“So, where do we start?” Step inside Diane von Furstenberg’s Venetian home
PHOTOGRAPHY JUERGEN TELLER
CREATIVE PARTNER DOVILE DRIZYTE
Diane von Furstenberg’s longest love affair is with Venice. Juergen Teller photographs the designer’s opulent palazzo, as Scarlett Conlon meets her, to discover how the history of the city and the tale of the woman are intertwined.
Venice in January is a special season to behold. The waters of the Grand Canal, usually heaving with gondolas, traghetti, and crowded vaporetti, are empty but for a few private water taxis. In the dusky streets of the Dorsoduro neighborhood, groups of chic Venetians wrapped up in tweed coats and felt Borsalino hats chat over late-afternoon cicchetti. The mood is one of restful hibernation, its official moniker of La Serenissima — meaning “the most tranquil” or “the most serene” — never better experienced than in this preparatory mode.
Just a few meters away, on the piano nobile of the storied 15th-century Palazzo Giustinian Brandolini, Diane von Furstenberg is nestled behind her desk in her salon, curled up on her favorite Paul Evans swivel chair and tapping away on her phone. As she swirls around to greet me, she flashes that warm and knowing smile that has beamed out from countless catwalks and magazine covers. She straightens her dusty-pink pashmina before beckoning me to follow her towards a decorative 19th-century wrought-iron daybed, where we sink into the plumpest of cushions to chat.
Von Furstenberg has just jetted in from New York the day before, fresh from celebrating her 79th birthday on December 31. “It just feels so good to be here, especially with what is going on in the world,” she says, as she lies back and takes a deep exhale gazing up to the hand-painted ceilings above. “These ceilings are so reassuring to me, because I lie here and worry it’s the end of the world. And then I think, these ceilings have been here for 600 years… so, you know.” Overlooking the Grand Canal, the salon is the grandest of rooms, but feels ridiculously cozy.
Vases are bursting with pink peonies and ranunculus, while glossy clementines and chocolates wrapped in metallic foil are dotted around in Murano glass bowls. Frank Lloyd Wright lamps on dimmers, and a double-faced sofa in the middle of the room, ensure there is no shortage of inviting places to perch. “When you have a huge space, the most important thing is that you know what each room is for and then, all of a sudden, it’s not that big any more,” she smiles. “This is a place where I can think, speak on the phone. I can receive people.”
This afternoon, however, it’s just us. “So, where do we start? she smiles, gently pushing her famous auburn curls away from her face. We’re here to discover von Furstenberg’s Venice: She has had a six-decade love affair with the city, which she first fell in love with as a teenager. On this return visit, she is in a forward-thinking mood.
“When the new year comes, I always write my diary and I pick my words for the year.” This year’s words are wisdom, imagination, and magic. “Wisdom is your knowledge and who you are. Then imagination is your ideas and your dreams. And magic is where you let go,” she says. “This year is probably my last decade — or maybe I have a little more, I hope — but I am preparing and setting the scene.” Venice, she says, “is my stage, and this is where…” she pauses. “I don’t want to sound arrogant, but it is the right word — I have chosen I will rule from, for the winter of my life.”
Born in Belgium in 1946, von Furstenberg first visited Venice on a day trip with her father and brother when she was 17. “The night before, I had a secret, passionate love affair on the beach with some Italian boy,” she smiles. “The next morning, I was just a little girl with her family visiting Venice, but it was the first time I really felt like a woman.” She points up to the sprawling shelves behind us covered in books, albums, and silver photo frames. “There, I have the picture of us all on that trip, my brother found it.”
Her next encounter was just as intoxicating. It was with her then-boyfriend, soon-to-be husband, Prince Egon von Furstenberg, that she first stepped over the threshold of Palazzo Giustinian Brandolini aged 20. It was, as it remains to this day, the home of Egon’s aunt, Cristiana Brandolini d’Adda, Contessa di Valmareno, sister of Egon’s mother, Clara. They were both granddaughters of Fiat founder Giovanni Agnelli, and naturally the parties were legendary.
