Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge

Pictures show people smoking, drinking, and wearing oxygen-style masks at a nightclub. Discussion of wanton drug use in the past, including quaaludes, cocaine, marijuana, and needles found on the streets.

Naked breasts, topless men, and gyrating bodies at '70s-era discos seen in images and archive footage. A woman's past sexual life is discussed, from relationships with men and women to "rejected threesomes," promiscuity and affairs, being sexy, pursuing pleasure, getting pregnant before marriage, and a man wanting to "get" a woman "in his bed." Grown children describe learning their father was gay, and his nickname "first in bed."

Discussion of Holocaust includes a woman's experience surviving the camps and emerging at just 44 pounds, suffering trauma later in life. A museum displays images of survivors and dead as well as a train car that took people to concentration camps. A man discusses his father's slow death from AIDS, says the epidemic wreaked havoc on their family and friend group. An older woman says it's important to think about death because it happens to all of us.

"Badass."

Born in Belgium, von Furstenberg stood out in her early social and business circles as a dark-haired Jewish woman. Her mother was a Nazi prisoner at Auschwitz and weighed 44 pounds upon liberation, grappling with the trauma of that experience over the course of her life. When von Furstenberg married a German prince, his antisemitic father wouldn't attend the wedding reception (her mother called it retaliation). Von Furstenberg was open about her sexuality, sleeping with the people she wanted to (men and women). Her first husband turned out to be gay. The 1970s in New York City were described as a time of sexual experimentation and looseness, before the AIDS epidemic and before the "moral clampdown" of the Reagan years.