Diane von Fürstenberg

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Diane von Fürstenberg

Diane von Fürstenberg
Born Diane Simone Michelle Halfin
December 31, 1946 (1946-12-31) (age 61)
Brussels, Belgium
Occupation Fashion Designer, Former Princess

Diane von Fürstenberg (born Diane Simone Michelle Halfin on December 31, 1946, Brussels, Belgium) is a Jewish American woman fashion designer best known for her hallmark wrap dress.

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[edit] Birth and education

Diane Simone Michelle Halfin was born into an upper-middle class Jewish household. Her father was Russian-born Leon Halfin, who spent World War II in Switzerland, and her mother was Greek-born Liliane Nahmias, who was a Holocaust survivor . She studied economics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

[edit] Marriages

At university, when she was 18, she met Prince Egon of Fürstenberg, the elder son of a German prince and his first wife, an heiress to the Fiat automotive fortune. Married in 1969 and divorced three years later, the couple had two children, Alexandre (who was born six months after their wedding)[1] and Tatiana, who were born in New York City. She is now the grandmother of three children. The Fürstenbergs' marriage, though not popular with the groom's family because of the bride's religion, was considered dynastic, and Diane became Princess Diane of Fürstenberg at the time of the wedding, according to the Genealogisches Handbuch Des Adels: Fürstliche Häuser [2]

At the beginning of the eighties, she had an affair with Alain Elkann, Margherita Agnelli's ex-husband, then an ex-cousin of her own ex-husband. From those days, she kept an excellent relationship with his children, Jaki, Lapo and Ginevra Elkann.

In 2001, she married American media mogul Barry Diller, with whom she had been involved, off and on, since the 1970s.[3] In 2002, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

[edit] Career

As Fürstenberg once explained, "The minute I knew I was about to be Egon's wife, I decided to have a career. I wanted to be someone of my own, and not just a plain little girl who got married beyond her deserts."[4]In 1970, with a $30,000 investment, she began designing women's clothes. (Her former husband became a fashion designer, too, launching his career in 1974.)[5] She is best known for introducing the knitted jersey "wrap dress" in 1973, an example of which, due to its important influence on women's fashion, is in the collection of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[1]

Fürstenberg has started a number of successful businesses including a line of cosmetics and has ventured into the home-shopping business, which she started in 1991. In 1985 she moved to Paris, France where she founded Salvy, a French-language publishing house. From her design and marketing studio in a 19th-century carriage house in West Greenwich Village in New York City, she currently creates a line of high-end women's apparel which is only offered in stores such as Bergdorf Goodman, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus.

In 1997, after more than a decade, Fürstenberg successfully relaunched her high-end line. In 2005, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) [2] awarded her a lifetime achievement award. In 2006, she was named president of the CFDA. In 1998 she published her memoirs, "DIANE: A Signature Life".

In 2006, she appeared as a judge on several episodes of Project Runway. She also teamed with T-Mobile to design a Limited Edition Sidekick 3.

Professionally and personally, she uses von with her surname instead the usual zu used by the House of Fürstenberg (the latter term is rarely encountered outside of Europe). As her advertising campaigns and company letterhead indicate, she also prefers to spell her surname with no umlaut. Earlier in her career however, until the late 1990s, her company's labels included either an umlaut or a squiggle in its place.

Ms. von Fürstenberg is a recipient of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Joyce Maynard, "The Princess Who is Everywhere", The New York Times, 16 February 1977
  2. ^ (C. A. Starke Verlag, 1991), p. 261. According to Bernardine Morris's article "Basic Dresses in Sexy Prints And Washable" (The New York Times, 18 April 1975), Diane von Fürstenberg, then separated from her first husband, had dropped her title from use in her professional life.
  3. ^ Joyce Maynard, "The Princess Who is Everywhere", The New York Times, 16 February 1977
  4. ^ Joyce Maynard, "The Princess Who is Everywhere", The New York Times, 16 February 1977
  5. ^ Lawrence Van Gelder, "A Princely Designer Gets It All Together for Fashionable Men", The New York Times, 21 January 1976

[edit] External links