“I saw glamor for the first time in Venice,” she recalls. “It was during the film festival and all those balls with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim — I mean, it was just the most glamorous thing.” After her divorce from Egon in 1983, the designer continued to visit Venice each year (“I’ve been to Venice with every man in my life”). Remaining close with Egon and the Contessa, who is now 99 years old and lives on the floor above von Furstenberg, she would frequently visit her for lunch in between sailing the Mediterranean with her second husband, Barry Diller, on their 305ft yacht, Eos.
On one trip, von Furstenberg read historian Thomas F. Madden’s, Venice: A New History which provided a lightbulb moment. “People have always asked me, who is your mentor? Who is your role model? And I couldn’t come up with anything. As I was reading this book, I started to imagine Venice as a woman and I realized that she invented everything… she became the most extraordinary architect, building this masterpiece of the city; then needed boats, so she started making flatboats,” she says, leaning forward and gesturing outside the window. “She was a maritime engineer and [later] a merchant… of spices, jewels, and fabric. Because she was a merchant, she needed finance. So, she invented the banking system. Countries needed representation, so she invented the embassies, passports, customs.” Venice is, she concludes, “my muse of all time.”
She sits back, calmly. “We had [film director] Stephen Daldry with us on that trip and I started fantasizing about making a movie.” She won’t be drawn on the possibility of a producer credit in the near future. “I do intend to make a movie about it,” she says seriously, sipping her herbal tea infusion. “But I can’t talk about it yet.” Recounting her enlightenment to the Contessa in 2022, it was suggested that von Furstenberg rent the first-floor 11-room apartment she now resides in. “She told me if I took it then the whole palazzo would be family again.”
This personification of Venice draws a striking parallel with von Furstenberg’s own early trajectory. Having fallen hard for New York City on her first visit with Egon in February 1969 (“It was dirty, it was dangerous, but it was cheap, with artists and painters everywhere”), she returned to Italy where she convinced the owner of a Lake Como jersey factory to make her samples so that she could go back to the States and sell them.
Two months later, during a romantic rendezvous in Rome, she conceived her first child, Prince Alexander, with Egon, and the pair decided to get married. Determined to make her own money, she struck up a deal with the factory owner. “I said, ‘Listen, I’m pregnant, I’m getting married, I’m moving to America. But I absolutely need to be independent. I will not take money from my husband. And so you have to make me samples and give me good terms.” What started as a wrap top soon morphed into the very first iterations of the iconic DVF wrap dress in snake and leopard print. “I was not particularly interested in fashion, but I was interested in making a woman feel sexy,” she says. “I was a young pretty girl, so I just made what I wanted for myself.”
By the time her second child, Princess Tatiana, had arrived in February 1971, the business was struggling. “I’m 24 years old, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” she recalls. But through sheer determination, things took off. By 1973, she was making and importing 25,000 wrap dresses a week while playing mother, designer, spokesperson, saleswoman, style icon, princess. She was still only 26 years old.
“I was a huge success, and I was on the cover of Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and Interview magazine,” she smiles. “And then I had my husband, who was extremely promiscuous and would sleep with everybody. So, at the same time, I had to be cool, because I didn’t want to be like a betrayed wife. So, I had a lot of things to deal with at the same time.” The pair soon separated. “But we stayed very close — I mean, I loved him. I was with him when he died.”
Of all the many hats DVF has worn, “becoming a woman in charge and completely independent, is what I wanted to be. And the reason was a dress. I was able to share the confidence because women would buy the dress. So not only did I become in charge, but I became a conduit for other women to become in charge.”
