Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion
US DEBUT
October 17, 2024–August 31, 2025
Skirball Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion explores the remarkable life and work of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. This expansive, multidisciplinary exhibition, enriched by a lavishly illustrated catalogue featuring interviews and scholarly essays, invites visitors to discover the extraordinary features of von Furstenberg’s career, from the 1970s to the present day.
Organized in four thematic sections, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion includes a selection of over sixty pieces drawn from the DVF archives along with ephemera, fabric swatches, media pieces, and information on her philanthropic work. The Skirball’s presentation of this exhibition will also include new images and audio that shed light on von Furstenberg’s personal biography as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a war refugee, offering additional perspective on the factors that shaped her life and work.
The exhibition explores many questions, such as:
What are the specific features of von Furstenberg’s fashion design?
Her inspirations?
How did her signature creation, the wrap dress, come to epitomize freedom and empowerment for women in the United States and well beyond?
How has her personal story—as an immigrant to the United States and child of a mother who survived the Holocaust—shaped her creative vision and career as well as her philanthropic work?
Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion was organized by the Fashion & Lace Museum in von Furstenberg’s native city of Brussels, Belgium.
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