Diane von Furstenberg (born Diane Simone Michelle Halfin on December 31, 1946 in Brussels, Belgium) is an American fashion designer best known for her hallmark wrap dress.
Diane Halfin was born into an upper-middle class, highly assimilated Jewish household, to a Russian-born father, Leon Halfin, who spent the war in Switzerland, and a Greek-born mother, Liliane Nahmias, who was a Holocaust survivor (see ).
She studied economics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
At university, when she was 18, she met Egon Prinz von und zu Fürstenberg, the elder son of a German prince and his first wife, an heiress to the Fiat automotive fortune. Married in 1969 and divorced in 1972, the couple had two children, Alexandre (who was born six months after their wedding) and Tatiana, who were born in New York City.
In 2001, she married American media mogul Barry Diller, with whom she had been involved, off and on, since the 1970s, and the following year she became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
As von Furstenberg 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."In 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.) 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.[citation needed]
Von Furstenberg 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, von Furstenberg successfully relaunched her high-end line. In 2005, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) 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, von Furstenberg appeared as a judge on several episodes of the Bravo reality television program 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, being as rare as the use of the family's full surname, von und zu Furstenberg). As her advertising campaigns and company letterhead indicate, she also prefers to spell her surname with no umlaut.
