Diane von Furstenberg 2024 Interview on Her Career, New Book and Italian Home

“It was a complete accident that I ended up here,” says Diane von Furstenberg, sitting on a brown couch in the piano nobile (the second floor of a palace where Italian aristocrats traditionally live) of Palazzo Brandolini, one of Venice’s most venerable buildings. Three generations of the patrician Brandolini family still occupy apartments in the sprawling 15th-century palace overlooking the Grand Canal, but von Furstenberg has taken a long-term lease on the grand main floor, where she plans to spend several months of the year. After a lengthy renovation, she has just moved in. As we saw in a recent documentary Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Poweris a not-so-fashionable fairy godmother pensioner who hasn’t done anything in 77 years. But in Venice she found the makings of a magnificent finale. “This will be the scene of the winter of my life,” she announces.

Facade of the palace situated on the Grand Canal.

For decades, von Furstenberg has returned to Venice at the end of every summer, when she and her husband, media mogul Barry Diller, sail into town on the Eos, their majestic three-masted schooner, just in time for the glamorous Venice International Film Festival. When she’s not attending premieres or star-studded balls, she loves to briskly stroll the city’s labyrinth of car-free streets. callas AND Court.

In fact, it’s no accident that she’s here. The first of her many visits came almost 60 years ago, when her first husband, Prince Egon von Furstenberg, took her to meet his aunt Cristiana, the granddaughter of Fiat founder Giovanni Agnelli, who became chatelaine of the palace when she married Count “Brando” Brandolini d’Adda in 1947. Early in their marriage, when the couple realized that the ballroom-sized salons of the piano nobile weren’t exactly cozy places to raise their four sons, they moved to the upper floor. The 97-year-old contessa still reigns there today, while her grandson Marcantonio, 33, lives in a ground-floor apartment overlooking the garden.

DVF lives in a piano nobile in a palace. Her neighbors are Cristiana Brandolini d’Adda, her son Brandino and his son Marcantonio.

Two years ago, von Furstenberg’s love affair with Venice took a decisive turn. Over lunch with Cristiana, she spoke passionately about the city’s past, and also about its future. As she recalls, she said, “Venice is the mother of all logistics. In the last 1,500 years, it invented everything: the banking system, passports, diplomacy, double-entry bookkeeping… Today, we have the information revolution, and everything is changing, so I thought Venice would be a good stage to gather people to try to invent the future. Venice has the opportunity to re-invent the world.” Cristina replied, “If you feel that strongly about it, why don’t you take the piano nobile? Then the palazzo will be just a family again.” (In recent decades, the floor has been rented to various tenants, most notably the San Francisco socialite Dodie Rosekrans, who brought in Tony Duquette to renovate it.)

The paintings in this room were bought by Cristian Brandolini d’Adda when she lived in the apartment. The table and lamp were designed by Parisian designer Chahan Minassian.

After that lunch, von Furstenberg entered the Gritti Hotel and ran into Chahan Minassian, from whom she had bought beautiful furniture (notably the Brutalist-inspired sculptural metalwork made in the 1970s by Paul Evans) when Minassian had run a gallery in the United States a decade earlier. Now an interior designer based in Paris, he had recently purchased an apartment in Venice, he told her. She hired him on the spot to redesign the piano nobile at the Palazzo Brandolini.

Nearly two years of painstaking work followed, restoring the apartment’s venerable stucco, marble, and woodwork, and updating its historic fixtures. Then came the “fun part,” as Minassian describes it. After von Furstenberg’s directive that she “don’t want it to look like an old lady’s apartment,” he brought a modern sensibility (and countless yards of custom Fortuna fabric) to the apartment while respecting its baroque background. He designed sizable metal armoires, tables, and bookcases—many of them on casters. “In Diane’s mind, we’re nomads and travelers, part of a caravanserai, so everything had to be able to move,” Minassian says.

For her part, von Furstenberg brought items from her homes in Connecticut and Paris, such as a Frank Gehry cardboard table and several Evans works. While rummaging through her storage units, she also pulled out a few items she hadn’t seen in decades, including a massive Art Deco bed that her mother had given her for her 30th birthday. “I had a great time in bed,” she says.

When she finally hung a pair of Andy Warhol silkscreen portraits from 1974, she knew she was home. But she sees the apartment as a place of work, not a place for frivolous socializing. “Everything is planned so I can have people, we can have conferences, raise the level of debate,” she says. “I’ll try to bring interesting people here.” Her team includes a top chef.

Forget about borrowing a cup of sugar. Neighbor Marcantonio Brandolini joins DVF for lunch.

