<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  It&amp;#039;s six o&amp;#039;clock in the evening on Memorial Day, and Diane von Furstenberg&amp;#039;s tycoon husband, Barry Diller, is standing in the middle of her palatial new offices on West 14th Street in New York (around the corner from the giant Frank Gehry iceberg that now houses Diller&amp;#039;s own offices), dressed in a T-shirt, pink swim trunks, and a pair of flip-flops, just back from a weekend in Sag Harbor, checking the place out. It&amp;#039;s a work in progress, with boxes stacked in the corners and tape on the windows, but Diller is glowing with excitement. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s fantastic,&amp;quot; he says is his deep macher voice. &amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; says von Furstenberg in her husky European purr. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a mess.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s fantastic.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Non. It&amp;#039;s not finished yet, darling. I don&amp;#039;t want you to see it like this.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s fantastic.&amp;quot; Von Furstenberg pauses for a long moment. &amp;quot;It is good, isn&amp;#039;t it?&amp;quot; Diller smiles his big gap-toothed smile. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s fantastic.&amp;quot; SEE LOOKBOOK: DIANE VON FURSTENBERG A lot about von Furstenberg&amp;#039;s life is fantastic these days. At 60, she has staged the ultimate comeback, evolving from the jet-setting &amp;#039;70s wrap-dress princess to the head of a wildly successful fashion empire and president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, not to mention an enduring style icon with those famous DVF initials stamped on everything from handbags to rugs to sunglasses. Whether she&amp;#039;s commuting between Cloudwalk, her 160-year-old farm in Connecticut, and her new headquarters in the meatpacking district, cohosting Hollywood&amp;#039;s fabled pre-Oscars picnic with her husband, or cruising the Mediterranean in Diller&amp;#039;s luxurious sailing yacht Eos (which features a figurehead of von Furstenberg sculpted by Anh Duong), the designer remains the embodiment of modern glamour. How does she do it?  &amp;quot;Well, I love life,&amp;quot; answers von Furstenberg matter-of-factly. We are sitting on the couch in her new office (which we arrived at via an enormous staircase decorated with Swarovski crystals that glitters in the late-afternoon sun like the stairway to heaven), and she is curled up in navy pants and a printed cardigan, her navy suede espadrilles kicked off and her tanned bare feet tucked beneath her. Her long curly hair is lighter than usual, shot through with fine strands of gold, and falling loosely around her shoulders. She doesn&amp;#039;t have any makeup on, but she looks amazing anyway, all bronze cheekbones and languorous gestures, the picture of catlike satisfaction. &amp;quot;The key is to love life,&amp;quot; she repeats. &amp;quot;Also, I am constantly moving. I don&amp;#039;t sleep five nights in the same bed ever. There&amp;#039;s a lotta pieces of me, so in order to do it all, I gotta do it all.&amp;quot;   For von Furstenberg, doing it all means sleeping in a sumptuous diamond-shaped glass room that sits atop her 14th Street office building so she can stay close to her business and &amp;quot;get up with the sun.&amp;quot; It also means regular yoga (she&amp;#039;s having a yoga studio built in her offices) and meditation (&amp;quot;Deepak Chopra taught me many years ago when I was sick&amp;quot;), weekly facials with Tracie Martyn (&amp;quot;she defies gravity&amp;quot;), and the constant shifting from glamour-puss to wife to mother to tycoon and back again.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is exactly the sort of woman she designs her clothes for. &amp;quot;The DVF woman is the woman that I wanted to become when I was young, the woman that I became, and the woman that I no longer am but still am a little bit,&amp;quot; she says, conjuring an image of her young, raven-maned amazon self from the &amp;#039;70s, partying late into the night at Studio 54 and roaring around the globe, making deals in stilettos and furs, all the while juggling her two cherry-cheeked children and hosting big, earthy lunches for the likes of Calvin and Mick and Bianca &amp;quot;at the farm&amp;quot; on weekends. When I ask her to tell me more about the DVF woman, she cocks her tawny head and says, &amp;quot;You know, I wanted to be the woman who could smile at her own shadow, who could do it all: have kids and lovers and boyfriends and husbands and be in the driving seat \u2014 all of it.