| Diane Von Furstenberg |
Article Index for Diane |
Website Links For Diane |
Information AboutDiane Von Furstenberg |
|
BIRTH AND EDUCATION Diane Simone Michelle Halfin was born into an upper-middle class, highly assimilated at the University Of Geneva in Switzerland . MARRIAGES At university, when she was 18, she met the now-deceased (C. A. Starke Verlag, 1991), page 261. According to Bernardine Morris's article "Basic Dresses in Sexy Prints And Washable" (The New York Times, 18 April 1975), Diane von Fürstenberg, then separated from her first husband, had dropped her title from use in her professional life. In 2001 , she married American media mogul Barry Diller , with whom she had been involved, off and on, since the 1970s. Joyce Maynard, "The Princess Who is Everywhere", The New York Times, 16 February 1977 The following year (2002) she became a naturalized U.S. citizen. CAREER As Fürstenberg once explained, "The minute I knew I was about to be Egon's wife, I decided to have a career. I wanted to be someone of my own, and not just a plain little girl who got married beyond her deserts."Joyce Maynard, "The Princess Who is Everywhere", The New York Times, 16 February 1977In 1970, with a $30,000 investment, she began designing women's clothes. (Her former husband became a fashion designer, too, launching his career in 1974.)Lawrence Van Gelder, "A Princely Designer Gets It All Together for Fashionable Men", The New York Times, 21 January 1976 She is best known for introducing the knitted jersey "wrap dress" in 1973, an example of which, due to its important influence on women's fashion, is in the collection of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum Of Art . {Link without Title} Fürstenberg has started a number of successful businesses including a line of cosmetics and has ventured into the home-shopping business, which she started in 1991. In 1985 she moved to Paris, France where she founded Salvy, a French-language publishing house. From her design and marketing studio in a 19th-century carriage house in West Greenwich Village in New York City, she currently creates a line of high-end women's apparel which is only offered in stores such as Bergdorf Goodman , Nordstrom , Saks Fifth Avenue , and Neiman Marcus . In 1997, after more than a decade, Fürstenberg successfully relaunched her high-end line. In 2005, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) {Link without Title} awarded her a lifetime achievement award. In 2006, she was named president of the CFDA. In 1998 she published her memoirs, "''DIANE: A Signature Life''". In 2006, she appeared as a judge on several episodes of '' Project Runway ''. She also teamed with T-Mobile to design a Limited Edition Sidekick 3. Professionally and personally, she uses '' Von '' with her surname instead of the official '' Zu '' used with the Fürstenberg titles (the latter term is rarely encountered outside of Europe). As her advertising campaigns and company letterhead indicate, she also prefers to spell her surname with no Umlaut . Earlier in her career however, until the late 1990s, her company's labels included either an umlaut or an squiggle in its place. REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|