The designer credits her mother, Liliane Halfin, for instilling that sense of fearlessness. Having survived the Holocaust and imprisonment at Auschwitz, she was advised by her doctor that she wouldn’t survive childbirth. A year later, von Furstenberg was born. “My mother used to say, ‘God saved me so I could give you life’,” she says. “The one thing she never allowed me to be is afraid. Fear was not an option. She taught me to never be a victim.”
Von Furstenberg’s personal history can be felt all over her palazzo, which her friend Chahan Minassian helped her design. The ‘studio’ boasts replicas of the eight flags she commissioned for the 2025 Biennale depicting Venice in all her many roles, hanging proudly on the wall. Beneath them is a 1972 Frank Gehry dining table, crafted from corrugated cardboard, surrounded by 16 tubular steel Venetian director chairs; this is where she and her team like to work.
In 2024, she bought her eponymous brand back from Chinese licensee Glamel, and so is busier than ever. “It was important, because I didn’t like the product and now is the moment that I’m preparing the full future,” she says. She is also busy planning the 17th edition of the DVF Awards — the fifth in Venice — appropriately celebrating women who have demonstrated courage, strength and leadership.
She glides into the adjacent living room where two of the four silk-screen 1974 Andy Warhol portraits of the designer wearing her first wrap dress hang above the fireplace. “In the 1980s, there were another five. He had given me one, and when he died I bought them all,” she says, walking out on to the wisteria-lined terrace overlooking the Università Ca’ Foscari that specializes in modern languages. (Von Furstenberg herself speaks French, English, Italian and Spanish fluently, with a little German and Russian. “When you speak four, you speak more,” she shrugs).
Pausing in the grand ballroom to play Ballake Sissoko through her speakers, we then drift into her bedroom. The bed was made by another friend, renowned furniture designer Dakota Jackson, for her 30th birthday in 1976 and is the item she has owned the longest. “I had a lot of fun in that bed. Then it spent 30 years in a warehouse — now it’s back to life.” Von Furstenberg spends no more than seven hours asleep in it and rises with the sun. “I don’t think I’ve ever used an alarm.”
In the next-door room — “the more formal salon” — 18th-century rococo oil paintings are mounted on hot-pink ikat fabric wallpaper with thick-pile wild-cat carpets DVF designed for her series with The Rug Company. Von Furstenberg opens the doors to the balcony. “And here is the Grand Canal,” she says proudly. “You know, in the middle of the night when I’m all alone, I look at this and I think, ‘this is eternity’.”
There’s “something new” that von Furstenberg has been thinking about and wants to share: “So, you’re the mountain; and with age, your mountain becomes thicker because you have more experiences and more things growing on the mountain — trees and whatever,” she smiles. “It’s very important that you see yourself as such. Other people can come and go, but you are the mountain.”
The analogy seems to be a poignant statement for this period of her life. “The first thing that I wanted to achieve in life was to be in charge,” she says. “Now that I am in charge, I have to stay in charge and staying in charge means that you have to have enough time to be on your own, and to stay true to yourself. But I have discovered the power of kindness. The power of kindness is fantastic, because kindness is like a currency and it compounds, just like money. And generosity is the best investment.”
During our tour, a friend — who has just arrived in Venice — calls, and von Furstenberg insists his whole group comes for dinner. “I have an open house, I try not to go anywhere when I’m here and I like hosting as much as possible,” she smiles.
They’re arriving shortly and so it’s time for her regular evening walk. As she grabs her coat and keys and pops her hood up, the blue sparkle of the magic-eye ring on her finger catches the light. “I think this was the first piece of jewelry I ever bought myself after I was successful, and I recently rediscovered it and I like wearing it again.”
It feels like a full-circle moment for von Furstenberg as she double kisses and points me in my direction. Slowly, she disappears out of sight, and I can’t help but think of her embodying the true essence of her beloved La Serenissima: The most tranquil, the most serene and, as ever, prepared for what’s to come.
PHOTOGRAPHY JUERGEN TELLER
CREATIVE PARTNER DOVILE DRIZYTE
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First photography assistant Felipe Chaves
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