Diane von Furstenberg's Marriage Was Much Nastier Than You Thought

Diane von Furstenberg's mother was told by doctors she would never have a child. Twenty-three years later that child married into a German princely family — and on her wedding day, the head of that family made sure her new father-in-law did not sit down at the reception. Everything you have been told about this marriage is the charming version. A Belgian girl meets a blond prince at a party in Switzerland, becomes a princess, moves to New York with a suitcase of jersey dresses, invents the wrap dress. All of that is true. What the charming version leaves out is why she was in such a hurry, what the Fürstenberg family actually said about her, what happened in Geneva in the spring of 1969, and the identity of the woman who eventually wrote her life story down. Because Diane von Furstenberg has said, in her own memoir, that a 1973 magazine article destroyed her marriage. And the journalist who wrote that article went on to become the co-writer of both of her memoirs — and her friend for the next forty years. In this video: Liliane Nahmias and the Belgian Resistance; the medical verdict that made Diane's birth what her mother called "my flag of freedom"; Étienne Balsan's château and the ski trip that changed her mind about Egon; the telegram from Hong Kong that scheduled the wedding; the reception her husband's family boycotted; the wrap dress and Diana Vreeland; the New York magazine profile that ended it; the thirty-one years of anniversary gifts that arrived after the separation; and the phone call in the 1980s that finally told her what her mother had actually survived. This is not a story about a marriage that failed. It is a story about a woman who was raised to treat her own existence as a victory, who married into a family that treated it as a problem, and who responded by building something so large that the objection stopped mattering. — 00:00 What the doctors told her mother 00:00 Lily Nahmias and the Resistance 00:00 A childhood in Brussels 00:00 Egon, and the car in the snow 00:00 Geneva, spring 1969 00:00 The telegram 00:00 The reception nobody attended 00:00 New York, and the wrap dress 00:00 The article that ended it 00:00 The woman who wrote it all down 00:00 The phone call from Europe — SOURCES & FURTHER READING Diane von Furstenberg, "The Woman I Wanted to Be" (with Linda Bird Francke, Simon & Schuster, 2014) — https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re... Diane von Furstenberg, "Diane: