The woman behind the dress.
Diane von Furstenberg is best known for inventing the wrap dress, which achieved the rare feat of becoming a staple in the closets of women you know and the ones you admire from afar, like Madonna, Michelle Obama, and Kate Middleton. But there’s so much more to the legendary designer than a tie-front frock (not that the dress wasn’t revolutionary). A new no-holds-barred Hulu documentary chronicles the woman behind one of the most famous and versatile clothing designs.
In the film Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge, co-director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy chronicles DVF’s unlikely journey from an outsider in Belgium to an insider in the fashion world.
“Diane felt like an outsider from a very young age,” Obaid-Chinoy tells Katie Couric Media. “She went to a school in Brussels where everybody was blond and blue-eyed, and Diane had dark curly hair.”
We sat down with Obaid-Chinoy to better understand what the 77-year-old overcame to see success, and put some rumors to bed once and for all.
Her parents were Holocaust survivors
During WWII, Furstenberg’s father, Leon Halfin, escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Switzerland from Moldova, and her mother, Liliane Nahmias, survived the horrific conditions of the death camp Auschwitz.
After liberation by Allied troops, 22-year-old Liliane was reunited with her family and fiancé Leon, but doctors told her she would never have children. Then, 18 months later, von Furstenberg was born, and she was named Diane Simone Michele Halfin.
Von Furstenberg opened up about her mother’s miraculous survival in the Hulu documentary. “My mother was not supposed to survive,” von Furstenberg said in the film. “She used to say, ‘God saved me so that I can give you life. By giving you life, you gave me my life back. You are my torch of freedom.'”
Her mother taught her from an early age to face her fears head-on, though her parenting style might raise some eyebrows nowadays. At one point, she locked von Furstenberg in a closet because she was afraid of the dark. “Fear is not an option” and “Don’t be a victim” were mantras she often heard. “Diane hasn’t had it easy, contrary to what people may think,” Obaid-Chinoy tells us. “She was never a child —- she was always an adult because of the trauma her mother carried from Auschwitz.”
At the same time, she credits her mother with her ability to overcome both personal and professional challenges. “Diane always looked for those shards of light when things had been the darkest for her,” says Obaid-Chinoy.
She used to be a princess
In 1969, the designer married German Prince Egon von Furstenberg, which is how she got her iconic last name. The pair met when they were 18 years old at a friend’s birthday party in Switzerland.
After they got married, she was determined to launch her fashion line and have an identity of her own, which Egon supported and even encouraged. “The minute I knew I was about to be Egon’s wife, I decided to have a career,” she told The New York Times in 1977. “I wanted to be someone of my own, and not just a plain little girl who got married beyond her desserts.”
The couple seemed like they had it all — but their marriage was far from a fairy tale. Egon admitted to sleeping with other people, which inspired von Furstenberg to have an affair of her own. The ultimate catalyst for their breakup was Linda Franck’s 1973 profile in New York Magazine, “The Couple That Has Everything. Is Everything Enough?” The pair talked about having a threesome and were painted as “Eurotrash,” as Franck said in the Hulu documentary.
The couple separated and eventually divorced in 1983 after having two children together. Von Furstenberg credits the split for jumpstarting her career, and the exes remained close until Egon died in 2004. “I became the woman I wanted to be,” she said of the divorce in the documentary. “I was in control of my destiny, I was in charge of my children, I was in charge of my life, I was in charge of my business, I was a woman in charge.”
Richard Nixon’s daughter inspired her famous dress
President Nixon is best remembered as the only president to resign from the Oval Office. So you might be surprised to learn that his daughter inspired von Furstenberg’s wrap dress.
One day, the burgeoning designer saw Julie Nixon Eisenhower on TV wearing one of her wrap tops with a skirt. That gave her the idea of combining the two pieces of clothing, and the dress was born. Feminine yet functional, the design became not only a must-have but also a symbol of women’s empowerment.
“You still find that women tend to temper their femininity,” Obaid-Chinoy told us. “They want to fit in, not stand out. Diane’s message was: You’re a woman. Stand out, feel like a woman, be a woman.”
By 1976, she had sold one million wrap dresses. As a result of this retail phenomenon, she went on to grace the cover of Newsweek magazine and was named by TIME as one of the most influential people in fashion.
The designer has faced multiple financial setbacks
While many consider von Furstenberg’s wrap dress to be timeless, her eponymous label, often shortened to DVF, struggled in the 1980s due to changing fashion tastes.
However, she found renewed success in the 1990s by selling her clothes on the homing shopping channel QVC. In her first two hours on the network, she sold $1.3 million worth of silk scarves and other clothing. “Diane was not afraid to continuously reinvent herself, which is a very important part of who she is,” says Obaid-Chinoy.
The next few decades were also a rollercoaster ride for the designer. While her brand saw a boom in the 2000s, it came close to bankruptcy in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We had grown very big, and I had hundreds of stores, and suddenly I was losing money,” she told The Guardian in 2023.
Instead of selling her brand, she closed all but one store in the U.S. and kept most of the ownership in the family. Now, her 24-year-old granddaughter, Talita von Furstenberg, is the company’s co-chair, bringing the brand to new generations.
She almost had a threesome with Mick Jagger and David Bowie
Von Furstenberg revealed in the Hulu documentary that she once considered having a three-way with rockers Mick Jagger and David Bowie, thinking at the time, “Well, this is a great thing to tell your grandchildren.'”
But after thinking it over, she turned down the two men. “I came back to the room, and they were two little skinny things, and I didn’t [do it],” she said in the film. The designer told her grandkids anyway — her grown granddaughter, Talita, who was interviewed as part of the documentary, called her move “really epic.”
It doesn’t look like the rockers took the rejection too hard: Von Furstenburg remained friends with Jagger, and she’s now the godmother of his daughter, Jade. The designer has also never been particularly shy about her love life. In the Hulu film, she revealed that she slept with actors Warren Beatty and Ryan O’Neal on the same weekend. She also notoriously had a short fling with Hollywood heartthrob Richard Gere.
“Diane very famously says in the film that she lived a man’s life in a woman’s body. And why can’t women get away with things and men can?” says Obaid-Chinoy. “And that’s a question we have to ask the world. Why are there such double standards about how a woman should lead her life versus how a man should lead his life?”
She proposed to her second husband
After being on and off lovers for decades, von Furstenberg proposed to media mogul Barry Diller for his 59th birthday. “If you want, I will marry you for your birthday,” she reportedly said at the time. Just a few hours later, the couple tied the knot at City Hall, surrounded by family.
The pair first met in the 1970s, when von Furstenberg was a newly single mother and Diller was the powerful head of Paramount Studios. “All I know is, we fell in love, we were lovers, then we left each other, then we were friends, and then we were together, and then we were married,” she said in the documentary.
Over the years, their relationship has sparked much public speculation — von Furstenberg has kept her first husband’s last name, and the two live in separate areas of Manhattan.
In the documentary, Diller acknowledges their unconventional relationship, saying some believe “it’s just a marriage of convenience.” But both have pushed back against that notion; von Furstenberg said that Diller has been a “consistent love” in her life.
“My relationship and love with Barry, it’s beyond anything. It is totally, totally love,” she said in the Hulu film. “When I met him, he was very shy, he was very introverted, and he opened it all up and gave me everything with no reservation, and I fell in love with that.”
