What a crowd of amazing women in the same room the other night at Cipriani!! Never have I seen so many powerful, committed women all sitting looking glamourous and being so concerned and efficient. Wendi Murdoch, Queen Raina and Sarah Brown (left with Nicole Kidman and Liya Kebede) spoke and were so compelling in their dedication for White Ribbon Alliance that everyone in the room decided to do something!! So, be ready and expect something fun and useful to happen for Mother’s Day 2010 in all DVF shops that will enhance the exposure and raise money for White Ribbon Alliance.

Do you think I was nervous before my show? Well, not as nervous as I was Monday night in Toronto for the premiere of Tanner Hall, the movie my daughter Tatiana co-directed with her friend Francesca Gregorini. It is the story of four girls in boarding school as they are becoming women. It is a beautiful, sensitive, deep movie… the audience loved it and I am the proudest woman in the world.

View the trailer…

Who on the eve of her fashion show sleeps with her grandchildren? Well I do, because to me, family is the core of everything and the engine of my life!!! My son Alex brought his children Talita and Tassilo to our Spring Show along with his fiancée, Ali Kay, Alexandra, the mother of the children and her companion Dax Miller. Why was my daughter Tatiana not here? Because she is in Toronto presenting her movie Tanner Hall at the Toronto film festival. We are flying there tonight!!!

Summer always goes by so fast…

This August, we spent  a wonderful vacation sailing the Indonesian islands of Bali, Sanbawar, Flores and Komodo. We climbed Volcano Agung, visited the Water Palace of Tirtatanga in Bali, and even danced with frogs! On the way back, I stopped in Singapore to celebrate the opening of the latest DVF shop at the ION Orchard.

Now back to NY, where we are preparing for the Spring show!

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Naomi Sims died…she was a huge glamorous model. Andre Leon Talley spoke at her funeral and then again at Sugar Baby…and here he recalls their first meeting and her legacy.

We met at Joe Eula’s house, then at Halston’s house.  That is how I met her, in 1974, and then 1975.

My best memory of Naomi is the Life Magazine cover and the AT& T telephone commercial that she did in the sixties when black models were not gracing mainstream American covers of a weekly family magazine, much less a commercial on television of a major brand like AT&T

The legacy of Naomi Sims is that she left to women of color, of all diversity of color the inspiration to believe in themselves to empower the world with a sense of worth, class, and dignity, through her own example, and through giving back by her self-help books (five of them!) as well as creating a beauty empire of wigs, fragrance, beauty salons. Her legacy as the first true black Supermodel is only part of her history. That is important but there is so much more that she gave to the world. She broke the barriers down for women of color to be in high fashion, as a great model and she went on to empower women and young women with her own brand of Naomi Sims.