Diane von Furstenberg Read Online Free Page A

focused on one product and became Europe’s major supplier. With the birth of Diane’s brother, Philippe, in 1952, the family was complete. The Halfins moved into a penthouse apartment at 80 avenue Armand Huysmans in Ixelles, a middle-class Brussels neighborhood of large, comfortable apartment buildings across from a vast park, the Bois de la Cambre. The area must have been a force field of style. Audrey Hepburn, born in 1929, spent the first years of her life a few blocks away on rue Keyenveld.
    Diane’s mother “wasn’t a fashion person; she didn’t talk about fashion,” says Diane. Lily always dressed beautifully, however. She patronized a couturier in Brussels who copied clothes by Paris designers and wore cashmere and jersey garments from the shop owned by her sister Mathilde off the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. Lily also owned a sable coat, which she’d bought with her reparations check from the German government. For Lily, beautiful clothes were a way of beating back sadness and celebrating life. Clothes mattered because they were frivolous. To be alive and free to buy a fur coat was a gift.
    Lily’s elegance was accompanied by a powerful intuition and curiosity about people. “Lily was extremely sensitive,” says Diane’s girlhood friend Mireille Dutry. “She could tell if something wasn’t right in your life just by looking at your face.” Adds Diane’s brother, Philippe, “My mother always gave very good advice. She had impeccable judgment.”
    When Lily first caught the teenage Diane smoking, instead of lecturingher about how bad cigarettes were for her health, she said, “‘Wouldn’t it be more interesting to be the only one who didn’t smoke?’” Diane recalled. “I was so anxious to be individual that I just quit.”
    But for all Lily’s spirit, she suffered from serious depression. “Lily had post-traumatic stress disorder really badly,” says her granddaughter, Diane’s daughter, Tatiana.
    Many studies over the years have documented the high incidence of PTSD among survivors of the Holocaust. Few of these survivors received psychiatric help, and their problems only intensified over time. Lily’s psychological and emotional difficulties were compounded by physical ones, also results of her wartime trauma, particularly malnutrition. “She had a lot of pain in her body, and her eyes were awful,” says Tatiana.
    Hardly a day went by that Diane didn’t see her mother cry. “It must have been so hard to not ask anything of your mother because you didn’t want to put any pressure on her because she’s so frail and broken,” says Tatiana.
    The doctor who examined Lily before her wedding warned her that childbirth in her frail state might kill her. When Lily discovered she was pregnant, she and Leon tried to induce a miscarriage by taking long, jarring rides on Leon’s motorcycle over the cobblestone streets of Brussels. It had no effect, and Lily was secretly relieved. Later, when Leon brought home some pills that were supposed to induce a miscarriage, Lily threw them out the window. She had begun to feel a deep yearning for her unborn child, a belief that the baby would be her lifeline. “If I hadn’t been born, my mother might have killed herself,” Diane wrote in The Woman I Wanted to Be.
    Leon, Diane’s father, “was another traumatized person, another broken heart,” says Tatiana. He never got over losing his family in the war, and he compensated by becoming a workaholic. “He never stopped working,” adds Philippe.
    Though Diane has never consulted a psychotherapist, some experts might connect the insecurity that has plagued her throughout her lifeto her mother’s experiences during the war. Perhaps Diane internalized Lily’s fear and sorrow. Perhaps Lily’s fragility gave Diane a sense of instability, a feeling that the ground could shift beneath her at any moment.
    At the same time, however, Diane showed traits of exceptional resilience that researchers