When addressing the crowd at the Skirball Center the night before the opening of her retrospective “Woman Before Fashion,” Diane von Furstenberg is clear and direct when she says, “I have always been a feminist, I always will be a feminist. That’s just what I do.”
In 2010 she founded the DVF Awards, supported by her family foundation with husband media mogul Barry Diller, which gives grants of $100,000 to women to continue their advocacy work. During our interview, she makes it clear that not all grantees are well known (though many are: Gloria Steinem, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay) because the prominent recipients bring attention to the grantees whose activist work may be less glamorous, yet deserve elevation.
Towards the end of the exhibit—on display until Aug. 31, 2025—a QR code directs visitors to sign up for her more recent innovation: the “InCharge platform,” which serves as “a place to rally, where we use our connections to help all women be the women they want to be.” Its aim urges women to make “first a commitment to ourselves” by “owning who we are” and then to use the platform to “connect, expand, inspire, and advocate.” It is her latest project in a lifetime of advocacy meant to strengthen women.
“She gets it,” says Hillary Rodham Clinton during an interview in the recent documentary about DVF (as she is known), directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. The film covers the arc of DVF’s career (hardly over) and finishes with DVF reflecting on entering the “winter” of her life as she sits on a bench in the family cemetery where one day she will be buried.
“She gets the struggles that women are facing across the world, and I think she has made a real difference,” continues Clinton.
Speaking about the awards, von Furstenberg expands, “I have enormous faith in women. My role is to just help connect, expand, inspire and advocate.”
At the film’s end, her commitment to feminist philanthropy is crystalline when she says, “If I have a voice, it is a responsibility, a duty, it’s an obligation to try to make that useful. Where I am in my life now, I want to put myself at the service of women.”
Von Furstenberg also serves on the board of Vital Voices, which supports women’s leadership and in 2022 was awarded the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award.
Von Furstenberg’s consistent message is that she wants women to be in charge—foremost, of themselves. Despite once saying she wanted to live “a man’s life in a woman’s body,” a less binary-defined interpretation means simply understanding what you want and making it happen. In a podcast interview, she makes it clear that being in charge doesn’t mean being aggressive or replicating a traditionally patriarchal model. Rather, she says, “being in charge” means “being in charge of your vulnerability as well.”
The Skirball exhibit (debuting in the U.S. after launching at the Fashion & Lace Museum in DVF’s native Brussels) includes a section about her mother, Lily Nahmias, who was interned at several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and gave birth to Von Furstenberg (against medical advice) just over a year after her release.
“I was born with a torch of freedom in my hand and that can be heavy for a little girl,” she comments, but it is also clear this served as a charge which fueled her desire to make a difference. Nahmias’ steely determination to survive at times translated to childhood training that DVF says might have her mother arrested today, yet was meant to reinforce her independence. Her stories carry a sense of intergenerational trauma which underscores Von Furstenberg’s “brook no excuses” attitude.
“‘Failure is not an option,’ my mother often said to me,” comments DVF during our interview, which fits with her ethos that any obstacles can be turned into opportunity, rejection into new chances. Yet, she concedes, “of course, that is not the same in Afghanistan.”
It is impossible not to note these philosophies are more easily implemented when undergirded by door-opening connections and tremendous wealth—both of which DVF had through her first marriage to Austrian prince Egon Von Furstenberg at age 22.
When she divorced Egon Von Furstenberg, she credits Ms. magazine with her decision to renounce her title of princess in favor of the (then) more newly used “Ms.”
She is clear that her big break came after showing her now iconic wrap dress to Diana Vreeland at Vogue, a meeting set up through a connection with her then husband. The work she did after that—growing a brand which expanded to cosmetics, luggage, bedding and more—was all her own though her entrée into social circles in New York City in the ’70s, including the celebrity scene at Studio 54, was clearly a boost.
“The hours between midnight and 2 a.m. were my own,” comments von Furstenberg in her autobiography in an honest reveal of what it meant to be an ambitious single working mother with still young children, taking the only time available to her.
Though her fame as a designer came through the success of her iconic wrap dress, von Furstenberg has said, “I don’t think I had a vocation for fashion; I had a vocation to be a woman in charge.” If designing wasn’t her natural métier, it became the channel that served her impulse to improve women’s lives. In our conversation she mentions, “Christian Lacroix once said to me, ‘Men design costumes, and women designers make clothes.’”
