Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion / Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA

Diane von Furstenberg:

Woman Before Fashion

The Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA

October 17, 2024–August 31, 2025

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Text Source: https://www.skirball.org/museum/diane-von-furstenberg-woman-fashion

Explore the remarkable life and work of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. This US debut exhibition—coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Diane von Furstenberg’s iconic wrap dress—includes a selection of over sixty pieces drawn from the DVF archives along with ephemera, fabric swatches, media pieces, and information on her philanthropic work. 

“DVF is an example to women everywhere, from women refugees who must expand language and culture to women artists and business owners forging a path in a patriarchal world. If they know her whole story, I can’t imagine any woman who wouldn’t be inspired by her.”—Gloria Steinem 

Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion explores the remarkable life and work of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. This expansive, multidisciplinary exhibition, enriched by a lavishly illustrated catalogue featuring interviews and scholarly essays, invites visitors to discover the extraordinary features of von Furstenberg's career, from the 1970s to the present day. 

Organized in four thematic sections, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion includes a selection of over sixty pieces drawn from the DVF archives along with ephemera, fabric swatches, media pieces, and information on her philanthropic work. The Skirball’s presentation of this exhibition will also include new images and audio that shed light on von Furstenberg’s personal biography as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a war refugee, offering additional perspective on the factors that shaped her life and work. 

The exhibition explores many questions, such as:

• What are the specific features of von Furstenberg's fashion design? 

• Her inspirations? 

• How did her signature creation, the wrap dress, come to epitomize freedom and empowerment for women in the United States and well beyond? 

• How has her personal story—as an immigrant to the United States and child of a mother who survived the Holocaust—shaped her creative vision and career as well as her philanthropic work?

Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion was organized by the Fashion & Lace Museum in von Furstenberg's native city of Brussels, Belgium.

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Nicolas Lor, Head of Exhibitions and Publications at the Fashion & Lace Museum in Brussels, is the originating curator of Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion, which he developed for the Fashion & Lace Museum. In 2013, his first research work on material and historical matters in fashion (textiles and fabrics) brought him to collaborate with the most famous luxury houses in Paris: Chloé, CHANEL, Maison Margiela, and Christian Dior Couture. Between 2018 and 2021, Lor worked as Fashion Archivist for the Christian Dior Couture house, where he researched and preserved rare pieces of fashion. Additionally, Lor participated in the acclaimed traveling exhibition Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams, curated by Florence Muller and Oriole Cullen, a project that was initially presented in Paris in 2017. Lor is known for his research into Chinese costume and Chinese fashion design. In 2017, he curated The new momentum — China contemporary fashion at the Shanghai Textile Museum. His work on Chinese fashion continued with the exhibition Future Fashion Spaces – Reimagined, co-curated with Pooky Lee in Shenzhen, as well as with the online exhibition Symbioses. Lor has written several papers for fashion and cultural journals or magazines, including Pièce détachée, Koï Magazine, and TTT Magazine.

Cate Thurston is the Skirball Cultural Center’s curator of this exhibition.