Diane von Furstenberg is baring it all ahead of her runway return.
The 79-year-old designer posted a mirror selfie to Instagram ahead of her Thursday New York Fashion Week show, wearing only a black one-piece swimsuit with a white sheet mask on her face and colorful bracelets stacked on both wrists.
“Getting ready for NY Fashion week!” she wrote on the platform, continuing, “79 and no filter! OWN IT 🙏👍🙏.”
Andy Cohen dropped a quick “Own it” in the comments, while Jenna Lyons echoed the praise with “🔥❤️🔥❤️LEGEND.”
The unfiltered post arrives 12 years after von Furstenberg told E! In 2014 that her appearance had become the hardest part of aging without surgical intervention. “I hope I learn a little bit about myself every day,” she said in that interview. “The hardest part of the whole thing is the way I look because with no plastic surgery at my age, it’s not the easiest thing.”
She doubled down on that stance after a 2017 skiing accident left her with a broken nose. “If I ever had any desire to have plastic surgery, after this week, I know for sure, I would not want it,” she told The NY Daily News at the time. She added in a chat with the outlet, “My cheekbones, my best feature!”
The designer has since turned her refusal to hide imperfections into a public mantra.
Last year, when she took a tumble in LA that left her with a black eye, she photographed the massive bruise and shared it on social media rather than covering it up. “Upon arrival in LA, I fell on the pavement and hit my forehead!” she wrote in that post.
She repeated her signature phrase in the same update: “I am owning it, applying lots of arnica gel and happy it was not worse!!” She concluded with the declaration, “Owning it is the secret of survival!”
That philosophy now frames her Fashion Week preparations as she readies her DVF collection for Thursday’s presentation.
The “no filter” approach has become a through-line across her public appearances and digital presence, with the designer consistently opting to document her unaltered self rather than present a polished facade.
Her Instagram following has come to expect this candor, with celebrity friends regularly amplifying her posts in the comments section.
The Thursday runway marks another chapter in a career that has spanned five decades since she first introduced the wrap dress in 1974.
Von Furstenberg has built her brand partly on the alignment between her personal values and her professional image, using her platforms to normalize conversations about aging that many public figures avoid entirely.
The sheet-masked, swimsuit-clad prep photo extends that project into her ninth decade, treating the getting-ready process itself as worthy of documentation rather than the polished final look alone.
Her 2014 E! Interview captured the tension she has navigated throughout: maintaining visibility while refusing the industry-standard fixes that might smooth her path. “The hardest part of the whole thing is the way I look because with no plastic surgery at my age, it’s not the easiest thing,” she reiterated in that conversation.
The designer’s Thursday show will unfold against this backdrop of accumulated public statements about authenticity, each social post adding another layer to a narrative she has constructed deliberately over years.
Von Furstenberg’s DVF presentation is scheduled for Thursday during New York Fashion Week.