Diane von Furstenberg

Diane von Furstenberg is a recurring presence in Andy Warhol’s diary: a dinner host and party-giver whose invitations connect artists, editors, entertainers, and society figures. Her appearances carry more than the details of a social calendar. They reveal a world in which a magazine cover can prompt an invitation, a slight can unsettle a friendship, and a clothing choice becomes a verdict on how someone inhabits a public image. Across these scenes, Diane is generous and socially commanding, but her relations with Andy and the people around him are not free of calculation or strain.

Invitations, Interviews, and Social Exchange

Diane’s place in Andy’s orbit is shaped in part by the traffic between social life and media. When she invited him to dinner for Sue Mengers, he arrived by cab after going home to pull himself together. The gathering brought together newspaper and magazine figures, including Barry Diller, whom Andy identified as Diane’s boyfriend at the time. Andy felt talkative but believed the table ignored him; he also thought Diller disliked him, and tried without success to change that impression. The evening left him feeling rebuffed, despite the prestige of the company and the invitation.

Andy later interpreted another invitation as repayment for his having given Diane an Interview cover. At her dinner, he described the guests as two-faced and dismissed the event as something she had arranged to return the favor. The account does not establish Diane’s motives independently; what it records is Andy’s suspicion that social hospitality could operate like an exchange of favors. That reading sits beside evidence of her active involvement with the magazine’s world. Interview’s growing celebrity appeal made the promise of appearing in its pages a powerful social currency, and Diane’s connection to a cover became part of Andy’s understanding of why he had been invited.

A separate disagreement exposed the pressure created by competing invitations. Diane asked Andy to be her date for a CBS filming, saying they would make an interesting television couple. He declined on the grounds that he would be out of town, although he was not actually leaving until Friday. He instead asked her to bring the television crew to his Tuesday party. When she later overheard him accept Regine’s Thursday dinner invitation, she challenged him for having lied. Andy said he had made a mistake. The episode makes the social performance unusually visible: plans were negotiated in public, and an evasive explanation quickly became a test of trust.

A Host at the Center of the Scene

Diane’s homes and parties recur as places where separate parts of Andy’s circle meet. She invited Andy and Bob Colacello to dinner and to watch the television miniseries Holocaust. Diane’s mother, who had been imprisoned at Auschwitz, responded to the broadcast by saying that it made the camps look more glamorous than they had been: the women had crew cuts, conditions were more crowded, and the scale shown on screen was far smaller than the reality she remembered. Marina Cicogna was also present, making the viewing especially charged in the account because her family had been closely involved with Mussolini. The evening did not remain a quiet viewing: before the program was over, Diane was ready to go out and was calling for a limousine.

Diane also gave a birthday party for Bob at 1060 Fifth Avenue. Bob’s parents attended, and Andy noticed that Bob’s father looked especially attractive to him. Bob kissed Andy in thanks for his gift, a gesture Andy found embarrassing. Catherine Guinness was there with Tom Sullivan. When Tom mentioned that he had rented a summer place in Montauk, Diane stopped talking to Andy and left without saying goodbye. Andy suspected that his romance with Halston, Diane, and Steve Rubell was over; Steve told him that Diane was upset. Andy linked the tension to an earlier call in which Vincent Fremont had asked Mick Jagger whether he would pay for the place if Diane took it, and Mick had refused. The party thus gathered celebration and awkwardness in one room, while a summer rental and its financing cast a shadow over the evening.

Her social reach extended beyond New York. At a dinner hosted by Lynn Wyatt for Diane and Barry Diller, Andy encountered wealthy guests from Dallas and Fort Worth, whom he described as rich, vulgar, and funny. Later, at a film screening, Diane moved along the aisles as if she owned the place. She wore tight pants, a small top, a vest with a sheriff’s badge reading “Disco Sucks,” and an extravagant amount of vintage diamond and gold jewelry. John Travolta arrived amid a crowd and photographers; the guests raised their cameras, and Andy recorded that everyone loved the movie. Diane’s entrance and dress gave the occasion a vivid focal point, linking personal style to the spectacle of celebrity attendance.

Fashion, Judgment, and Public Image

Diane’s comments about bodies and clothes show how closely social judgment and appearance are joined in these entries. At an event where a governor came around to shake hands and seek support, she told him that he had become too thin, saying she had liked his “love handles.” The remark is brief, but it captures her ease in making bodily appearance a conversational subject, even in a political setting. Andy’s account registers such comments alongside fashion and celebrity, rather than treating them as separate domains.

That same eye appears in his account of Bianca Jagger’s clothes. Diane was described as Bianca’s friend, while tensions involving Bianca, Halston, and Barbara Allen had begun to circulate through the group. Andy retaliated against Bianca by telling her she had missed a fashion show and teasing that the clothes seemed made for her, including a bat-wing dress and a Wonder Woman outfit. Beneath the joke, he offered a specific assessment: Halston’s simple clothes did not suit Bianca’s proportions, making her look too short and cutting her body awkwardly; Andy thought she needed something more like a costume. He liked Halston’s simplicity as an idea of American clothing, yet distinguished that general preference from what worked on Bianca. Diane’s place in this scene is as one of the people bound to the same overlapping network of friendship, clothing, and grievance—not as the speaker of Andy’s critique.

The diary also catches Diane’s presence through the changing atmosphere of a room. At her home, Andy found Diana Ross looking great, while Diana Vreeland had become too difficult to talk to. The observation is about the other Diana, but it situates Diane as host to a gathering where celebrity and social ease are continually assessed. Similarly, Andy’s complaint that he had been invited to repay an Interview cover and his account of trying to win Barry Diller over show how he measured acceptance through small signs: who listened, who invited whom, and who seemed to welcome him.

Disagreements and the Limits of Access

Diane did not treat every social venue as harmless. After a large party Studio 54 gave for Interview was spoiled for Andy by confusion at the door over whether Jed Johnson had been allowed in, Diane said she would no longer go to the club. Her stated reason was that she thought it was wrong of Steve Rubell to name names. The entry records her decision as a response to conduct she disapproved of, not simply as a change in nightlife preference. In a social world organized around entry, invitation, and reputation, refusing to return was itself a public position.

The repeated appearances build a portrait through incidents rather than through a continuous account of Diane’s life. She is shown inviting Andy to television and dinner, hosting a birthday and a gathering around a difficult broadcast, appearing among wealthy guests, and making pointed observations about bodies and clothes. At the same time, the diary is explicitly a constructed record of daily life: weekday conversations were written down after Andy recounted what he had done, while the earlier Factory log had tracked visitors, events, and expenses. Diane therefore reaches the reader through Andy’s selective, often immediate judgments. The result is not a neutral biography but a textured record of how her hospitality, style, and choices registered within his changing social circle.