Free Diane von Furstenberg by Gioia Diliberto

kinds of clothes they’d wear to go dancing at a nightclub—short party dresses or sexy pants outfits. Diane arrived on Egon’s arm dressed like her mother in a black and white Chanel suit with a white blouse and foulard, clutching the chain of a shoulder bag. In a photograph Cicogna took of her that evening, she looks pale and scared.
    DIANE HAD HEARD STORIES ABOUT Manhattan, about its swank eateries and smart hotels, its neon glamour and Wall Street zest. When she told her mother about Egon’s invitation, Lily gave her a plane ticket as a twenty-second birthday present. Lily knew Diane would be staying with Egon and his roommate, Baron Stanislaus Lejeune, at their apartment at York and Eighty-First Street. Diane told her father, however, that she would be living with a girl named Suzanne Lejeune. She knew he’d disapprove of her bunking with a man “and this way he could still write to me [in care of] S. Lejeune,” Diane recalls.
    She left Paris on a cold night in January 1969. As the jumbo jet lifted higher and higher, Diane looked out the window. The tall, twinkling city had flattened out to resemble a swath of black silk spattered with crystals and paillettes. The journey that would change her life had begun.

New York
    D iane fell in love with New York the moment she stepped from the taxi onto the pavement in front of Egon’s building and got her first whiff of Manhattan air—that heady mix of glamour, power, danger, grittiness, and wealth. This was where she belonged.
    At Egon’s side she entered the recherché world where society and celebrity meet. The old guard in New York admired Gianni Agnelli, the rich and influential head of Fiat, and embraced his charming, handsome nephew. It didn’t hurt that Egon himself was a prince, a title that gave him a magical glow, invoking romance, fairy-tale endings, and an exotic history of palace riches and court intrigues. Since moving to New York, Egon had been invited everywhere—to Park Avenue dinners and grand charity balls, to gallery openings and polo games in Southampton. Now he took Diane with him. She met everyone from Diana Vreeland and Andy Warhol to Brooke Astor, Nan Kempner, and Truman Capote. Painfully aware that she was included on guest lists because she wasEgon’s girlfriend, “Diane tried desperately to fit in,” says the writer Bob Colacello, who met her soon after he arrived in New York.
    “Egon introduced me to all these [society] girls who’d take me to lunch at 21 and La Grenouille, and they’d explain to me how ‘if you sit on that side, it’s Siberia,’” and social suicide, “and it all felt so strange,” says Diane.
    The sixties had been a time of freaks and hippies, of political activism and radical chic. Soon the revolutionary spirit, faux and otherwise, would be overtaken by the dawn of the disco decade with its hedonistic brew of style, irresponsibility, indulgence, and glitz. At the fringes was the drug- and sex-soaked demimonde that thrived in the downtown clubs and gay bars. Egon moved effortlessly through the night worlds of New York. “He was in perpetual party mode,” says Colacello.
    Though Egon participated in the training program at Chase Manhattan, his banking career stalled. “He never really made any money,” says his son, Alex. Still, his family money enabled him to live comfortably, and Diane, as his live-in girlfriend, did not have to work.
    The idea of being a kept woman, though, horrified her. It contradicted everything about the life of freedom she craved. It also was an impediment to her most deeply held ambition—to be somebody. Since financial independence, Diane believed, was the first step to this end, she toyed with becoming a model. Francesco Scavullo, a fashion photographer best known for his portraits of celebrities such as Brooke Shields and Burt Reynolds, took pictures of her. But when Diane showed her portfolio to Wilhelmina Cooper, the head of Wilhelmina Models, the prestigious agency that