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DVF Never Really Wanted to Be a Socialite

Photo: Tracey Nearmu/epa/Corbis

For its 4oth-anniversary issue, W labels Diane von Furstenberg the “Icon of the 1970s.” In her remembrance of the decade, the designer recalls the 1973 New York cover story profiling her and her husband at the time, Prince Egon, which was called “The Couple That Has Everything. Is Everything Enough?” Detailing what von Furstenberg later described as their “strange marriage,” the feature laid bare their jet-setting lives — uncomfortably so: “As awful as that story was, it made me realize that I did not want to be a socialite,” von Furstenberg explains. “That was so far from the woman I wanted to be. I wanted to be independent.” One divorce and many thousand wrap dresses later, she was all set.