Survivor

Von Furstenberg has done more than most. The inventor of the wrap dress - a must-have for any woman - she has been the toast of Studio 54 in New York, married twice (once to royalty), raised two children, launched her own fashion and beauty business, sold it, then launched it again. She is now president of the powerful Council of Fashion Designers of America, where she fights the good fight over the health standards of fashion models. "My role in fashion is to make women feel great about themselves," she tells me. "Clothes are about respect: my respect for women and a woman's respect for herself. That's why I often think women design better than men, because they are much more interested in the woman - male designers are only interested in the clothes. Fashion should be soft and flattering. Clothes must respect body types and allow women to live and breathe. It makes me so happy when I see all types of women confidently wearing my clothes, with pearls and Manolos or with piercings and cowboy boots."

The DVF dress, as it is known, is now a fashion staple - as it was the first time around. In 1979, she sold the company, and the Diane von Furstenberg story should have ended there. But in 1997, noticing how many young girls were wearing her 1970s dresses bought from thrift shops, she started her business again. Second time round, things were much easier. "There was already good brand recognition, and I didn't have the same personal anxieties," she says. "It's great, now that I'm in the early fall of my life, to have young women embracing what I do. And prints are what I do best. They always make a woman look and feel younger. We put 12 new prints into production every month, nearly all by English designers, who are unquestionably the best in the world."

They may be, but it is von Furstenberg who is in charge. The young British designer Erdem, who worked with her, says: "The woman is the dress and the company. She never misses a meeting and makes all decisions personally."

Throughout her career, von Furstenberg has remained extraordinarily grounded. Not for her injections and operations - she is one of the few women in fashion who has had nothing done to her face. "Why would I want to erase the physical souvenirs of my life?" she asks. She owns an ocean-going yacht, although the way she describes it - as "my boat" - it could be anything from a dinghy to a Thames barge. Her apartment on the Left Bank in Paris is a lived-in family space rather than a sterile showroom. Hundreds of family pictures are mixed with shots of her at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol, Halston, Calvin Klein, Bianca Jagger and Barry Diller (now her husband and "the pillar of my life") - and the fabric prints that fulfil her constant need for pattern are everywhere.

Von Furstenberg's mother, an Auschwitz survivor, taught her "never be a victim of life", a piece of advice that has coloured everything she has done and become. Brought up in Belgium and educated in Switzerland and England, her life suddenly changed when she met Prince Egon von Furstenberg. At 23, after a whirlwind romance, she found herself in New York and pregnant. The couple married and, three months after the birth of her son, Alexandre, she found she was pregnant again with her daughter, Tatiana.

When the marriage broke down three years later, the woman who once said "I've always somehow been in love, sought love and given love" was on her own. She was undeterred. She had worked with a dress manufacturer in Italy, and this gave her the confidence to begin designing fabrics and clothes. She showed some of her work to Diana Vreeland, the all-powerful editor-in-chief of American Vogue. "I was so nervous. I could hardly hail a taxi," von Furstenberg recalls. "I arrived home in tears - of relief. She'd liked my collection." Vreeland wrote to her saying: "I think your clothes are absolutely smashing. This is what we need." And that was just what a single working mother of two needed.

"Diane has lived so many lives, and that gives her a sense of humour and the ability never to take herself too seriously," says Nathan Jenden, her creative director. "Although her fashion approach is timeless and ageless, she is totally a woman of our time, which is why she always has a new story to tell." And right now, it's a story that thousands of woman wish to hear.