THE HUNTRESS.

There was a time in the nineteen-seventies when the American woman, many millions of her, wore, tucked into a private spot under the soft fabric of her collar, brushing against the rounded, protruding spinal bone at the nape of her neck, the name of a young Belgian emigree, Diane von Furstenberg. The American woman had gone to a department store and stood in a small, bright space before a mirror. She had unbuttoned and tugged off her dull, stiff old clothes and dropped them in a pile on the floor, and then, stripped to her underwear, she had bound herself into a supple, silky, cleverly cut garment of vividly patterned jersey that felt smooth against her skin. It didn't seem to have any buttons or zippers or hooks anywhere--it just tied with a sash around the waist, like a bathrobe. It was very comfortable--quite sensual, in fact, all that soft stuff clinging to her. It was rather tight-fitting on the top, tighter than she was used to, and it was rather low cut as well. Could she get away with it? She could see, twisting around, that the dress showed the curve of her bottom. It was suggestive, but it wasn't indecent, she decided--she could wear it to the office. And somehow, inexplicably, it was flattering.

The American woman knew of the Belgian who had designed this unusual garment, the wrap dress, from looking at photographs in the society pages and from reading about her in the press. The Belgian woman was, despite her American-sounding story (an astonishing entrepreneurial success, founding her dress business at twenty-three, working very hard, on the cover of Newsweek at twenty-nine), alluringly, intimidatingly foreign. She didn't look like an entrepreneur. Photographs showed her with long, loose dark hair (at all times loose, never tied back) and Cleopatra eyes of lavishly painted color, looking boldly into the camera with a controlled half smile, her legs conspicuous since she was always wearing dresses and always in heels. She said gnomic, French-sounding things to reporters ("Woman are becoming too beautiful, too strong, but there's no other way to be. What do you want me to do? Go out to lunch? Find a lover? So what. What would it bring me?"). She was even--and it was this fanciful detail that toppled her out of reality altogether--a princess: there were pictures of her husband, the prince, an Austrian, in the society pages, too, a feral-looking blond man with large, carnivorous teeth. Above all, she was feminine, in a way that was as alien and mysterious to the sensible American woman as being a princess--a femininity that promised intimacy and seduction and yet, in its over-the-top, almost mythical quality, seemed somehow impersonal, as though it were a kind of timeless spirit that possessed female infants (foreign ones), setting them off on a life course that led from bewitching nymphet to Madame Blavatsky and wrought all kinds of thrilling damage in between.

The American woman bought the wrap dress and took it home. She found that she was wearing it all the time and received many compliments on it, so she went back to the store and bought another one, in a different color and print. She noticed that many famous women were wearing wraps, too, such as Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Gloria Steinem. That was fun. A few months later, she bought a third. But then she observed that several of her friends owned the same dresses, which was embarrassing, and she began to see herself on the street coming and going, and some women looked quite bulgy and unattractive in their wraps, which soured her on the dress a little bit, and anyway three was enough, so she didn't buy any more Diane von Furstenbergs. She hardly noticed when, in 1978, the dresses were put on sale at clearance prices and, shortly afterward, the company collapsed. The name Diane von Furstenberg was jostled to the back of her memory, along with other scraps and remnants from that period in her life.

Twenty years later, the American woman's daughter came home from college wearing a wrap dress that she had bought in a vintage clothing shop for two hundred dollars. Two hundred dollars for somebody's old dress! That was so extraordinary that the American woman was not surprised to read in the newspaper that Diane von Furstenberg had started up her business once again.

One steamy afternoon this summer, Diane von Furstenberg, aged fifty-nine, climbed into the back seat of her car to be driven to the showroom of Christian Louboutin, the shoe designer. She was going to select the shoes for the models to wear at her fashion show in September. She was dressed easily in loose beige linen trousers, flat sandals, and a very large gold chain bracelet of her own design. (In public, she always wears dresses and heels, but en prive she is casual.) On the way, she chatted on her phone (she speaks to each of her two children at least five times a day, and to her husband, Barry Diller, the media magnate, at least five times a day, and to her many close friends very frequently.)

Her hair was still long and loose, but curly--she has stopped straightening it--and a different color than it used to be, a rich henna rather than reddish-black. She was tanned a nineteen-seventies Brazil-nut shade of brown, from sitting outside at Cloudwalk, her estate in Connecticut, and from lying on her yacht. Her face was almost bare: she still loved the old gaudy paint, but women didn't wear that kind of makeup anymore and she preferred not to look ridiculous. She had considered cosmetic surgery but had so far decided to remain natural. Through yoga and hiking and eating carefully, she had maintained her figure. Her business the second time around was going even better than she had hoped--a hundred and twenty million dollars in wholesale this year, her clothes in Barneys and Harvey Nichols and Le Bon Marche, nine Diane von Furstenberg stores around the world. Soon she would open a new boutique in Saint-Tropez (and one in Tokyo in September), and the festival at Cannes, then sailing around Majorca in the yacht, then launching her jewelry line in London, then the Allen conference in Sun Valley. In August, she would visit her children at the hunting lodge in Austria that they had inherited from their father. She had three grandchildren. She felt wonderful.

Shoes, shoes, shoes. She and Christian Louboutin had become close friends a few years ago, and since then she had declined to wear any shoes but his, with their signature red soles. ("You are a prisoner of the red sole like I am a prisoner of the wrap," she liked to tell him. "On your grave there will be two little red soles.") Louboutin felt that they understood each other because she was so much a woman, and he, being the only boy in a family of four sisters, permitted in his childhood to overhear their female whisperings, understood women. "She is a femme Orientale," he says, meaning Orient in the old sense, the southern Mediterranean and the Middle East. "She plays with her hair, she talks with her hands, with her neck. She is like a beautiful courtesan you would find in the novels of the nineteenth century. She is like a fragrance coming from the Orient, which means the opposite of a perfume with a lot of water." (Although she was born in Belgium, she is, in fact, somewhat Oriental in that sense: both her parents are Jewish; her mother was born in Salonika, in Greece, her father was born in Bessarabia and behaved like a Middle European--a loud singer of songs, a breaker of glasses.)