Who was she?
Furstenberg is a Belgian fashion designer who became popularized for creating the wrap dress. She had grown fame initially from her marriage to Prince Argon von Fürstenberg but divorced in 1983 and kept the last name. She began a fashion company in her name that was very successful and established in 70 different countries.
Her outbringing wasn’t easy as she was born to her mother, Diana Simone Michele Halfin, and father, Bessarabian-born Leon (Lipa) Halfin. Her father had found refuge from Nazis in Switzerland and her mother was a Holocaust survivor who had been captured by the Nazis, imprisoned in Auschwitz concentration camp. She managed to escape being only 49 pounds. She had a high-risk pregnancy because of how malnourished she was, Diane was expected not to be “normal”, and no doctor anticipated how much she would thrive. Furstenberg has always expressed how much of a supporter her mother was about her goals.
It’s shocking how she started designing clothes while married to the prince, she said it encouraged her to pursue a career so she could have something of her outside of marriage. The divorce only led her to her success as she moved to New York for her career and met a high-profile editor of Vogue, Diane Vreeland. She complimented her designs and listed on the Fashion Calendar for New York Fashion Week.
In 1974, she brought to light her wrap dress, which quickly gained attention and was included in the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was selling 25,000 dresses every week and had sold 1 million dresses by 1976. Quickly after she appeared on the cover of the Newsweek magazine with an article saying how Furstenberg is the most marketable woman since Chanel. She started her cosmetic line in 1979 and reported that the company was worth $150 million. Her company had already sold $1.2 million of her new collection within 2 hours by 1992. She branched out her range for her company even more and introduced more beachwear and jewelry.
Fürstenberg became the elected president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and earned a star on Seventh Avenue’s Fashion Walk of Fame in the early 2000s. Her signature was also featured on Michelle Obama in the official White House Christmas card. Within the same year, she opened an exhibition called Diane von Furstenberg: Journey of a Dress, which opened in Moscow’s largest exhibition, Manezh. The exhibit was so popular it even traveled to São Paulo and Beijing.
Unfortunately, despite her recent successes of collaborating with GapKids and earning a gold medal, the recession caused drastic losses of $80 million, and DVF closed all but one of its stores in the United States permanently in 2020. Though there are fewer physical stores, the business is still flourishing now with its online stores and expects a revenue growth of 15% percent in 2024. Diane Von Fürstenberg has a net worth of 1.2 billion dollars and expects a documentary about her life in 2026.
