Latest news with #DianeVonFurstenberg
Washington Post
a day ago
- Lifestyle
- Washington Post
A century ago, this designer set women free. And gave them pockets.
Claire McCardell, forgotten by too many, is the ingenious designer who understood that women could be comfortable and stylish. Imagine that. Naturally, she was an American, born in Frederick, Maryland, in 1905. McCardell put women in ballet slippers, denim, leggings, modern bathing suits, dolman sleeves, leotards and wrap dresses (decades before Diane von Furstenberg). She gave women pockets, which had long been deemed unseemly in female attire, even empowering and dangerous, as they could conceal love letters, money, a pistol. Nobel Prizes have been bestowed for less.
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Hollywood billionaire who smuggled a stray dog from Ireland and cloned her five times
For more than half a century, Barry Diller was one of the most feared men in Hollywood. When he ran 20th Century Fox, he once got so frustrated at an employee, he hurled a video tape at a wall. (The employee put a frame around the hole.) The American billionaire media executive, who has also headed up Paramount, IAC and Expedia, has won contentious lawsuits against competitors and close friends alike. Even his friend Oprah Winfrey said she was afraid to meet Diller the first time they had dinner. But with the publication of his new memoir, Who Knew, the world has learned that the gruff, terse, domineering Diller has a softer side. In the book, the 83-year-old mogul came out as gay, but also writes vividly about his love for his wife, the famed fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg – 'the miracle of my life' – whom he married in 2001, and her children and grandchildren. Diller calls them his family. He, who had distant parents and an abusive, heroin-addicted brother, also has several passages in the book describing how he cried at tough moments, both personal and professional. Nothing, however, makes Diller turn to mush like talking about his beloved late dog, Shannon, and her five cloned 'daughters' (though technically they're closer to replicas). READ MORE 'They're all little Irish girls,' Diller gushes. The billionaire hates talking about himself, but he is happy to talk to The Irish Times about Shannon and her clones – which are objects of fascination in Hollywood. 'How can you even describe what you love?' Diller says about Shannon, his late Jack Russell terrier, when asked to explain why he was so infatuated with her. 'She was a super dog. She was just the loveliest, most adventurous – she was a wondrous little animal.' Barry Diller's dogs Shannon and Evita when they met in 2013 Diller first saw Shannon when he was on holidays in Ireland in 1999. He cannot recall the town's name, but says it was 'south of Shannon, about 30 minutes by helicopter'. After having lunch in a small restaurant, he exited and saw his future pup on the street. She began following him around. He inquired about her owner and was told she belonged to a waitress. But when he saw the dog at another restaurant down the road the following day, he inquired again and was told the nameless puppy had no owner. 'I scooped her up,' says Diller. He was flying out that day. In an instant, the dog went from lonely and homeless in rural Ireland to a cosseted traveller on a private jet with a life most people can only dream of. En route back to the United States, they had a layover in Shannon Airport, and the puppy was nameless no more. He jokes that he told Shannon to hide in the back of the jet until they cleared customs. 'She made it to New York as an undocumented immigrant,' says Diller. They lived together at the von Dillers' Beverly Hills mansion until her death in 2014. It was a canine Cinderella story. Barry Diller with his dog. Photograph: Diane von Furstenburg Instagram The year before she died, some of Shannon's tissue was biopsied and shipped to a biotech company in South Korea. Upon arriving it was injected into an enucleated egg from a canine surrogate donor, thus becoming a cloned embryo, which was then inserted back into the surrogate. Six months later, the first clones were born, and delivered back to Diller in the United States. First came Dina (a play on DNA) and Evita, then Tess in 2016, Luna in 2021 and Bossie and Birdie in 2024. Diller says they all have the 'ethos' of Shannon, and that their personalities are only 'very slightly different'. Diller took Dina back to Ireland to 'explore her roots'. She lived a full life, living between Beverly Hills, their compound in Connecticut, the Carlyle Hotel in New York's Upper East Side, and their Art Deco yacht Eos. But she met an unfortunate end while in Costa Rica, hiking with Diller and von Fürstenberg. She was eaten by a crocodile. 'A country I'll never return to,' says Diller bitterly. Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller arrive on the carpet for the 2023 Met Gala. Photograph: EPA Diller was early to the animal cloning game, even among those who can afford the six-figure-per-clone price tag. Barbra Streisand cloned her Coton de Tulear in 2017, but chose a cheaper cloning service. Celebrities from Simon Cowell to Paris Hilton have publicly mused about doing the same with their own canine companions. Does Diller consider himself a trendsetter? 'We've given endless, endless details to people about our cloning experience, when they ask about it,' he says. It has been said that von Fürstenberg murmurs to friends that she is sure Diller will clone her, too. He writes in his memoir that she is the only woman he has ever loved. Does he plan on creating a carbon-copy wife to match his carbon-copy dogs? 'Of course,' he says, laughing.
