Oprah Winfrey, Diane von Furstenberg on Venice, the American Dream, Kamala Harris

VENICE — One could easily say Diane von Furstenberg and Oprah Winfrey are kindred spirits. Or, as Winfrey put it, “there’s a soul connection” between them.

Ahead of the DVF Awards to be held Thursday evening, coinciding with the 60th Art Biennale and the 81st Venice Film Festival, von Furstenberg and Winfrey spoke at the fashion designer’s stunning apartment in the 15th-century Palazzo Giustinian Brandolini on the Grand Canal — a marvel of stuccoed or wooden carved ceilings and frescoed rooms.

“It’s been amazing,” von Furstenberg said of the awards, which this year is in its 15th edition. “It’s all about giving support to these women and to their organizations, but also visibility. And because you want to give visibility, you also need to have famous women.”

Enter Winfrey, who was also a recipient in 2012. “She is famous and she gets everybody,” von Furstenberg said simply. “So it’s about support, visibility and connection. Connection is very important. I could support these people by just writing a check, but doing these events gets people to connect.”

Von Furstenberg and Winfrey, both in a shirt and pants combo — the former in a white and green graphic print and the latter in a vivid royal blue hue, were generous with their time, approaching subjects that spanned from mentorship to politics, following Winfrey’s endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her speech at the Democratic National Convention last week.

Clearly in sync with her longtime friend von Furstenberg, Winfrey beamed about the opportunity to be a presenter at the DVF Awards.

“I’ve never been to Venice, so it was a wonderful reason to come. I would have come regardless of where it was, but to have my virgin visit to Venice and be surrounded by so many powerful women, powerful in their desire to do good in the world, powerful in their vision for a better world,” she enthused. “I think that anytime you can be in any experience that’s an elevated experience, you come away lifted yourself.”

In particular, she was excited about giving an award to Graça Machel, the women’s and children’s rights advocate founder of the Graça Machel Trust and the Foundation for Community Development, whom she described as “a mentor and a friend over the years.”

“It’s also a chance to renew and restore your own commitment to doing good in the world, because you see so many women doing so much, who have so little, who haven’t had the resources or the provisions or the access,” Winfrey continued. “But in spite of that, were convinced in their ideas about what could work and what could be of value to their various communities. So I’m always inspired, and I walk away feeling elevated by the experience of being around women who are strong, as strong as and stronger than I.”

Her other longtime friend, Gayle King, accompanied Winfrey and was down to present Dame Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, with the DVF Leadership Award.

Speaking of her relationship with von Furstenberg, Winfrey said that “there’s an energetic soul connection here, where we literally vibrate on the same frequency. And in so many areas. I mean, she has her Diane way of being in the world, sitting in a chair and moving through the room. Sometimes she’ll just be sitting on the sofa and I go, ‘how do you get your leg to do that?’ We couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds, but she has this deep desire to use what she’s been given in a way that manifests goodness for the world, and particularly women in the world.”

“And let me just tell you, Diane is this way all the time,” Winfrey said, referring to her activist initiatives. “This is not a show for her. This isn’t just something to be on display. She’s always thinking about what can we do to help the world? What can we do to bring about change? She’s always trying to connect people, anything that’s going to bring enlightenment or some kind of empowerment to all of us.”

“This is also very much what leads me in Venice, in this place, at this stage of my life, since I’ve entered the winter of my life. I’ve had a full life. I’ve had a big life,” von Furstenberg said

When Winfrey interjected to say that von Furstenberg’s husband Barry Diller “is annoyed when you say that,” the designer said “that’s because he doesn’t like to think about death. But I hope I have a very long winter. The important thing is to be productive.” Connecting people “creates energy that goes around and around,” she added.

