The Woman I Wanted to Be by Diane von Furstenberg Page B

those of different men at different times in my life. I think most women consciously change their stripes or at least modify them in their relationships with men, especially during the delicious period of seduction. They become instant football lovers or sailing enthusiasts or political junkies, then taper back to their own personalities when the relationship is either cemented or over. No one I know, however, went to the lengths I did.
    My relationship with Paulo lasted four years, as did my wardrobe of sarongs. “Why don’t you wear real clothes?” my mother kept asking. But even she couldn’t envision my next metamorphosis when I left Paulo to become the muse to a writer in Paris.
    The summer of 1984, after I sold my cosmetics business to the English pharmaceutical company Beecham, I chartered a sailboat to sail around the Greek islands. The children were young teenagers, their relationship with Paulo was not good, and the mood on board washeavy and unpleasant. My close Brazilian friend Hugo Jereissati, who had first led me to discover Bali, was with us. I remember telling Hugo while we were sunbathing, “My life is going to change again.” It did.
    W ool skirts. Buttoned-up sweaters. Flat shoes. They would dominate my wardrobe for the next five years. Alain Elkann, an Italian novelist and journalist, didn’t like the sexy clothes I had just started designing, so, yet again, I changed my stripes for love. My new image startled me every time I looked in the mirror.
    I’d met Alain in New York at a fourteenth-birthday party Bianca Jagger was giving for her daughter, my goddaughter Jade. Tatiana and Alex were both home from boarding school, she from England and he from Massachusetts, and we were all in New York that weekend.
    Alain was very attractive and we knew a lot of people in common as he had been married to Margherita Agnelli, Egon’s first cousin. “Come with me to Paris,” Alain said soon after we met. I didn’t hesitate. The children were away at school and I couldn’t bear another day in New York. Just as I had found Paulo during my introspection after my mother’s collapse, I found Alain in 1984 during my disenchantment with New York. Life in New York had become all about money— Dynasty and Dallas were the hits on television—and after four years cloistered at Cloudwalk with Paulo, Paris intellectual life was very appealing to me. My work wasn’t really interesting anymore. Though I was working on starting a new business, my heart wasn’t really in it.
    What was in my heart was Alain. And Paris. Paulo was very angry and moved to his native Brazil; I moved to a beautiful apartment I rented on rue de Seine between a courtyard and a garden. My friend François Catroux, an interior decorator, helped me to set up a chic andbohemian interior filled with Empire furniture and the pre-Raphaelite paintings from my recently sold Fifth Avenue apartment.
    Alain and I entertained a lot: writers, artists, and designers, even though fashion was no longer my priority. Alain had a day job at Mondadori, the publishing house, and wrote novels after work. My all-time favorite writer, Alberto Moravia, stayed with us for weeks at a time. He would write in the morning, and in the afternoons he and I would go to museums, movies, or to Café de Flore for hot chocolate. I could not believe we had become such close friends.
    In my new Parisian life I rediscovered my first love, literature, and was living yet another fantasy—having a literary salon and founding a small publishing house, Salvy, where we published in French the great writers Vita Sackville-West, Gregor von Rezzori, and Bret Easton Ellis, among others.
    Alain and I also had a lively, loving family life during holidays. He had three children with Margherita Agnelli: John (“Jaki”), Lapo, and Ginevra. Maybe because they were related to my own children, we immediately became a family. We only had the five children on vacations and occasional weekends, but