Vogue
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Diane von Furstenberg Fall 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection
Looking through the clothes in the Diane Von Furstenberg resort collection, one word kept coming to mind: ease. Dresses and tops are made to simply pull on over the head; pants and skirts have elastic waists—zipper closures are few and far between. 'What I think is really important about DVF is how it made women feel in the '70s. They felt empowered, and they felt free, and they didn't feel constricted,' Nathan Jenden explained. 'It was really important to her and it's really important to me.' On his second official go-around at DVF, Jenden is carefully considering not only all of the different life events that women get dressed for, but all of the different women that count DVF as their go-to brand. For daytime there was soft tailoring in broken pinstripes that provided a playful take on 'power dressing,' worn with a sequined tweed bomber jacket; for evening, boho-inflected sheer gowns in arty plaids, sporty knitwear separates, and romantic-but-not-fragile ruffled and lace-trimmed dresses in pinstripes embedded with a secret 'love is life' message in the fabric (Said Jenden, 'This is Diane's mantra.') For the younger set, he did kicky mini skirt suits in knit houndstooth or Von Furstenberg's own favorite Ginkgo plant print; and lingerie-inspired matching tank tops and shorts. Outerwear was a strong component in the collection; many of the coats and jackets constructed to be reversible and featuring 'look at me' shaggy faux fur (in burgundy or hunter green), or bold geometric patterns. Animal print also played a starring role in both decadent and oversized '80s iterations, and abstracted pop-art takes that brought to mind Von Furstenberg's iconic portrait by Andy Warhol. You can't have a DVF collection without a wrap dress, and this season Jenden included both faithful and more modern takes on the style—the former included jumpsuits with wrap bodices, an architectural mini dress made from sequin tweed and jersey that had none of the vintage associations of the classic, and a shirt-dress style with buttons on the bodice. 'Some people say the [neckline on] the wrap dress is too low. And for me, all of these things are wardrobe problems. My job is to provide wardrobe solutions.'
WIRED
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
Barry Diller Invented Prestige TV. Then He Conquered the Internet
Jun 6, 2025 10:00 AM The mogul behind Fox, Expedia, and Tinder opens up about Steve Jobs—and his close friend Sam Altman. Barry Diller attends a conversation with Anderson Cooper at 92NY on May 20, 2025, in New York City. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:Of all the egomaniacal lions who ruled Hollywood during the 20th century gatekeeper era, very few made a brilliant pivot to the internet. The exception is Barry Diller. After leading programming at ABC, running Paramount, and supercharging Fox by launching its broadcast network in the late 1980s, Diller no longer wanted to work for anyone else. Either you are or you aren't , he said of independence. As a free agent he quickly grasped the power of interactivity and built an empire that includes Expedia Group, almost the entire online dating sector (Tinder, Match, OkCupid), and an online media lineup that includes People, which wrote a hit piece on him early in his career titled 'Failing Upwards.' In his absorbing memoir, Who Knew, the third act of Diller's career gets short shrift, as the road to becoming an internet billionaire is dispatched in a few dozen pages. The bulk of the book weaves his life as a not-quite-out gay man (who nonetheless passionately loves his iconic wife Diane von Furstenberg) with a deliciously dishy account of his Hollywood days. So as a WIRED kind of reader, I start our interview by calling him out on the tea shortage regarding his life in tech. With Diane von Fürstenberg in the Dominican Republic. Courtesy of Simon & Schuster 'What do you mean?' growls Diller, a notorious suffer-no-fools guy, who two weeks after publication is undoubtedly getting tired of book promotion. When I tell him I just wanted to hear wonderful details from his tech days, like the ones he shared about his earlier acts, his demeanor changes, and he cheerfully agrees with me. 'I did whiz by it,' he says of his internet triumphs, citing time constraints. (Note: the book was 15 years in the making.) 'It is something I should have done and I didn't do.' This is an essay from the latest edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter. SIGN UP for Plaintext to read the whole thing, and tap Steven's unique insights and unmatched contacts for the long view on tech. I try to make up for the omission in our conversation. To get things started, I remind him of a 1993 Ken Auletta New Yorker profile titled, 'Barry Diller's Search for the Future.' It describes Diller's quest for a post-Hollywood third act using the metaphor of his newly found obsession with an Apple PowerBook. A decade into the PC revolution, the idea of a media mogul actually using a computer was a novelty, and Auletta acted as if Diller had invented public key cryptography. But the PowerBook was critical, says Diller. During his first job, as a 20-year-old working the mail room at William Morris, he buried himself in the archives and tried to read every single file and contract to understand the nuances of the business. In every subsequent job, he set out to absorb voluminous information before making critical decisions. It was his superpower. With the Apple laptop now he could have all this data at his fingertips. 