Diane von Furstenberg

“I was a very young girl and I got into fashion very much by accident, wanting to be independent. What was wonderful was that while I was learning and discovering - learning about the work, discovering myself as a woman - I was allowing other women to feel the same way.”

“A challenging economy is always good for design. It unites necessity and functionality. You are forced to be creative with poor materials.”

“My favorite days are the ones where I deal only with my own team, design, marketing, working on the next accessories collection.”

“I was 26 when I invented the wrap dress. It was just a nothing little printed dress made out an jersey, and before I know it, I lived an American Dream making more than 25,000 dresses a week.”

“Fashion is mysterious, as a rule. Why are blue jeans a classic? You just hit on something that happens to be timeless and right.”

“I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I knew the woman I wanted to become.”

“I adore dark chocolate.”

“When you come to a hotel room, you want it to be grand, functional and beautiful. But you don't want things that are not useful. Sometimes you go to hotels and there are all these frames and pictures of people you don't know, and you end up hiding everything in the drawer, and then housekeeping come and put it out again.”

“I've always liked wrinkles. When I was a young girl, I used to make lines on my face with my nails because I loved Jeanne Moreau. I always wanted to be older; I always added years to my life. For the longest time, if people thought I was older, I would take it as a compliment.”

“My mother never, ever told me about evilness. She only saw the beautiful things... she wanted to protect me from it.”

“I used the aspects of being a woman to my advantage, but I worked for myself, not a big corporation, so I was lucky to have the freedom to behave however I liked.”

“Eighteen months before I was born, my mother was in Auschwitz. She weighed 49 pounds. She always told me that God saved her so she could give me life. I was born out of nothing.”

“Women are strong. We can do it all. But not always at the same time.”

“There are emerging countries. I mean, there are countries, you know, China, India, and Brazil, and all of these countries that are emerging. They are building homes. They are building - so there is a new lifestyle.”

“I was lucky enough to have it all. To be successful in business, to have children, to raise them on my own, and to travel and live my life. It was a lot of work, but it's a privilege to have been able to do it.”

“The fashion industry has a responsibility to represent a healthy image of women, but to start weighing them and putting them against a wall and making them feel like animals? No.”

“Insecurity is a waste of time.”

“I wanted to be an empowered woman, and I became an empowered woman. And now I want to empower every woman. And I do it through my clothes, I do it through my words, I do it through my money, I do it through everything.”

“I believe that all women should have children. I think women are made to have children and to be mothers. I also think women have to have an identity outside the home.”

“My mother said that we're so lucky to be women. It's not that men are weak. Men are men. We're two completely different animals.”