While the adjustability of the wrap dress seems a natural vehicle for size inclusivity, DVF maintains it is the fabric (comfortable, stretchy jersey) that transforms women who wear it. “They put it on and they feel … in charge, they are a woman on the go….” She tied this sense (so to speak) to traditional femininity in her now equally iconic statement: “Feel like a woman, wear a dress.”
When it is pointed out that not all women want to wear dresses, DVF reiterates it’s not the dress itself that is critical; rather, it’s the sense of oneself that emerges when wearing jersey fabric, which molds the body, granting a feeling of ease and complicity in having a “uniform” to rely upon.
It’s not hard to believe that, as the dress saturated the market, part of its associative moxie came from buying a clothing item associated with DVF as a woman gaining rapid media presence (she was on the cover of Newsweek at age 28 in 1976) and who embodied both sexiness and business-sense in the “I can fry it up in a pan … because I’m a woman” advertisement of the ’70s.
“The way she presented herself as this very sexy glamourous woman in fishnets and stilettos was exactly opposite how a woman who wanted to be in professional in the ’70s was supposed to present,” says Gigi Williams, a makeup artist also featured in the documentary. The sense of throwing off traditional power structures to change the system from within is a tenet central to DVF’s career.
When we spoke at the exhibit, she recounted how she and von Furstenberg would go on tour to shopping malls to do makeovers on women after DVF launched her makeup line. “And we would be doing makeup and talking to a whole crowd of women and our main focus was feminism,” says Williams. “We’d start out with ‘you should only spend five to seven minutes doing your makeup, because you have other things to do.’ Basically, it was like ‘don’t depend on the man in your life because he’s not going to be around so just take care of yourself.’” She notes, “In 1976 as a woman you couldn’t have a credit card or a checking account without a husband or a father cosigning for you, and that’s where we were.”
A placard in the exhibit displays the print DVF created for the 50th anniversary of the wrap dress. Entitled “Crosswords,” the fabric looks like a traditional crossword puzzle but is filled in with words and phrases such as “Dare,” “Freedom” and “Attitude.”
In the print—a mix of “feminism and fashion together”—the designer has literally written her feminist commitments into her aesthetic choices, with the belief that fabric, messaging and style can combine to bolster women’s confidence. In the documentary, Hilary Rodham Clinton comments, “Diane was one of the very first women who’d really broken through the glass ceiling in business.” And later in the film, “It’s odd to think that a single dress could have made that kind of impact, but I was there, and it did. It had a huge reverberation.”
In an interview with Katie Couric, von Furstenberg mentions that being groped was just part of being a woman in the pre #MeToo era; “you just dealt with it.” She comments that she is glad that the genie is “out of the bottle now” and is not going back in. And establishing her own business at such a young age was partly motivated by the fact that this was way to escape a cultural norm where workplace “seduction” (as she comments, sometimes in more and sometimes less, cavalier ways) was simply routine. Part of her later work as president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America included advocating for models’ rights as well.
There is no question DVF’s presence in the fashion industry opened doors for other women—a foundational tenet in her life, now embodied through her philanthropy. In the documentary, Gloria Steinem comments, “She wasn’t trying to become the only woman in a male club. She was changing the whole nature of the club.” Praise for the path von Furstenberg has forged is thick. Oprah observes, “What DVF exemplifies is a desire to lift other women up in every way. It’s deeply personal and real for her to make life better for women who have no voice, for women who are unseen.”
At the end of her Skirball address, von Furstenberg mentions that she writes daily in her diary, and “I encourage you to write your diary because it is communion with yourself.” This kind of self-understanding seems another way to express her credo of “being a woman in charge”—knowing oneself deeply and then acting on it (to the best of one’s resources) to undergird the self-reliance and independence drilled into her as essential by her survivor mother. I believe her when she says she wants this for every woman.
After she signs my copy of her autobiography, The Woman I Wanted To Be, I look at the inscription. She has added the word “be,” crossed out the “I” and replaced it with “you” to make the past tense present, so the title page now reads: “Be the woman YOU want to be.” This rewriting of her words so another woman is encouraged seems the essence of her message: one woman to the next, passing along power.