'I could do everything myself,' he says. 'Tech has basically rescued me from my own obsolescence.' In the early '90s—the perfect time to learn about the digital world, just before the boom—he went on a high-tech listening tour that included visits to Microsoft and the MIT Media Lab. 'My eyes were saucers,' he says. 'I ate every inch up.' He also met Steve Jobs on his tour, who showed him the first few reels of a movie he was working on called Toy Story . 'I've never had an aptitude for animation—I don't like it,' Diller says. 'Of course he was right and I was wrong. He pounded me to join the Pixar board, and I just didn't want to do it. Steve doesn't like to be turned down.' Diller describes his relationship with Jobs thereafter as tension-packed. He marveled at Jobs' business savvy but despised his scorched-earth tactics. 'The idea of having a 30 percent tax on going through the Apple store was, and is, an absolute outrage. It was pure Steve. But it's breaking apart now,' he adds, referring to recent antitrust litigation that he's clearly following. When the internet took off, Diller went on a buying binge. Some prizes are mostly forgotten—CitySearch?—but others were inspired. He convinced Microsoft's Steve Ballmer to sell him Expedia, and it became the centerpiece of a travel group that now includes Orbitz, and Vrbo. The total valuation of his companies is now over $100 billion. He credits most of it to 'luck, circumstance, and timing.' The book provides evidence that there's more to Diller's success than happenstance. Even before becoming his own boss, Diller operated like a founder. He joined ABC in his mid-twenties as a woefully inexperienced nobody, and bucked decades of tradition by arguing that the network should show films in prime time—and the ratings blockbuster Movie of the Week was born. Then he pushed ABC to make its own movies, and even created the mini-series, notably Roots . He invented prestige TV! When I tell Diller that this feat seemed to presage Netflix's entry into original content, he agrees, and adds a bit of commentary to Hollywood's current struggle with tech giants. 'The incumbents stood by while Netflix took their business away from them,' he says. Meanwhile, he says, Apple and Amazon started their streaming services with different business incentives—the former to keep people in its ecosystem, the latter to keep customers signed up to Prime. 'It's hard to compete against that,' he says 'It's not that these old media companies aren't going to survive. It's just they're never going to be the dominant player anymore. That's just gone.' Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier on the set of Love Among the Ruins, 1973. Courtesy of Simon & Schuster Attempting to shut down Diana Ross's Central Park concert amid thunderstorms, 1983 Courtesy of Simon & Schuster He writes that while the people he knows in the 'algorithmic' movie business are even richer than the ones he hung out with earlier in his career, 'I don't know anyone who is having any fun.' In our conversation, he extols the satisfying process of creating a narrative film and bringing it to market. In comparison, the best tech has to offer is something like Tinder. When he first saw its nascent form—it basically adopted the 'hot or not' format to a dating app—he saw great possibilities, and snapped up the team. Then came months of technical development. 'The result was something thrilling, but it pales in comparison to the creation of content,' he says. Diller, of course, is on top of the AI revolution. 'It's going to change so many things,' he says, comparing it to the shift from analog to digital. 'Do you know Sam Altman?' I ask. I should have known better. The man who just wrote a book dropping the name of every Hollywood royal of the past 40 years says, 'Sam is one of my closest friends, and has been since before he became Sam Altman.' Until recently, Altman sat on the Expedia board and helped the company integrate AI into the app. I mention that if ChatGPT had existed when Diller first worked in the William Morris mailroom, he wouldn't have had to painstakingly read every file. He could have simply uploaded the trove into a large language model and asked it questions. Anyone who did that would have Diller's superpower! 'I think you're right,' he says. 'That's why I think the future is unpredictable.' Unless, as Alan Kay once said, you invent it. With Calvin Klein and Doug Cloutier in Malibu Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
Daily Mail
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Hollywood agog over new memoir by Diane von Furstenberg's billionaire mogul husband in which he reveals he's been sleeping with countless men during their 50-year relationship... while she once bedded Warren Beatty and Ryan O'Neal in a single weekend
