“God delivered me for the sake of letting you take birth.” So the Holocaust survivor, Liliane Halfin told her daughter, Diane Simone Michelle. Lily weighed only 49 pounds when the Allied forces liberated her from Auschwitz. Eleven months later, she gave birth to a baby girl who would later transform the world of fashion and greatly alter its business models. For all the glitz, glamour, and especially the struggle in “Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge”, currently playing on Hulu, a larger and more encompassing problem embedded in the life of Diane is glossed over, as is the sheer narcissism of the grossness of it all. For sure, it is light and entertaining, but at the end of the day comes across as a century-and-a-half-long infomercial for the wrap dress.
The photographs, home videos, and press materials that von Furstenberg kept meticulously throughout her life would have surely delighted the filmmakers. Our teenage years at the boarding school, family vacations, and birthday celebrations are all neatly packaged into the collection’s upbeat montages. Polaroids taken during her childhood in Brussels, her time in London, and her first meeting with Prince Egon von Furstenberg (they were both in college) are all included in the collection.
Similar archives, but this time with pictures of the glamorous couple dressed up and saluting arm in arm, tell us about their life as a love bird while in Cortina, Rome, and Paris. The glamorous life in Amsterdam is detailed. Until she found out she was pregnant, Diane worked in a variety of capacities. Not so much covertly as less publicly, the royals objected to a Jewish daughter-in-law as they married the couple but only called the ceremony and not the reception. As evidenced by her experience of joining her husband’s family at their castle, this did not lack its own exploitative remarks. Diane does not have a clear memory of all the words exchanged. I recall a conversation I had with my unborn child. I said, “We’ll make them pay.”
I don’t see that it was ever Jean-Marie’s intention to start a business in New York, where she follows her husband without much explanation about his job (on Wikipedia one can read about his brief efforts in fashion and later in Finance). The husband even persuaded her to take along her suitcase with T-shirt samples, which she made.
Diane cherished the loss of glamour that came with her work. Over the years, she heard a lilting voice in her head repeating the phrases, ‘There is no reason to ever settle,’ and, ‘Life without dreams is not worth living.’ She founded her own fashion house to great acclaim, meeting some of the most successful women in the world. It is hard to believe that the woman behind the innovative design of the wrap dress, whose headquarters was in New York, could still not get a seat on an airline exuding on-board class. Yet, even during that time, life was exciting and full of prospects. Following her hunch, she began speaking, and eventually, this brought her great success. Her career was moving quickly within a few months, she attended her first fashion show in her own wardrobe that she created from scratch.
On the matter, Diane was not to be pessimistic. Moreover, she was adamant about correcting the situation now. This became clear to her in Vienna, during a fashion conference in the late 1980s, where she and a handful of influential well-known women of the fashion world had been invited. Under the direction of Barry Diller her second husband and the former CEO of Paramount Pictures, she became the CEO of QVC, a famed television network that primarily aired shopping channels. In spite of these setbacks, she remained unrelenting and unapologetic Searing pain was all that surrounded her at that time, but now, she sought peace.
There are some things that Alexander and Tatiana, who also happen to be the designer’s children, addressed only in passing. The designer, who seems to have owned a successful business back in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s, was always busy tending to it and enjoying the nightlife which meant she never had ample time for her kids. While Tatiana outright refrains from calling it neglect, she still has a note pinned to a corkboard that her mother kept and does not understand. When written in a toddler’s handwriting, the note states, “You know nothing about my life.” In a way, this absence of von Fürstenburg around her children fostered a volatility that nurtured Lily to become a full-time caregiver. Can there still be a bigger paradox than this, when Lily herself had to grow up in a household where she had to revolve around supporting the mother? At the start of the movie, she makes it clear why she revolves around the mother, claiming, “I was never a child.
“I have always been an adult.” Even Tatiana and Alexander were taught how to cook and travel alone and were able to meet their mother only during the evening meal and kiss her in the morning before going to school while she was in bed with some man. What was perhaps most tragic of all, the absence of Diane and Egon and the upbringing practices in those days meant that no one saw that Tatiana was born with a disease of the neuromuscular system which she got to know only when at the age of 21 she visited a doctor. Diane admits this is a big miss and Tatiana too, said that her mother’s attempts to get more into her life as she grew were “too little, too late” And so did Tatiana.
What is equally baffling is the documentary crew’s choice to consult journalists who reported on Diane at length almost at every phase of her life but none of the remarks excoriated by the journalist in those articles towards Diane are ever challenged or even mentioned. In a part of her book Mocha, Diane said, “In my younger adult life, I was in love with a woman”. But money destroyed this cult, or the marriage of someone, which for a long time, is featured in the film with words “Its Feminine Narcissism at its Best, It’s Boring” which is a part of the 1973 New York Magazine article on the marriage of the von Fürstenburg. She then proceeded to insult lesbians in detail.
No one seems to care to ask why Diane used to hang out with monstrous war criminal Henry Kissinger so often around her and her callous statements concerning plus-size women to start with plus her attempts to gentrify the Meatpacking district which led to the region that used to be home to queer/trust sex workers being driven out only to make room for the flagship DVF store and other overly priced and bland restaurants. (This change was also shown as quite transphobic in “Sex and the City” when Samantha starts living in a loft in the “MePa” area.)
“Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge” intends to avoid all controversy, depth or controversy. Apart from common friends Fran Lebowitz and common colleagues Gigi Williams, the journalists don’t speak about anything. Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton who invariably wax poetic about Diane’s accomplishments greatly praise her while this blogging New York Times fashion columnist Vanessa Friedman arguing with her husband Marc Jacobs and Christian Louboutin have good words about the lady they are honoring but I guess that’s understandable. But it is a boring cinema. Indeed, it is clear that Diane von Fürstenburg says she has a woman’s body but enjoys living a man’s life.
But does this imply that she is beyond criticism and should not be subjected to a more thorough examination of her life? The film leaves us with a conclusion that is entirely a celebration in length of her life’s achievements as an advocate, more so for women. However, it does not provide room to acknowledge those who were outrun, neglected, or were deemed expendable in the process of her rule.
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