Diane von Furstenberg’s design business was stagnating in the 1980s when she got a call that her mother had had a nervous breakdown in Europe.The breakdown, her mother’s companion said, may have been triggered by hearing German men speaking loudly. Her mother was cowering under a hotel concierge’s desk.
Von Furstenberg, newly divorced and worrying about the future of her dress label, immediately headed to Europe with her children. She knew that her mother had survived the Holocaust, but on that trip she learned awful details about Lilli’s experience in Auschwitz. Arriving home in New York, von Furstenberg was invited to give a speech to the Anti-Defamation League at the Pierre Hotel and surprised herself by speaking about being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
“To hear myself saying that was so shocking to me,” von Furstenberg recalls in a new documentary about her life. “I started to tremble. I couldn’t believe that I said that.
And I remember I walked back home. And I was in shock. I had realized who I was.
And where I came from. And before that I had never done that.” The moment is a pivotal one in “Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge,” which explores the rise of von Furstenberg’s brand, her multiple love affairs — including her marriage to a half-German prince — the AIDS crisis, and her identity as a Jewish woman and child of a Holocaust survivor.
The film, which premiered as the headliner at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival this w.