Billionaire movie mogul Barry Diller first met the 'deliriously glamorous' fashion queen Diane von Furstenberg at a super smart Manhattan dinner party in 1974. On that occasion the haughty Belgian creator of the iconic 1970s wrap dress snubbed the gauche movie man – as did her then husband, German playboy Prince Egon von Furstenberg, who immediately told Diller his trousers were too short. But when Barry and Diane met again months later, it was a very different story. The pair clicked and were soon in the grip of a torrid passion that spawned one of America's most formidable power couples. 'There was a glow around us that was setting off sparks . . . I was functioning without a brain, not a thought in my head, being willed on by pure primitive urges,' gushes the hard-nosed Hollywood executive in a highly revealing new autobiography. Diller, who was at that time the 32-year-old head of TV and film studio Paramount Pictures, and his 27-year-old lover were inseparable for most of the next 50 years, eventually marrying in 2001. But their relationship was unorthodox in the extreme. She was one of the world's most sexually voracious women, described by friends as the 'ultimate flirt' and even by Diller as unable 'to sit down without being louche'. She enjoyed a series of flings with other men, including an affair with the actor Richard Gere, which began in 1981 and led to a split with Diller that lasted a decade. Not that Diller was a choirboy himself. The big revelation in his new book, Who Knew, is that he is gay and enjoyed regular dalliances with men. Hardly surprising, then, that when the now 83-year-old told his wife, 78, that he planned to publish a tell-all memoir, she had just three words of warning: 'Just get ready'. Diller, estimated to be worth £3.4billion, was for decades one of the most formidable men in Hollywood, earning the nickname 'Killer Diller' for his ability to reduce even the most hardened executives to tears. But, despite his reputation, he avoided the limelight. And there was good reason for that, as he has now confirmed: he was terrified of being publicly outed at a time when being openly gay was still not accepted in Tinseltown. Diller has claimed to be taken aback by the excited media reaction to the revelation of his sexuality in his memoir published on Tuesday, since it was an open secret among Hollywood insiders. But even they assumed that his union with von Furstenberg had to be purely a marriage of convenience, a strictly platonic union. As the artist Andy Warhol once observed: 'I guess the reason Diller and Diane are a couple is because she gives him straightness and he gives her powerfulness.' But in Who Knew, Diller insists that nothing could have been further from the truth, describing their relationship as 'an explosion of passion that kept up for years'. He relates how they could barely keep their hands off each other after they met for the second time at a soirée a year after she first ignored him that night in 1974. 'While there have been a good many men in my life, there has only ever been one woman,' Diller says, adding: 'Yes, I also liked guys, but that was not a conflict with my love for Diane . . . I have never questioned my sexuality's basic authority over my life (I was only afraid of the reaction of others).' Within 24 hours of their second meeting, they were on von Furstenberg's sofa at her palatial Manhattan apartment 'wound around each other, making out like teenagers, something I hadn't done with a female since I was 16'. She promptly ditched another boyfriend (her relationship with the German prince was a marriage of convenience to conceal the fact he was bisexual) and they reconvened at Diller's LA mansion. In what he describes as an 'explosion of pent-up demand', Diller recalls them leaving friends by the pool to have sex in a guest house. Readers will have to decide whether these tales of unbridled passion are Diller's attempt to reassure his wife their marriage hasn't been a total sham. While he may not be a household name, in Tinseltown Barry Diller was a man to be reckoned with. At Paramount he was responsible for giving the green light to such classic films as The Godfather Part II, Saturday Night Fever, Grease and Raiders Of The Lost Ark. He later set up the Fox TV network with Rupert Murdoch and brought us The Simpsons, whose vicious, bullet-headed boss, Mr Burns, was reportedly inspired by Diller. He reveals in his book how he was once seated next to Princess Margaret at a Hollywood dinner shortly after the release of Saturday Night Fever in 1977. The late Queen's sister said she'd like to invite its star, John Travolta, for tea at her hotel. Diller duly arranged a meeting only for the actor to complain to him afterwards: 'She hit on me!' (Travolta was then 33, Margaret 47.) Diller is still revered as one of the most brilliant operators in Hollywood history and remains chairman of the digital media company IAC, but nowadays prefers to spend time on his 305ft schooner Eos, one of the world's biggest sailing yachts. He and von Furstenberg are often accompanied on trips by their friends Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his soon-to-be-wife Lauren Sanchez. It's clear von Furstenberg, who is proud to be 'sexually fluid' having reportedly slept with men and women by the score, knew about Diller's men. 'Today, he opened to the world,' she said this week. 