Von Furstenberg said her mother “taught me that fear was not an option. She would not allow me to be afraid, obviously she survived the Holocaust, so she saw terrible things. So she wanted me to be independent and free, and not to have any fear. If I was afraid of the dark, she would lock me in the closet; today she could go to jail for that. But as a result, I’m not afraid, because she wanted to teach me that there’s no reason to be afraid of the dark. And the other thing she told me, which I think is very important, no matter what, never be a victim. Just own it. Deal with it, but don’t be a victim. Don’t complain, don’t blame. Just move on.”

The DVF Awards were created in 2010 by the designer and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation to recognize and support extraordinary women who are dedicated to transforming and inspiring the lives of other women, granting each honoree $100,000 for their nonprofit organization in order to further their work.

This year, in addition to Machel and Ardern, the honorees included cofounder of Women Wage Peace Yael Admi; cofounder and director of Women of the Sun Reem Al-Hajajreh; Xiye Bastida, climate justice activist and cofounder of Re-Earth Initiative, and Alessandra Kustermann, reproductive rights advocate and president of SVS Donna Help Donna.

Concurring with von Furstenberg, who speaks of Venice as a woman, Winfrey said the city “is definitely a woman, there is no question she’s a woman. She is a beauty and she is a wonder. She is the word awesome, which is really appropriate for this city.”

Turning to politics, and referring to a now famous photo of a young Harris in pigtails, Winfrey said “that picture spoke volumes to me because I have been that little girl, and never imagined a female president, but I’ve been that little girl looking to the future and looking to the hope that the future might bring. And I think that it’s a really exciting time, and also a time of really hard work. I think it’s a time of a need for discernment. I think the fact that she has been able to raise more money than anybody else in the history of raising money, and that more volunteers, and all the excitement that has come from hope making a comeback speaks to where we are.”

Asked about the main challenges Harris may be facing, Winfrey said that she believes “in all of our lives, everything that has happened before this moment prepares you for the moment that you’re in right now. So I think that her years as a prosecutor, the fact that she ran her own campaign, that she has been behind the scenes as vice president and with Diane we have talked about this, she literally came out of the shadows.”

“It feels like they kept her in the shadows, hiding in plain sight,” said von Furstenberg. “Also the media used to cut her off.”

“That’s right, because she wasn’t the one who could get the ratings for you,” concurred Winfrey.

Linking her own experience to the hope Harris has spoken of, Winfrey said she was “a living example of the American dream,” recalling her youth in “apartheid Mississippi, with no running water, no electricity, no chance. At the time, my grandmother used to say, ‘I hope you grow up and get good white folks,’ because she was a domestic worker, and she worked for a white family that would give us food, and that would give her their old clothes. And she thought that that was the best you could have. And that was her dream for me, that I would grow up and have some good white folks. And she had no idea that I would end up having white folks working for me,” she said with a laugh.

Similarly, her grandmother would boil the clothes in an iron pot because she did not have a washing machine and she would say, “’You better watch me Oprah Gail because one day you’re going to have to learn to do this for yourself.’ And I could feel inside myself and hear the voice inside myself saying, ‘No, you won’t. No, this will not be your life.’ But I had sense enough not to say that to my grandmother,” she added with another laugh. “But I could always feel that my life would be beyond what I could see. I didn’t know how, but I just knew that that was not going to be my life. So I think the American dream is still very much alive, and I feel that it will be even stronger if Kamala Harris wins this election, because she is, she will be a president for the entire country. She will, I think she genuinely does care about people, and she has decency and respect and regard for everyone, and that’s what’s to be on the line here.”

Addressing issues such as taxes and reproductive rights, she said it was “essential, in my opinion, to have people in leadership who have a strong regard for the people that they serve. It’s draconian, it’s unfathomable that we’re living in a world where women in 2024 can’t make decisions about what they want to do with their own bodies. And Kamala Harris obviously would make a difference in that choice for all of us. Being able to choose common sense over nonsense is to me what this election is about. I think that the American dream is not only alive, but it is strong and powerful in that a daughter of a Jamaican immigrant and an Indian immigrant can receive the nomination for her party to become president of the United States of America, I think that is just extraordinary.”