Diane von Furstenberg on Her New Documentary: ‘I Have Lived a Long Life, and I Don’t Want to Apologize for Any of It’
The life that Diane von Furstenberg has lived is one of jet-setting romances, European aristocracy, Studio 54 conquests, gay lovers and tycoon successes that needs to be seen to be believed. The film festival premiere for her new biopic, “Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge,” offered a fleeting glimpse.
On Wednesday evening in New York City, “Woman in Charge,” opened the Tribeca Festival to a red carpet of European socialites, fashion luminaries and the same tall, beautiful, old-moneyed people who run around von Furstenberg’s biopic.
More from Variety
Candice Bergen was there. So was the Consulting General of Belgium in New York. You may have spotted executives from fashion brands like Neiman Marcus, David Yurman, Estée Lauder, Kering and many more. Karlie Kloss walked the red carpet, and the Greek Royal family made an appearance, including Marie Chantal, the Crown Princess of Greece, and Prince Achielieas-Andreas of Greece and Denmark.
The new Hulu documentary, which premieres on the platform June 25, tells the glamorized story of von Furstenberg’s life: A poor Jewish girl turned feminist icon and business tycoon who changed the face of fashion with the wrap dress.
The film, like its recondite subject, came together through association. Fabiola Beracasa Beckman, an heiress and film producer, first broached the subject to von Furstenberg in 2017. Beckman and her family had known von Furstenberg for years: Beckman’s father, the Venezuelan banker and industrialist Alfredo Beracasa (and first husband of Veronica Hearst), was once the University of Geneva roommate of von Furstenberg’s late husband, the prince, Egon von Fürstenberg.
“It’s hard to be rejected by DVF. You can ask David Bowie and Mick Jagger. It took a lot to get her to say yes,” Beckman told Variety on the opening night red carpet. “But she met Sharmeen [Obaid-Chinoy]”—the two-time Academy Award-winning director who helms the film with co-director Trish Dalton—“and we created an all-female team that a woman like her deserves.”
“She’s had absolutely no creative control over the project,” Beckman told Variety. “She’s only seen the film once. She doesn’t have anything to hide. She’ll tell this whole room what she’d tell her most intimate friends.”
Beckman winked at one of the many gossipy details which the film offers up: In the documentary, von Furstenberg recounts turning down a threesome with Mick Jagger and David Bowie, a solicitation she said was cocked up by Jagger himself. The film delves into Furstenberg’s relationship with her late mother, Liliane Nahmias, who gave birth to von Furstenberg only months after surviving Auschwitz. (“I am her revenge,” the designer says in the documentary of her choice to marry into the German-Austrian House of Fürstenberg in 1969.) The film talks frankly about her first marriage’s demise—thanks to the prince’s well-known reputation as a closeted gay man—and discusses his eventual death from AIDS. It tells of her relationships with her children—including her daughter’s late diagnosis of a rare autoimmune disease, overlooked (as she describes) by von Furstenberg’s absence—and embraces her marriage with businessman Barry Diller.
“People who watch the film should take away what most touches them,” director Obaid-Chinoy told Variety on Wednesday night, straying carefully from politics. “Someone whose uncle or friend died of AIDS will walk away from this film, someone whose ancestor died in the Holocaust, and so will single young mothers struggling to be business women.”
“Diane draws you in,” she said of her subject. “When you go out and film with her, she sits on the floor, she makes you sit next to her. She opens up the inner sanctum of her life. Very few people who’ve lived that kind of life allow you to peel the onion to the core, and she allows you do that.”
For von Furstenberg herself—who showed up in a flowing black-and-white DVF gown, glitter on her chest and usual buoyant bob, which bounces around the 77 year-old like it never left Steve Rubell’s dance floor—the documentary was a long time coming.
“I wanted to do a documentary about these badass women that I am,” she told Variety on the opening night red carpet. “No network wanted to buy it. They didn’t want a movie about the other women. They wanted a movie about me, what they thought about me. But I was interested in doing a documentary about the women that I am. I have lived a long life, and I don’t want to apologize for any of it.”
No regrets, said DVF.
“I am entering the winter of my life, and I’m hoping that I can inspire as many women as possible.”
Best of Variety
Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
