DVF Through the Years

"We're in Rome here; it's 1969. Egon [von Furstenberg] and I had met years before, at university in Geneva. He was on a trip to Asia, and I was an intern at Ferretti's factory in Italy—that's where it all started—and he came to visit. He asked me to come to a party he'd organized, and when I came in he gave me a ring. So that party actually turned out to be my engagement party. Not that I took the engagement that seriously at the time, but anyway."

"This is very funny: Tom Ford spoke to the board of the Council of Fashion Designers of America recently, and he said that this photo has been on his inspiration board for 20 years. In this photo I am with Ara Gallant [left], who I adore and who took all these great reportage photos of me working in my studio. With Studio 54, with that whole time, there was a very short window—but it was a wonderful window—where we thought we had invented freedom. But of course we didn't know anything. I used to drive up to Studio 54 at midnight, alone. It was part of this fantasy I had, living a man's life in a woman's body. I would never stay very long. I had my children, my business, and I was on my own."

"This was 1974, under my early Warhol, in my apartment with my dog Peanut. This was the year the wrap dress was born!"

"I love this picture. I think it's so beautiful and glamorous. My daughter was about two years old, so I was about 26, with my children in Central Park, wearing my very first dress in the very first print I designed. That print was later reissued; Mrs. Obama wore it for the first family's first Christmas card."