| Diane von Fürstenberg | |
|---|---|
 Diane von Fürstenberg at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival |
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| Born | Diane Simone Michelle Halfin December 31, 1946 Brussels, Belgium |
| Occupation | Fashion designer |
| Official website | |
Diane von Fürstenberg (born December 31, 1946) is a Belgian-American fashion designer best known for her wrap dress.
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Diane Simone Michelle Halfin was born in Brussels, Belgium into a Jewish family. Her father was Russian-born Leon (Lipa) Halfin, who immigrated to Belgium from Chişinău (then Bessarabia) in 1929.[1][2] Her mother was Greek-born Liliane Nahmias, a Holocaust survivor. She studied economics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
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, the couple had two children, Prince Alexander von Furstenberg (born six months after their wedding)[3] and Princess 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[4] According to Bernardine Morris's article in The New York Times, Diane von Fürstenberg, then separated from her first husband, had dropped her title from use in her professional life.[5]
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.{{Citation needed|date=December 2010
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 desserts."[3] In 1970, with a $30,000 investment, she began designing women's clothes. (Her former husband also became a fashion designer in 1974.)[6] She is best known for introducing the knitted jersey "wrap dress" in 1973, an example of which, due to its influence on women's fashion, is in the collection of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[7]
In an interview with Diane Sawyer, she said, "I have yet to meet a woman who is not strong. They don't exist."[8]
Fürstenberg has started a number of businesses including a line of cosmetics and a home-shopping business which she started in 1991. In 1985 she moved to Paris, France where she founded Salvy, a French-language publishing house. Upon the death of artist Lowell Nesbitt in 1993 Diane von Fürstenberg purchased Nesbitt's studio and residence at 389 West 12th Street, the site of a former police stable that Nesbitt had renovated and called "The Old Stable." The Lowell Nesbitt studio became a popular gathering place for major art world figures, celebrities and dignitaries including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers and James Rosenquist. This monumental space that Nesbitt created resulted in feature articles about the facility in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Architectural Digest Magazine in the late 1970s. Diane von Fürstenberg used it until the early 2000’s as her studio and residence when it was sold and demolished to make space for a new high-rise building. She now operates DVF Studio, a line of women's apparel, at 874 Washington Street in New York City.
In 1997, Fürstenberg relaunched her high-end line. She published her memoirs, "Diane: A Signature Life" (Simon & Schuster; 1998). In 2005, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) awarded her a lifetime achievement award.[9] In 2006, she was named president of the CFDA. She also designed a Sidekick with T-Mobile.[10] In 2008, she appeared as a judge on several episodes of Project Runway.
Professionally and personally, she uses von with her surname instead of 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 as well as the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA).
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