Description:
Diane von Furstenberg is a sweeping biography of one of the most influential and controversial legends of New York fashion--the iconic designer whose creations captured the modern feminist spirit. Gioia Diliberto brings von Furstenberg's extraordinary life into focus, from her post--World War II childhood in Belgium, through her rise to the top of the fashion world in the decadent seventies, to her humiliating failures both professional and personal, and her remarkable comeback in the nineties.
Drawing on interviews with DVF's family, friends, lovers, employees, and the designer herself, Diliberto creates a captivating portrait of a pop culture heroine, one who played a key role in the development of American style at a time when fashion was evolving from rare luxury to marketing monster. Diliberto also offers a look into the rarified world of the nation's elite--an exclusive club where fashion, culture, society, politics, and Hollywood collide. Lively and insightful, Diane von Furstenberg is a modern fable of self-invention, fame, wealth, failure, and success, pulled together with the style and assuredness of a DVF dress.
Brief description:
Gioia Diliberto is a journalist, biographer, and novelist. She is the author of the biographies Paris without End: The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife, A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams, and Debutante: The Story of Brenda Frazier and the novels I Am Madame X and The Collection. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian, and Vanity Fair, and she is a visiting lecturer in writing at the Savannah College of Art and Design and DePaul University. She lives in Chicago.
Review Quotes:
"Un-put-downable." - Wall Street Journal
"A fresh look at DVF's life...as powerfully seductive as the designer's iconic wrap dress." - DuJour
"Fascinating." - New York Times Sunday Book Review
"Absorbing . . . an all-access pass into the life of this enterprising artist [and] a lively portrait of a bold and determined woman as colorful and alluring as her fashions." - Chicago Tribune
"A compelling portrait." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of BUSTLE's "11 Women In Nonfiction Who Are Totally Killing It" "Diliberto captures Diane's determination in the early days to build a fashion brand and her great success striking the exact right note at the right moment with the creation of her modern wrap dress." - Providence Journal
"Diliberto's biography of a determined yet often self-destructive woman adds to the legacy this force for fashion and female autonomy has bequeathed to the world." - Booklist
"Unwrap and enjoy." - Library Journal
"Fast and engrossing...a fun and insightful read about both the woman and the larger fashion universe." - Chicago Business Journal
"The book [is] a winner. . . . A roller coaster life, full of love and work, told as a juicy tale." - Library Journal
"Fascinating . . . examines the designer's rise to stardom from her postwar, European childhood to the personal scandals of her adulthood through a feminist lens." - Bustle
"Thoroughly reported . . . rich with delicious details . . . a timely tale of a woman who knows what other women want: Everything." - USA Today
"A complex and often incredibly fun portrait . . . Diliberto deftly highlights the heady social whirl of Paris . . . [A] handsomely imagined story." - Los Angeles Times on I Am Madame X
"Postwar Paris and the ruthlessly competitive atelier of Coco Chanel come to glamorously gritty life." - Vogue on The Collection
"Explores the pulse and impulses of the designer." - Daily Mail (London)
"In the rarefied world of capital-F Fashion, there are . . . designers . . . who have changed the way women have come to think about the image they present to the world via the clothes they wear. Few epitomize this clothing-as-self mantra as fully as Diane von Furstenberg . . . In a thorough and balanced look at von Furstenberg's life, Diliberto not only probes the pain caused by her roller-coaster professional and personal mishaps but tallies the triumphs that came through sheer perseverance and an unwavering belief in her abilities and vision . . . Diliberto's biography of a determined yet often self-destructive woman adds to the legacy this force for fashion and female autonomy has bequeathed to the world." - Booklist
"A fresh and incisive look at the first--and most intriguing--of [Hemingway's] four wives." - The Boston Globe on Paris Without End
"Diliberto's prose . . . sings . . . leaves the reader with a vivid sense of the beauty in question, in both the painter's version, and the lady's herself." - San Francisco Chronicle on I Am Madame X
"A bittersweet modern love story [that] reads as easily as a novel . . . their intimacy and candour was the raw material for Hemingway's great early short stories which achieved a powerful new realism about he relations between men and women." - Vogue on Paris Without End
"Fascinating....A detailed, grittier portrait of the woman Hemingway loved and left." - Newsday on Paris without End