'To me, he opened 50 years ago. All I can tell you is Barry and I have had an incredible life for 50 years. We have been lovers, friends, married, everything. And, you know, for me, the secret to honour life, and to honour love, is never to lie.' That's fine for her to say now – and Diller echoes her noble sentiments by insisting in the book that he never pretended he was straight – but the couple have spent years evading or ignoring questions about his personal life. A few months after their 2001 marriage, for instance, she made clear to Vanity Fair magazine that rumours their marriage was only platonic were entirely wrong and that 'everything has always been normal' in their relationship. 'We share the same bed,' she said. 'We go on vacation together . . . It's so weird that people can even ask.' By 2013, when she and Diller still retained separate homes in New York, von Furstenberg was sticking to the same script when a New York Times interviewer mentioned to her that there was 'a lot of curiosity' about their marriage. 'I don't understand what is there to understand,' she responded. 'This man has been my lover, my friend and he's now my husband. I've been with him for 35 years. At times we were separated, at times we were only friends, at times we were lovers, at times we're husband and wife, that's our life.' The following year, von Furstenberg published her own memoir – but nowhere in its 240 pages did she address her husband's sexuality. Her past coyness about discussing Barry's bedroom habits was definitely unusual for a sexual adventuress who delights in retelling tales of her conquests and who Vogue once dubbed 'an exotic cat woman seductress'. In a 2024 TV documentary, von Furstenberg boasted of how Mick Jagger and David Bowie once suggested she join them for a threesome: 'I considered it and I thought: 'OK, this is a great thing to tell your grandchildren, then I came back to the room and they were two little skinny things, and I didn't',' she recalled. She also revealed that while once staying at LA's Beverly Wilshire hotel, she slept with both Warren Beatty and Ryan O'Neal on the same weekend. 'How about that? I was very proud,' she said. The mother of two children (by first husband Egon) added: 'If I didn't have kids, I can't even imagine what I would have become, because I would've had no restraint.' (Her daughter Tatiana revealed that von Furstenberg was so remiss as a mother that it wasn't until she went to a doctor at the age of 21 that she discovered she had a serious neuromuscular condition, Brody myopathy, that causes weakness and cramps.) A 2015 biography of von Furstenberg, with which she collaborated, detailed how she continued to play the field in the years before she and Diller finally married. Leaving her two children at home with the nanny, she partied at New York's Studio 54 nightclub, where male couples would have sex in back rooms and drugs were passed around by bare-chested men. While she's denied being a lesbian, she admits her tastes have also run to women, especially a heroin-addicted Italian supermodel named Gia who died of Aids in the 1980s. Von Furstenberg was also a regular at gay bars in Manhattan where she'd go dressed as a man. Why Diller has decided to publicly address his sexuality so late in the day remains unclear and friends are reportedly bemused. (Some expressed similar confusion when he suddenly wed von Furstenberg 24 years ago, although in that case it was assumed to have been for tax reasons.) He suggests it may be because of the immense 'guilt' he still feels that he failed to step forward to try to be a 'role model' for other gay men. After an unhappy and isolated childhood in Beverly Hills, with parents who neglected him and a drug-addicted older brother who bullied him (and was later shot dead in a drug-related incident aged 36), Diller had a nervous breakdown aged 19. It left him with a crippling shyness which never completely left him as he battled his way up the Hollywood ladder. It would also be fascinating to know when and how he broke the news of his preference for men to von Furstenberg and how she reacted. Diller, a man used to getting his way, isn't about to reveal any more than he wants, snapping to a New York Times interviewer last week that he had cut short his promotional book tour as 'I am not up for interrogation about aspects of my personal life'. Indeed, while Diller insists he's now 'too old to care' what people think, he glosses over the nitty gritty of his relationships with men. He writes sketchily of his first sexual encounter with a 'shaggy blond guy' who, from the terrace of a West Hollywood apartment, signalled to a 16-year-old Diller, sitting in his car at traffic lights, to come up to him. He doesn't dwell either on his notorious reputation as a ferocious boss and business adversary whose hair-trigger temper was likely to explode at any time. Staff at Diller's various offices reportedly lived in dread of him descending on them. 'There's no tolerance for errors; Diller is known to shred employees if his tea isn't properly brewed,' reported the Tampa Bay Times in 2002. Diller admitted to the New York Times last week: 'I'm a difficult manager.' Whether he's also been a difficult husband is for his wife to decide.
