Diane von Furstenberg has been putting on The Diane von Furstenberg Show for something like half a century. Act I began, roughly, in 1969, when Diane Halfin, twenty-two years old and three months pregnant, became Princess Diane von Furstenberg, wife of the German playboy Prince Egon von Furstenberg. The couple stormed New York, where they were an exotic fixture on the social scene.
In Act II, as a decadent ex-princess and fashion juggernaut, she was the famed inventor of the wrap dress, an emblem of liberated seventies womanhood. (Her best model was always herself.) More acts flew by: Studio 54 habitué, Paris literary impresario, nineties QVC queen.
In 2001, she married the media mogul Barry Diller, years after they had first dated, in the late seventies, and became part of yet another endlessly scrutinized power couple. At seventy-seven, von Furstenberg is still starring in the spectacle of her life, now as a global luminary with wisdom to dispense. She has told her story, and doled out advice on living well and being fabulous, in multiple books (“ ,” “ ”).
Since 2010, she has bestowed the DVF Awards to “extraordinary women who are dedicated to transforming the lives of other women,” which is very much how she would like to be seen in her latest act. A new Hulu documentary, “Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge,” directed by Trish Dalton and , retells the story of how a Belgian Jewish daughter of an Auschwitz survivor became a brand name. Along the way, s.
