Diane von Furstenberg on Aging and Threesomes

Diane von Furstenberg isn’t aging, she’s life-ing. The phrasing is a quote Pamela Anderson gave to People, and I can’t help but think about it as I watch von Furstenberg’s forthcoming documentary Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge. I told von Furstenberg as much during a press conference for the new film. She smiles and repeats it back to me—“life-ing”—while nodding her head. “I’m going to steal that.”

Even at 77 years old, von Furstenberg feels like the most youthful spirit in the room. She enters the press conference with a radiant smile and her arm up high as if she’s waving to a parade of people, greeting the room full of journalists with a sunny and elongated “Hiii!”

Before von Furstenberg and the women behind her documentary (co-directors Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Trish Dalton and producers Fabiola Beracasa Beckman and Tracy Aftergood) even take their seats for the day’s panel, the designer exclaims, “We were just on my bed,” like a giddy middle-schooler at a sleepover.

Her youthfulness translates on-screen. The documentary’s opening montage includes a clip of a charming 34-year old von Furstenberg on The David Letterman Show, flashes of archival photographs and magazine spreads, and a roster of her A-list friends, including Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Anderson Cooper, and Karlie Kloss. The 31-year-old supermodel says it best: “I think DVF is one of the youngest people that I’ve ever met—the first one on the dance floor, the last one at the party.”

Then, the bassy '70s disco track playing in the background stops, and the film cuts to von Furstenberg quietly climbing into her bathroom sink. She stares at herself in the mirror, taking in every crease and beauty mark, as she starts to apply moisturizer.

“I don’t understand why so many people do not embrace age. I’ve always been attracted by wrinkles, you know? Age means living,” she says. “You shouldn’t say how old you are, you should say how long have you lived.”

She continues as she applies a mauve lipstick, blends her foundation in with a brush, and fixes her hair, “If you take all your wrinkles away, you know, the map of your life is different. I don’t really want to erase anything from my life…I’ve had a full life. I’m 76; I should be 300.”

Von Furstenberg has no shortage of life she has lived. The documentary chronicles remarkable moments, including the founding and reinvention of her iconic wrap dress, her marriage to Prince Edouard Egon von Fürstenberg when she was just 22, and her embracing of sexual freedom—she even shares that she declined a threesome with Mick Jagger and David Bowie back in the '70s, when she was an It girl at Studio 54. “I was having a man’s life in a woman’s body,” she reflects.

She was—and still is—living for herself. “You live your life. You design your own life,” she says during the press conference. “The lesson I can give all of you—because you’re very young and I’m much older—is that the most important thing is to be true to yourself. And if you stay true to yourself, which is not easy, then you are free.”

Von Furstenberg simultaneously embodies the curious, optimistic spirit of a child and the warm, wise aura of a grandmother (which she is). “I’m entering the winter of my life,” she tells InStyle on the red carpet of the documentary’s Tribeca Film Festival premiere. “I hope that I can share my experience, my knowledge, my resource[s], my connection[s] to help women to be the women they want to be.”

Despite her youthful air, von Furstenberg reveals in the film she thinks about dying “all the time,” and always has. “But with zero fear,” she adds.

In the closing scene, she takes Obaid-Chinoy through a cemetery: “My resting place, where I will become a mushroom,” she says cheerfully. Von Furstenberg has changed out of the dress that popularized her initials globally, and into something a joyful little girl might put together: cheetah-print joggers, chunky pink hiking boots, a mustard-yellow and white vest layered over a striped sweater of various candy-colored hues, and a blue and purple patterned scarf.

“They say ‘Life is a journey, and death is the destination,’ so we die for sure, so I can’t even understand people who don’t think about it,” she shares. “I don’t think I could live without thinking that I could die at any time, because that allows me to have more gratitude and to enjoy life.”

She wears this lesson with pride—literally. On the carpet, she dons a draping long-sleeve dress emblazoned with a pattern of white swans outlined in pink, something she says she picked out at the last minute. “The Swan Lake is a little bit where I am in my life now.”

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