Diane Kruger’s first trip to Aisa

Diane Kruger was the essence of Chanel chic in an haute couture black organza and lace ballerina-length gown with jewel-encrusted bodice at New York Fashion Week where she presented her long-term friend, Karl Lagerfeld, with his FIT Fashion Visionary award.

But she’s preparing to swap her Hermes birkin Ostrich veines bags for yurts.

In a few weeks she’ll be roughing-it on location in the wilds of Tajikistan, the landlocked Central Asian republic, which is bordered by Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China.

Diane is filming a new action thriller where she plays a young journalist captured by the Taliban. She’s already shot scenes in the in the capital of Dushanbe and has fallen in love with the remote and exotic land that has been continuously inhabited for 4,000 years.

She is returning in a few weeks, and this time filming resumes in Tajikistan’s forbidding mountain regions, containing some of the highest peaks in the world.

“There’s absolutely nothing, it’s miles from anywhere and anybody,” she told me. “We’re going to be living in camps (yurts) and they’re having to helicopter everything in, including hundreds of mattresses. It’s going to be very different, but exciting. I’m really looking forward to it.”

German-born Kruger, best known for her roles in ‘Troy’, ‘National Treasure’ and, more recently, ‘Inglorious Basterds’, began her career as a model, at the age of 16, after an injury put at end to her wish to become a ballerina, and she had successfully auditioned for the Royal Ballet School in London..

“I feel I’ve known Karl all my life,” she said of the couturier who is regarded as the ‘kaiser’ of fashion, and who has wielded the golden scissors at Chanel since 1983.

“I did catwalk for Karl and Chanel and my first big editorial job was with Karl and Chanel. We did the shoot in his house in Paris; me, just 16, and all these supermodels, all of us in the most beautiful, full-length ballgowns.