in the
five years it was on the market, Diane sold more than five million
of them. Her entry into the beauty business in 1979 was as
serendipitous and as successful.
Diane learned her trade in the trenches, crisscrossing the
country to make personal appearances at department stores, selling
her dresses and cosmetics. "As I was learning to be a woman and
enjoying being one, I was sharing my discoveries, designing for my
needs, and making a business of it," she writes. That business had
its ups and downs. Eventually, there was so much demand for and
exposure of the dress that the market became saturated; on the
verge of bankruptcy, she licensed that part of the business,
focusing on her fragrance and beauty products.
Von Furstenberg's personal world unraveled a bit in 1980 when
her mother, Lily, a survivor of Auschwitz, had a breakdown. Diane
of course knew about her mother's experience in the camps, though
her mother had never wanted to dwell on it. She understood that her
own need for freedom came from her mother's lack of it, and that
her resilience derived from her mother's life lesson to always turn
a negative into a positive.
Leaving the glitz of Manhattan and the music of Studio 54
behind, Diane escaped to Bali with her children, returning inspired
and renewed. With all of this energy, the cosmetics business
flourished. But it grew so fast that in 1983 she found herself
undercapitalized and was forced to sell.
In 1985, having given up control of her brand to licensees and
with her children away at school, Diane turned her back on America
and packed for Paris. She spent four years in her new role as part
of the literary scene there, trading in her spike heels for flat
shoes and tweed.
In 1990, she found she missed the chase and returned to New York
to regain control of her name and relaunch her company. Frustrated
by the degraded status of her brand and dismissed by the retail
community, she searched for a new way to reconnect with her
customers. She found it through the revolutionary new medium of
teleshopping and once again became a success. However, she still
wanted to return to retail.
In 1997, as the wrap dress was making a comeback with the
nostalgia for the seventies, Von Furstenberg, with the help of her
beautiful daughter-in-law, Alexandra, redesigned the dress for the
nineties and made her name relevant to a whole new generation.
Now, at fifty, Diane works to make sense of the contradictions
in her life: glamour vs. hard work, European vs. American, daughter
of a Holocaust survivor vs. wife of an Austro-Italian prince,
mother vs. entrepreneur, lover vs. tycoon. She emerges wiser,
stronger, and ever more determined never to sacrifice her passion
for life.
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