It’s quite an achievement to have designed such an iconic, democratic item, but her proudest achievement is her family. “They’re interesting and happy and no one is banal,” she says – an interesting criterion to apply to one’s family, but also a pragmatic one for someone who says they deplore platitudes and small talk.
There’s her son Alexander, 51, a director of the family foundation, and daughter Tatiana, 50, who now co-runs the DVF business with a new Chinese CEO, as well as her five grandchildren, aged 21 to one. They regularly gather in the sprawling country home she has escaped to in Connecticut for the past 48 years. This is where she spent a lot of lockdown in her garden. “Life is always better with a garden,” she says, although I gather she doesn’t do the actual digging. Rather, she has taken up writing and is now a published author.
“Have you read Own It?” she asks, genuinely surprised that I haven’t. “It’s very good. It’s my lessons on life. You should buy it for your daughters.” I tell her I’ll definitely get a copy the minute the call is over, because, honestly, if it imparts half the energy and wisdom she does over the phone, it has to be worth the money. But she’s already Whatsapped it to me. She’s now working on a sequel entitled The Secret to Joy.
How does she maintain her sense of equilibrium, I ask, especially during the Trump presidency – she was never a fan. “I do get angry,” she says, “especially when I saw the pictures coming out of Afghanistan. But if you get involved you become less angry. You don’t feel so powerless.”
She has a game she plays. “Every day, I try to connect two people to something or someone they may not have had access to. We all have a magic wand and the more we use it the more powerful it is, it becomes a boomerang. So many times, I’ve done something to help someone and somehow it creates a good energy that comes back for me. It’s like mushrooms – they’re all connected. Have you seen that documentary called Fantastic Fungi?”. I tell her that Stella McCartney was talking about it backstage after her catwalk show in September. “That’s good. It was me who told Stella about it.” Of course it was. That’s the boomerang.
When she looks back at interviews she gave at 24, she says she often said the same things she says now. “Even then, I knew the most important relationship you have in your life is the one with yourself, and the only thing you have total control of is your character. You can lose your health, beauty, home but never your character… I’ve been thinking a lot about life lately,” she says. “I had to have a full-body scan recently and to occupy myself I thought ‘let’s make this a scan of my soul as well’.” What emerged above all, she says, “is that I‘m always honest”.
I can confirm that. It can be a bit disconcerting. But it makes her bracing company.
Growing up, Von Furstenberg didn’t have a clue what she wanted to be, other than “the woman in charge”. “That’s not an aggressive thing. That became the umbrella of my brand. Isn’t it funny that it’s always the women designers who work with jersey?” she muses. “Chanel, Norma Kamali, Madame Grès, Donna Karan…” Male designers, until recently, were too grand to use it. “But women know how it feels.” Actually, she doesn’t like lazy gender stereotyping, “but Christian Lacroix once said to me, ‘male designers make fashion and female designers make clothes’. It’s true up to a point, isn’t it?”
Another modern habit she deplores – and this makes me warm to her as much as when I first met her in the 1990s – is a proclivity among today’s celebrities and socialites to declare themselves humanitarians.
“That’s for others to say, isn’t it?”. People moaning that things were so much better 30 years ago is another bête noire. The cynic might say that’s because she has a pretty amazing life – rich, successful, married to the billionaire mogul Barry Diller, with a close family. She only escaped that Connecticut garden in lockdown when Diller “kidnapped me on his boat”. Last summer, they sailed around the Greek islands, where DVF swam for two hours every day, the equivalent of 24 hours a fortnight.
The glossy life isn’t the whole story. The reason she remains grateful for being alive “is because I wasn’t meant to be here at all”. Her Greek mother and Russian father were Jewish concentration camp survivors. “When my mother came out of the death camps, she was 21 and weighed 49kg. The doctors told her not to have a baby for at least three years, but she married my father and that was it. The fact that I’m here at all is a miracle”.
