One woman who has certainly never made any apologies for herself is Diane von Fürstenberg. The 77 year old designer is the focus of a new documentary which launches today. Its opening scene shows her climbing into a sink to do her makeup closer to the mirror, “I don’t understand why so many people do not embrace age” she laments. “I’ve always been attracted to wrinkles; age means living. You shouldn’t say how old you are, you should say how long you have lived. If you take all your wrinkles away the map of your life is different. I don’t want to erase anything from my life.”
This owning of life becomes more poignant when you learn her extraordinary story; the daughter of a Belgium Jewish Holocaust survivor who went on to marry a socialite German prince. “My roots were Jewish” she says, “but my mother paid for that and I was her revenge.” The couple would go on to become two of New York City’s most decadent, legendary figures (she confesses to turning down a threesome with David Bowie and Mick Jagger).
