Diane von Furstenberg took a look back and then looked forward as she offered advice before a group of mostly female executives at AOL’s Makers conference.
The designer gave a talk Feb. 7 in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., at Makers, which is also the name of AOL’s platform aimed at providing women’s stories of leadership, offering jokes at times while also seeking to provide guidance based on her own life experiences.
Von Furstenberg took the audience back to May 1944, when her mother was 22 and working for the Resistance. She was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, managing to survive it. “My mother always wrote me for my birthday: ‘God saved me so that I could give you life and by giving you life, you gave me my life back. You are my torch of freedom.’ So this is my heritage.”
Related Articles
Von Furstenberg went on to detail her own life story including the start of her company.
You May Also Like
“I never felt glass ceilings because I always ended up working for myself,” she said. “For me, being a woman was always an advantage. It’s now decades later, only right now, for the first time after this election that I actually felt sexism. I had never felt that before. It’s the first time ever that somehow I’m feeling not so bold myself.”
The designer’s talk wasn’t filled with doom and gloom, and she instead chose to focus on empowerment.
“The most important thing today that I think we should all do is we should individually make sure that we are strong…every day and that we are confident so that our confidence can weave into…a beautiful, colorful fabric that we are proud of and that is indestructible,” she said.
Von Furstenberg, who practices Tai Chi, went on to talk about the ups and downs of her business, beginning with the wrap dress’s rise to success followed by a slowdown in sales that led to the licensing of the brand and then the relaunch of the business in the late Nineties.
“When I relaunched the company, I was probably feeling like a loser,” she said. “You have your doubts. But what happened the second time around was that I started to see that young girls were buying the old dresses in vintage shops and I really wanted to do it again and so I did it.”
She’s not stopping to rest on her laurels.
“It never ends,” she said. “I just turned 70…. Turning 70 is a real thing. You’re like a real senior citizen, so how am I going to position myself? What kind of person am I going to be and how am I going to be engaged? What I want to do now is use my voice for people who have no voice…to connect.”