Diane von Furstenberg

Diane von Furstenberg (born December 31, 1946, Brussels, Belgium) is a Belgian-born designer and businesswoman who made a lasting contribution to fashion design with her flattering but practical wrap dress.

Early life, education, and marriage

Von Furstenberg was born Diane Simone Michelle Halfin, the daughter of Leon Halfin, an electronics distributor, and Lily (née Nahmias), a Holocaust survivor. Diane Halfin attended boarding schools in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in Oxford, England, and studied economics at the University of Geneva. In Geneva she met Austro-Italian Prince Egon zu Fürstenberg, whom she married and took his name in 1969. The couple moved to New York City, where they were known as members of the international jet set. They had two children, a son, Alexandre von Furstenberg (born 1970), and a daughter, Tatiana von Furstenberg (born 1971).

Wrap dress and success

Von Furstenberg started her career in fashion as an apprentice for an Italian textile manufacturer. She discovered an interest in the design sector of the fashion industry and initially produced basic pieces such as T-shirts, shirt dresses, and the two pieces from which the wrap dress later evolved—a wrap top with a matching skirt. Von Furstenberg’s wrap dress debuted in 1974. The original design was a long-sleeved silk jersey dress featuring a fitted top and a skirt that wrapped around the body to tie at the waist. Feminine yet functional, its design responded to the liberated mood of American society in the 1970s—the era during which more women joined the workforce and increasingly wore trousers, which had since the 1960s been incorporated and accepted as part of the female wardrobe.

By 1976 millions of wrap dresses had been sold, and, as a result of this retail phenomenon, von Furstenberg appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine (March 1976) and The Wall Street Journal. She became a role model—a modern powerful female designer—to whom other women, both inside and outside the fashion business, would look for inspiration. With the success of the wrap dress, she opened a cosmetics shop on Madison Avenue (1975). Two years later she introduced a line of home furnishings. Over the course of several years beginning in the mid-1970s, von Furstenberg began licensing her name, most noticeably to makers of luggage and eyeglasses.

Salvy, Silk Assets, and other projects from the 1980s and ’90s

In 1983 von Furstenberg divorced her husband and sold her cosmetics company. She moved to Paris, where in 1985 she established Salvy, a French-language publishing house. In the 1990s von Furstenberg published a series of coffee-table books: Beds (1991), The Bath (1993), and The Table (1996), which feature photographs of the beds, baths, and tables of celebrities. In 1992 she got involved with the home shopping cable network QVC, creating and selling on the air a collection called Silk Assets. In 1997 she bought back her dress line and relaunched herself as a designer of sophisticated ready-to-wear clothes (dresses, separates, and accessories) by reintroducing the wrap dress, which became, again, a bestseller. In 1998 she published a personal and business memoir, Diane: A Signature Life.

Books, documentaries, and other projects from the 21st century

In 2001 von Furstenberg married media executive Barry Diller. The two founded the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation, a family philanthropic enterprise that funds, among other things, the DVF Awards (established 2010)—grants that recognize women in leadership roles who have made an impact in various capacities around the world. In 2014 von Furstenberg published another memoir, The Woman I Wanted to Be. By 2020 von Furstenberg’s company had been losing money and had undergone a public retrenchment with, among other measures, the closing of all but one of its U.S. stores and the layoff of 60 percent of its corporate and retail staff. Soon after von Furstenberg wrote the self-help book Own It: The Secret to Life (2021). A documentary about her life, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge, premiered at the Tribeca Festival in 2024, the same year as the wrap dress’s 50th anniversary.