“I was having a man’s life in a woman’s body,” Diane von Furstenberg, famous Belgian fashion designer and businesswoman, says more than once in the new Hulu documentary. It’s a weird sentiment to say in a doc about female trailblazing empowerment, agency, and freedom, but one supposes it fits for the era when women’s lib was thriving, but perhaps not every woman was reaping its benefits.
But Furstenberg certainly was. Co-directed by two-time Academy Award-winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (“Ms. Marvel,” an upcoming “Star Wars” film) and Trish Dalton (“Student Athlete”), their new doc, “Diane Von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge,” opening the Tribeca Film Festival this year, is well-made, competent and relatively engaging. But it’s so by-the-book, cradle-to-grave familiar in the rise and fall structure, conventional with talking head tributes; there’s no actual interrogation about anything other than presenting the story of the subject’s life in chronological order.
While von Furstenberg is not credited as a producer or even an executive producer on the project, the film nonetheless feels like many celebrity portrait docs, where the subject often has some say. That’s not to say the documentary shies away from any of the problems in the Von Furstenberg narrative, but it all just seems so slick, so perfect, so by the numbers that there are few, if any, surprises. This is a celebration of a life documentary, a portrait of adversity, trials, and tribulations. Still, it also feels like something you’d see on CNN, commercially produced, and so polished, and so primarily flattering, it’s nearly airless.
Von Furstenberg became famous for creating the wrap dress— a symbol of modern female sophistication that became a massive hit in the 1970s, fell out of vogue in the ’80s, and then came back as a vintage style trend in the 2000s, making the designer and businesswoman in vogue all over again (and perhaps was the impetus for this documentary).
Known as a fashion tycoon, a jet-setter, a before-her-time influencer, a feminist icon, and a woman certainly in charge of her own destiny, Von Fustenberg was in many ways a self-made woman. Von Furstenberg was 22 years old when she came up with the idea for the dress that would revolutionize the fashion industry and create a chic symbol of feminine power.
Her parents were Holocaust survivors, and in the film’s intimate candidate interviews, Von Furstenberg details how her mother would trap her in closets to get her past her fear of the dark and force her to confront her fears. She married into the German princely House of Fürstenberg, as the wife of Prince Egon von Fürstenberg in the 1970s—shades of anti-semitism all around from the surrounding German family members— gave birth to two children, was divorced by ’83. “Divorce for me was freedom,” she says in the doc, a recurring theme the doc repeats over and over again.
While marital and family dramas take up much of the first half of the doc, no real conflict really arises until Studio 54 when the AIDS crisis swept through many of her friends and social-scene acquaintances, including her bi-sexual ex-husband, Prince Egon, who she maintained a good relationship.
But by the late ’70s and early ’80s, the wrap dress was passé; the trailblazer had to reinvent herself again, find a new path forward, and did so by launching her products on QVC, a controversial decision at the time that people thought would ruin her reputation but essentially relaunch her company. In 2001, she married American media mogul Barry Diller—who bought QVC, paving the way for their relationship— which seemed to bring her the lasting happiness that eluded her, but to go on further would be to essentially detail the highlights of what Wiki already does.
And that’s the problem with ‘Women In Charge,’ essentially, it feels like a laundry list breakdown of her Wikipedia greatest hits supported by complimentary talking-head testimonials from chummy figures and friends-in-high-places associates like Oprah Winfrey, Marc Jacobs, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gloria Steinem, British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, Fran Lebowitz and CNN’s Anderson Cooper (her now adult children Alexander and Tatiana are also two critical figures in telling her narrative)
Von Furstenberg’s achievements are undeniably impressive. She endured a lot and is a survivor who has thrived past her many setbacks and challenges, but part of the doc’s problem is it’s just filled with these cliched, beating-back-the-slump challenges narratives. Yes, Von Furstenberg is candid, as are her children, about her woes and how she suffered, but there are very few deep insights, and the entire affair feels mainly like a superficial celebrity portrait meant to re-polish the reputation of an already powerful, successful figure.
The doc picks up a little bit in the Studio 54 era, the designer claiming to have turned down a threeway menage proposed by Mick Jagger and David Bowie, but even this section is very familiar: the glitz and glam of the New York nightlife scene, the hedonism within and then the cocaine and AIDS epidemic that quickly turned the “freedom” of debauchery into a nightmare.
Additionally, while documenting her failures, ‘Woman In Charge doesn’t spend much time there, quickly just turning towards the next comeback. For the wrap dress downfall section, all we get is that it oversaturated the market, and her empire crumbled, but not many details are offered, and then it’s off to the next comeback.
There’s certainly necessarily nothing off with “Diane Von Furstenberg: Woman In Charge” in terms of its craft, its breezy structure, its slick pace, etc. It’s a handsomely made documentary, but it always borders on fawning puff pieces, letting us into the life of the fashion mogul but still making you feel like it’s a surface portrait meant to resell something vintage, like a classic dress everyone already knows and admires. [C+]
