Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Diane von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge’ on Hulu, Where The Fashion Icon Attributes Her Success and Happiness To “Living A Man’s Life In A Woman’s Body”

Fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg came from humble beginnings as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and in the new documentary Diane von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge, she explains that her success and her absolute enjoyment of life is “revenge” for the oppression and horrors her mother faced. The documentary, which is out now on Hulu, is a biography of the woman made famous by the wrap dress, but it’s also a masterclass in how to live a good life: In addition to her talent and success in business, she embraced life and pursued her passions when doing so as a woman wasn’t easy, thanks to an abiding belief that women deserve all the same things as men.

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG: WOMAN IN CHARGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The film opens on old clip of Diane von Furstenberg appearing on David Letterman’s show in 1980. As he introduces her, he says, “Welcome the woman who reinvented the dress. Is that right? Reinvented the dress?” It’s obvious that Letterman isn’t familiar with DVF and her wrap dress, and his laughter feels a little dismissive, but when she takes a seat, she proves no match for Dave, owning her success and getting laughs with her deadpan responses.

The Gist: Diane von Furstenberg’s life story would be fascinating enough if she hasn’t become one of the most influential and successful women in fashion of all time. Her mother, Lily Halfin, was liberated from Auschwitz 18 months before Diane’s birth. Malnourished and in poor health, she married her fiancé but was told she wouldn’t be able to have children. “God sent me Diane,” Lily says in an archival interview, as she explains how her defiant, rule-breaking daughter arrived in this world.

Diane’s relationship with Lily was the foundation for her independence and her strength, though it was tinged with tough love we might consider too harsh by today’s standards. After Lily left Diane’s father and remarried, Diane was sent to boarding school, an experience she loved, and where she experimented sexually with both men and women.

In the ’60s, she began a relationship with Prince Egon von Furstenberg, and that began her initiation “into the jet set,” she explains. A Jewish girl marrying a German prince in the decades after World War II was also a statement, and Egon’s father was not wholly supportive, often making derisive anti-Semitic remarks to Diane and her children.

At the same time, she became friendly with Italian textile designer Alberto Ferretti, and that’s when she began designing her now-signature wrap dress, inspired by the wrap tops that ballet dancers would wear.

The film delves into her relationship with Egon (whose sexuality lead them toward divorce; they would remain close until his death from AIDS), her motherhood, and her career, and includes interviews with Oprah, Hillary Clinton, Marc Jacobs, and Fran Leibowitz – a Venn Diagram of people from different sectors, but who, like DVF, have been at the very top of their respective fields. It also delves into her sexual affairs (“I was with Warren Beatty and Ryan O’Neal in the same weekend, how about that?” she boasts), she describes turning down a threesome with Mick Jagger and David Bowie. “I was having a man’s life in a woman’s body. Yes. God, yes,” she says in a way that suggests that’s the only way to do it.

Sure, she has had personal and professional highs and lows, but you never get the sense that the lows slowed her down for long, and the movie suggests that she was such a visionary that all of the risks she took paid off. While it’s fun to be regaled with anecdotes from her A-list celebrity existence, the stories about her low points and her mother’s struggles, her resilience in the face of her hardest moments are vital to who she is and who she has become.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? There are plenty of movies about women who have been ahead of their time or defied the odds to get ahead despite facing personal and systemic challenges, like RBG, or Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.

Our Take: While discussing her career with fashion curator Nicolas Lor, von Furstenberg tells him, “I don’t think that I had a vocation for fashion, I had a vocation to be a woman in charge. To be a free woman.” That’s the central thesis of this documentary, because while it’s true that DVF created an iconic item of clothing that did “reinvent the dress,” as Letterman said, she was born and bred to live a life that was fulfilling and made her own mother’s experience at Auschwitz mean something. Her mother would tell her that she was her “torch of freedom,” and that’s a phrase that’s special to their relationship, it’s something Diane seems to have taken seriously as she charted her own course, her own path to freedom.

As a fashion designer, she also created a path to freedom for the countless women who purchased her iconic wrap dress, with it’s recognizable silhouette and the fact that it symbolized the arrival of a specific type of woman, sexy, while also professional and modern. Though it wasn’t inexpensive, it was still more affordable than other high fashion brands, and it was a style that was accessible to women everywhere. Listening to von Furstenberg discuss her career, what’s remarkable is how ahead of her time she seemed to be, and how, even in the ’70s, her ethos as a woman in business is still pretty much the same as it is today, even though the world around her took some time to catch up to her.

She lived her own life as a direct response to being the child of a Holocaust survivor and she took nothing for granted, but the film doesn’t shy away from what appears to be her biggest weakness, being attuned to the needs of her children when they were young. (Diane openly discussed a letter written by her daughter Tatiana when Tatiana was a child, that accused Diane of not really knowing who Tatiana was. Diane says she hung the letter on the wall, and she doesn’t act embarrassed by it; to her, this seems to have been a moment of learning and understanding rather than a parenting fail.) In fact, nothing in Diane’s life comes off as a failure or a flaw, because she seems to own every single thing. It’s a perspective that feels refreshing, because even when she wasn’t in control of her narrative and the media tried to define her, she somehow always managed to reshape her own narrative.

Sex and Skin: Diane is frank about her past and her desire to have fun with both men and women and she and her kids speak openly about her sex life. There are some photos of bare breasts (mostly belonging to revelers at Studio 54) but nothing in the film is sexually explicit.

Parting Shot: An army of women dressed in the signature DVF wrap dress dance along the banks of the Seine in Paris to the Rolling Stones’ “Shes a Rainbow,” and then a quote, handwritten by Diane, appears onscreen that reads “Be the woman you want to be!”

Performance Worth Watching: Diane is the center of this film’s universe and she comes across as wise and charming, but the thing is, she seems to have surrounded herself with people who are equally charming and wise and have nothing but obvious warmth and love for her. One-percenter billionaires aren’t usually my type, but Diane’s husband Barry Diller comes across as so reverential and admiring of her that he seems like a cuddly teddy bear (who could buy and sell half of New York if he wanted to).

Memorable Dialogue: Diane is a quote machine, and she provides at least a dozen amazing, sometimes empowering statements during the film. A couple of favorites: “My roots are Jewish and my mother paid for that. I was her revenge,” Diane says at one point. It was her response to her anti-Semitic father-in-law’s disappointment that his son married a Jew, but moreso, it speaks to her desire to live life to the fullest as a response to her mother’s past. At another point, when the filmmakers ask Diane, who was surrounded by powerful men for much of her young adulthood, if anyone ever did anything that made her uncomfortable, she replies, “I cannot say that anyone has done anything that made me uncomfortable. I would never give anyone that much credit.”

Our Call: STREAM IT! Though I knew a little bit about DVF, mostly in the context of her life in fashion, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge makes it clear that It’s an inspiring look at someone whose success would not have been possible without an acute understanding of her history and her sense of self-worth.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.