&amp;quot;  But &amp;quot;doing it all&amp;quot; did not always come so easily for von Furstenberg. Despite her enormous success in the &amp;#039;70s, the business &amp;quot;grew too fast, too soon,&amp;quot; and by the early &amp;#039;80s, the market was oversaturated, the wrap dress was &amp;quot;over,&amp;quot; and the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. &amp;quot;It all happened so fast, and I was so young,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Everybody wanted a piece of me, and I didn&amp;#039;t know who to say yes to and who to say no to.&amp;quot;  She&amp;#039;s learned from her mistakes. In the 10 years since the relaunch of her flattering, sexy, versatile dresses, von Furstenberg&amp;#039;s company has mushroomed from a three-employee &amp;quot;experiment&amp;quot; in her West Village carriage house to a 120-person corporation with stores from Miami to Antwerp (22 total) and retailers in 57 countries. Kate Hudson, Gwen Stefani, and Paris Hilton hit the red carpet in her dresses. Everyone from Jessica Alba to Susan Sarandon to Marisa Tomei turns up for her star-studded shows. &amp;quot;I had no idea if it would work in the beginning,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I hoped, but you never know for sure.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s been fun because I&amp;#039;m aging,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;but I&amp;#039;m dressing younger women, so it keeps me in touch with that energy.&amp;quot; Indeed, von Furstenberg herself still dresses very much the way she did when she was in her 20s \u2014 and somehow manages not to look absurd doing so. She still has all of her Yves Saint Laurent and Giorgio di Sant&amp;#039;Angelo and Ossie Clark carefully stored in an enormous archival room at the farm in Connecticut, along with &amp;quot;many hundreds&amp;quot; of pairs of shoes (&amp;quot;I keep all of them&amp;quot;), which range from cowboy boots with butterflies stitched on them that she found in Texas back in the &amp;#039;70s to the Christian Louboutin shoes designed for her own runway shows. Then there&amp;#039;s the jewelry. &amp;quot;Oh, I&amp;#039;ve had a long affair with jewelry,&amp;quot; says von Furstenberg, her voice softening to a tone of near-religious solemnity. &amp;quot;I started out buying art-deco jewelry from Cartier and Seaman Schepps back when nobody liked it. I used to go to Fred Leighton before he was famous, back when he lived in the Village. You could get it for nothing.&amp;quot; Then there is the enormous collection of Indian Mughal pieces and the &amp;quot;big, chunky gold stuff from the &amp;#039;40s,&amp;quot; and then, of course, there are the pieces that Diller has given her.   &amp;quot;Barry is very good about giving me jewelry,&amp;quot; she says, smiling at the thought of her longtime companion and husband of six years. (Von Furstenberg separated from her first husband, Prince Egon von Furstenberg \u2014 the father of her two children, Alexandre and Tatiana\u2014in 1973, after four years of marriage. The couple divorced in 1983 but remained close friends until Egon&amp;#039;s death in 2004, so much so that Egon gave von Furstenberg a present every year on the day that would have been their wedding anniversary.) &amp;quot;Basically my style hasn&amp;#039;t changed,&amp;quot; continues von Furstenberg, who is now a grandmother of three, all of whom live in Los Angeles. &amp;quot;I dress the same way I always have. ... I&amp;#039;m older, I&amp;#039;m a grandmother, so certain things ...&amp;quot; She lets the sentence drift for a moment. &amp;quot;My body isn&amp;#039;t the same, my face isn&amp;#039;t the same, and blah, blah, blah, but I have lived, and my experiences are part of who I am. I enjoy being me, and that&amp;#039;s the thing.&amp;quot; Von Furstenberg has not had plastic surgery, and she does not plan to. &amp;quot;So many woman have it now, and of course sometimes, you know, you question, and you think, &amp;#039;Oh, maybe I should,&amp;#039; but then I look at some of the faces, and I just say I don&amp;#039;t need that.&amp;quot; She also has no plans to cut her famous mane. &amp;quot;I cut my hair once, in 1984,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I wanted to change my life, and I cut my hair really short, like a boy, and I did change my life. I moved to Europe. I didn&amp;#039;t really like it short though.&amp;quot;  Von Furstenberg may never cut her hair again, but there are some changes in her life that she clearly relishes. When I ask her if she thinks she&amp;#039;s intimidating, she strokes her lip for a moment, then replies, &amp;quot;You know, when I was young, I loved to be intimidating. I loved it because I wasn&amp;#039;t that secure maybe. As I&amp;#039;ve gotten more secure, it hasn&amp;#039;t seemed as necessary.&amp;quot; She pauses and looks out the window toward the setting sun. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve really tried to use success to grow. I think you can use success in two ways. You can either become arrogant, or you can become more humble and pay more attention to other people. I hope I do that.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/trends/a161/diane-von-furstenberg-0807/>