Toto Bergamo Rossi, director of Venetian Heritage, says, “You never know who you’re going to meet when Diane invites you out for lunch or dinner. She’s one of the most connected people in the world.” In addition to the likes of Hillary Clinton and Jeff Bezos, Rossi recalls meeting “the guy who invented the AI ​​app.” Altman himself? “I’ve known him for years,” von Furstenberg says. “He spent four days with me in January, after Davos. I told him, ‘You need to work on your character.’ ” Apparently, the OpenAI CEO was listening. “Suddenly, he was Einstein!” he says. “Now he says to me, ‘Do you think character Is he doing okay?’ I say yes.” Moral of the story: “We are all characters. We have to invent the person we want to be.”

Von Furstenberg’s convening power was on full display last August, when she hosted the DVF Awards, an annual awards show she founded in 2010 to recognize, support, and amplify the voices of extraordinary women. Winners (who include Jane Goodall, Women of Afghanistan, and Ava DuVernay) receive a $100,000 grant from the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation to benefit a nonprofit of their choice. For most of the first decade of the DVF Awards, the ceremony was held at the United Nations. That was followed by one-off events in Washington (at the Library of Congress, where Ruth Bader Ginsburg was honored) and Paris (at the Opéra Garnier, where Melinda French Gates was honored). Three years ago, von Furstenberg began organizing the event in Venice. This year, as the initiative celebrates its 15th anniversary, its founder wanted to stand out across the board. The gala dinner, held at the Teatro alle Tese in the historic Arsenale, was attended by 350 guests from around the world. Six people were among those honored, including Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand, and Xiye Bastida, a 22-year-old Mexican climate justice and indigenous rights activist.

Von Furstenberg’s next project is a book that will tell the story of Venice’s 1,500-year history through the lens of La Serenissima, the city’s allegorical female soul. “Venice is a woman,” she says. “I never wanted to be another woman, but I would like to be Venice.” For this endeavor, she has recruited Thomas F. Madden, distinguished professor and director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University in Missouri. She found him after reading his book Venice: A New History“I just read your book. It’s fantastic. I need to talk to you right away,” read the email she sent him.

“I’m a medieval historian, so I don’t know much about fashion designers,” he says. “I was just about to delete it when I asked my daughter, ‘Have you heard of Diane von Furstenberg?’” Madden is now collaborating on her book, which he describes as “kind of intoxicating… She sees Venice as something much bigger than just historical history. She really sees it as something beneficial to the world. As a historian, I tend to look to the past. She sees the past being used in the future.”

All this activity comes just after DVF appointed a new CEO for its brand, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Power, documentary that sparked a flurry of publicity. Though her story is well-known — daughter of a Holocaust survivor, jet-setter, business mogul, creator of the evergreen wrap dress — the film was still groundbreaking, even considering its subject matter. She describes watching it for the first time as “like 90 minutes at the gynecologist.”

In two days at the palace, I rarely see von Furstenberg stand still for a moment. Even posing for photos here — her third City and Country cover story — was constantly on the move, bravely climbing to the tops of dizzying bookshelves or sprawling on rugs, then jumping up to see what the photos looked like on the photographer’s laptop. “This is very DVF,” she proclaims, pointing to the photo. “I’ve been DVF for a long time. I know what that looks like.” Overall, she’s pleased: “Not bad for 77 fucking years old.”

Our visit ends with a special surprise: a dinner upstairs, hosted by the contessa and attended by her son Brandino and his son Marcantonio, who both have apartments on the estate. “I’ve known Diane for ages, so it’s so normal to see her here. And she has such wonderful views of the future of Venice,” says Brandino, who runs Vistorta, a large family estate that produces outstanding wine. Marcantonio, who runs Laguna B, the glassmaking company founded by his late mother, Marie, enjoys the brisk walks he and von Furstenberg take. “There’s just one problem: she’s faster than me,” he says. The matriarch, for his part, says it’s “fantastic” to have DVF under his roof. “She knows how to live!”

Back at home in the evening, von Furstenberg finally slows down. At night, he says, he likes to gaze up at the richly painted beams that span the 21-foot ceilings and think about all the drama that must have played out in these rooms over the centuries. “You can imagine all the intrigue that happened here: the deals, the marriages, the murders . . . all the jewels, the fine silks.” In a few years, future residents may marvel at the tales of what DVF has done here. It’s still early days in von Furstenberg’s Venice era, but be warned. “This place hasn’t even started yet,” he says.

Photographs by Thomas Whiteside

In the top picture: Diane von Furstenberg in Venice. She recently moved into the famous Palazzo Brandolini, dating back to the 15th century.

This story will appear in the October 2024 issue of the magazine. City and country. SIGN UP NOW

Journalist and writer whose areas of interest include: Vanity fairReginato is the author Growing Up Getty