The Woman I Wanted to Be (2014) is divided
into the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg’s life: roots, love, beauty,
and the business-related side of her life: the American Dream, the Comeback
Kid, and the New Era.
Diane von Furstenberg (DVF) takes
readers back to her roots, and the life of her parents. “It was the war that
brought my parents together” in 1940. Her mother Lily Nahmias, born in Greece, was
living in Belgium when she was arrested in 1944 working for the Belgium
resistance. On a torn piece of paper Lily scrawls a message to her parents and
throws it from the truck as she is driven to Auschwitz. One of 1,244 survivors
of 25,631 Belgium Jews deported, her mother’s resilience shaped DVF’s life. Her
father Leon Halfin, born in Romania, who immigrated to Belgium, gave her
confidence. Her parents married in 1945. DVF also writes of her mother’s
“longtime companion,” who was not her father.
Diane Simone Michelle Halfin was born
in Brussels, Belgium, in December 1946. The first time she had her photograph
in a magazine, at the age of 5, she was in Basel, Switzerland, waiting with her
mother for the Orient Express train. DVF’s marriage, at the age of 18, to
Austrian/German Prince Eduard Egon von and zu Furstenberg (referred to as Egon)
in 1969 made her an instant jet-set princess. They were the ‘it’ couple when
they moved to New York – partying, dancing at Studio 54, globe-trotting, and
producing two children: Alexandre and Tatiana. She left him when she was 26, and
had some flirtations with men such as Warren Beatty, Ryan O’Neal, and Richard
Gere. At 28 she met Barry Diller, American media mogul, and married him after
26 years of ‘non-marriage.’ She also mentions her surgery due to tongue cancer
in 1994 at the age of 47.
She writes of beauty, and her curly
hair: “my hair became a barometer of my self esteem,” and how her fashion
empire began – and the journey of that iconic jersey wrap-around dress
of 1974. The Journey of a Dress commenced in 1968 at Angelo Ferretti’s textile
factory where he was a pioneer in mass production. In 1972 she took a suitcase
of dresses to New York touting them to department stores. By 1974 she hit
success with that dress. From 1974-1978 millions of that dress sold all over
the world. Expanding too quickly, insurmountable debts, and not carefully
negotiating licenses led to the fall of her empire in 1982: “the end came
rapidly,” she wrote. She cut her hair and disappeared in Paris. “At
twenty-five, I was a wunderkind. At forty, I was a has-been.” TV shopping led
to her comeback in the 1990s. Again, it was a rapid rise from nothing to $200
million in sales.
But by 2010 the clothes were going
off-brand and she was losing her identity. She never had a business plan or a
strategy. By spring 2013 it was “the worst time ever … I wasn’t a great manager
and never will be.”
In 2014, with the 40th
anniversary of the iconic wrap-around dress, the new era begins. The rise and
fall and rise and fall of her business are told in three phases: the 1970s with
her desire for financial independence, the 1990s with the resurgence of her
brand, and the present with her desire to establish a lasting legacy.
The honest, interesting accounts of
her family, her loves, her Cloudwalk property and her studio offices, are
equaled to her candid accounts of the advances and setbacks of her business –
for it is only recently that she has been able to control the runaway train of
success. “I don’t know if I have reached wisdom, but hopefully my experiences,
told with all the honesty and candor I could find in my heart and in my memory,
will inspire others … to go for it fearlessly.”
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