Ira von Fürstenberg, Death of a Princess
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MILAN — According to British writer Nick Foulkes, Ira von Fürstenberg “was big in her day and her ways, as somebody like the Kardashians are today.” A princess by birth and model, actress and designer by choice, von Fürstenberg died on Monday aged 83. Her full name read Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galdina zu Fürstenberg.
Fascinated by her aristocratic heritage, colorful life and influence in the fashion and art worlds, Foulkes in 2019 penned the book “Ira: The Life and Times of a Princess” on her life growing up in Venice, her fairy-tale wedding in Venice to Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe at 15 years old, her glamorous travels and fashion magazine shoots, and her glitzy Place Vendôme apartment post-divorce.
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“The awareness about her in a world that was pre-Internet was quite astonishing. The volume of newspaper cuttings I went through was quite extraordinary,” Foulkes told WWD at the time.
She was the daughter of Clara Agnelli, who was the sister of Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli. Von Fürstenberg’s father, Prince Tassilo von Fürstenberg, was the son of a Hungarian countess and a prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and her maternal grandmother was Princess Virginia San Faustino, an American.
When her marriage to Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe, the jetsetting playboy who turned the sleepy fishing village of Marbella into a glamorous resort in the 1950s, was over — creating a major scandal at the time as she was also accused of adultery — Ira von Fürstenberg married the Brazilian playboy-industrialist Francisco Matarazzo “Baby” Pignatari, 23 years her senior, in Reno, Nevada in 1961, but that ended in a divorce as well — in Las Vegas after three years.
In his biography, Foulkes recounted her struggles with motherhood and marriage and the tragedy in 2006 of losing her son Christoph in a prison in Bangkok, aged 50, accused of having counterfeited a visa to enter the country to save time. Her other son, Hubertus, became a ski Olympian for Mexico.
“She’s got this rebellious streak and was a very independent woman at a time where it was still a very masculine world. She took a lot of decisions that were considered brave in those days,” writes Foulkes.
She defied conventions as an adolescent model for Emilio Pucci, occasionally walking the runways and posing for Helmut Newton and Cecil Beaton. “Ira was a great family friend and knew my father since she was 14 years old,” said Emilio’s daughter Laudomia Pucci.
Von Fürstenberg was a couture client, Diana Vreeland’s darling, and championed Karl Lagerfeld during the early stages in his career. She became a P.R. for Valentino and was rumored to become Prince Rainier of Monaco’s second wife after the death of Grace Kelly.
“I’ve known Ira forever, we even worked together on my first perfume,” said Valentino Garavani. “Beautiful and always smiling, Ira possessed an unwavering passion for everything she did set her mind to. Whether it was her work, her hobbies or her personal pursuits, she approached each endeavor with wholehearted enthusiasm and dedication.”
Diane von Fürstenberg , who was her sister-in-law through her first marriage to Egon von Fürstenberg, said: “When I first met Egon, she was the famous sister. She had gotten married in Venice and was a movie star. She was the big sister and the aunt to my children. She was part of Italy’s jet set, very gregarious. She was a lot of fun and loved to laugh. She never complained.” She said that last week when she herself was in Venice, Ira von Fürstenberg’s son came to visit and they talked with her.
The late Princess pursued an acting career under the aegis of the famous producer Dino de Laurentiis, racking up around 30 movies in the late 1960s and ‘70s.
Over the years, she collected art by Roy Lichtenstein, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Josef Albers and Yves Klein.
Traveling around the world, spending her life between Paris, Biarritz and London, after abandoning acting, she started designing home décor objects, many of them combined with gems and semiprecious stones, calling this line “Objets Uniques.” To wit, she made more than 800 one-of-a-kind pieces, each signed and numbered — vases, boxes, Indian jeweled hand mirrors, picture frames, bookends, animal figurines and trays, for example, which made it into the New York’s Chinese Porcelain Company and the Thyssen Museum.
She said she began designing when she couldn’t find a gift she liked for her friends Anne and Kirk Douglas, so she decided to make one.
Among her several charity initiatives, she was a patron of the Children of Africa Foundation.
“My whole life is filled with Ira-shaped moments,” said French event organizer Françoise Dumas, whose chance encounter on a photoshoot led to a lifelong friendship with the late aristocrat.
Having extensively traveled with von Fürstenberg, the events maven recalled a “citizen of the world who spoke six languages, had perpetual zest for life and was at ease everywhere thanks to her endless desire to discover new countries and new people,” a trait she admired the most.
According to Dumas, it isn’t possible to portray von Fürstenberg without speaking of her great creativity, expressed most recently in her line of precious objects.
Von Fürstenberg’s passing is “a page of an epoch that has turned,” said veteran press officer Jacques Babando. He formed a friendship with a woman he described as “sunlight personified” after working on her exhibition at the Jacquemart-André museum in 2014. “She was a true artist in every meaning of the word: curious, full of fantasy, capricious, funny, exacting, surprising.”
The adjective “solar” came up most often when describing her, the first quality that struck Parisian art dealer Pierre Passebon, who met von Fürstenberg and Dumas during a jaunt in Tangiers in 1986.
The second was how lightly she wore both her wealth and lineage, a sunny character who always offering bons mots and took life with a dose of humor that was not politically correct at times, he recalled.
Although as blue-blooded as it gets, von Fürstenberg was “a good friend who was always ready to offer her help” and was “absolutely not bourgeois,” remembered Passebon. “She wasn’t stuck in one society, Ira went anywhere.”
— With contributions by Lisa Lockwood (New York) and Lily Templeton (Paris)
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