It covers a multitude of sins, if you know what I mean. Not just an ordinary fashion designer, Donna Karan has proved she is an extraordinary New York designer. From the onset, what fascinates the outsider is the perfectionist, overachieving manner with which Karan translates her ideas into reality. Clearly running on New York energy, Karan wields her creativity masterfully and then packages her work in cashmere and silks to seduce her customers into a den of urban luxury.
Her better collections reveal a basic philosophy cultivated from her travels to the East and lifestyle changes she has made over the years in her personal life. Her many followers are treated to this inner space that she expresses visually, tactilely, and with clear attachments to a mixture of eastern and western spiritualism, dressed in the austerity of the all-encompassing color black.
Karan often claimed that having a working mother at a time when most women stayed at home generated cravings for a more conventional nuclear family. And having a demanding and hard-to-please parent may have equally shaped her passive-aggressive drive to excel and her pattern of doing it on her own terms.
Her whirlwind success in the industry was just beginning. Saddened by the loss of Anne Klein to cancer at the very same time she was beginning a new role as wife and mother, Karan was hastily promoted from associate designer to design director to complete the collection on which they had both worked.
The fashion press, however, credited the success of the company primarily to Karan and her vision of a new emerging and very successful working woman who happened to be a woman much like Karan herself. Yet her greatest contribution to the Anne Klein company was the unveiling of the Anne Klein II bridge line in , which changed the process of designing for women both by observing lifestyle and by bridging the price gap between designer and moderate price structures in the retail marketplace.
By the late s Karan had divorced and subsequently married her soulmate Stephan Weiss, a sculptor whom she had met socially prior to her first marriage.
With the business management support of her new husband and the economic backing of Takiyho, Inc. The year was also marked by one of her earliest and most successful advertising campaigns. By the s, DKNY had become a worldwide household brand. I had a purpose: to change the health care system into a well-being system, integrating Eastern and Western practices.
A philosophy of living emerged with three components: preservation of culture, integrative healthcare, and integrative education. Karan was fashion-obsessed from an early age, attending Parson's School of Design, which she left, without a degree, to take an assistant position at Anne Klein, one of the top design firms in the country. Jointly, they received many awards for their sporty, sophisticated womens-wear.
Japanese fashion financier Takihyo Tomio Taki had taken financial control of Anne Klein upon the founder's demise and his first gamble on Karan's genius was to appoint her to fill her boss's rather impressive pumps. Karan struck pay dirt in when she launched Anne Klein II, the first exciting "bridge" line priced between couture and affordable clothes for average women. The bridge line subsequently became a retailing phenomenon, creating a whole new shopping world for fashion-conscious yet budget-cautious women.
Many other designers, from Calvin Klein to Geoffrey Beene, followed her stylish suit. Black predominated in her separates, designed to make life, work, and getting dressed in the mornings and making appearances from office to evening affairs much simpler. The philosophy was one of simplicity.
She offered her version of wardrobe basics, which made dressing for any occasion easy. The line prospered by staying current with street fashion ideas incorporating the teenage grunge look a mismatched sloppy style adopted by the youthful 90s counterculture for mostly mainstream and older audiences. Essentials, only slightly lower-priced, was still a bit too costly for most fashion consumers.
And yet, by the mids she sensed another opportunity for those seeking greater exclusivity—this time at top price points under a limited edition label with her signature. From the start, Karan was a designer's designer, using her own closet as a testing ground and inspiration for her fashions. For suggestions for menswear designs, she used her husband and business partner, Stephan Weiss. Her personal life also showed steady growth and determination.
She married Long Island retailer Mark Karan in and had one daughter. While the couple divorced in , they remained good friends. In she married Stephan Weiss, whom she had first met on a blind date ten years earlier. They lived in Manhattan and in a beach house on Long Island, where Weiss designed the home and grounds, leaving Karan to handle the interiors. The family moved to Long Island after the marriage.
By the time Karan finished high school, she had already staged her first fashion show. She attended the Parsons School of Design for two years, leaving at the age of nineteen to work for the ready-to-wear designer Anne Klein.
Klein fired Karan in short order, but rehired her two years later. When Anne Klein died of cancer in , Karan was put in charge of Klein's Seventh Avenue sportswear company at the age of twenty-six, just days after having given birth to a baby girl. During Karan's decade-long tenure as head designer, she built Anne Klein into the most profitable sportswear company in the United States.
She launched Anne Klein II, a so-called bridge line of clothes priced slightly lower than the signature collection and meant for the working woman. Long since divorced from Mark Karan, the father of her ten-year-old daughter, and remarried in to her business partner Stephan Weiss, Donna Karan set out to "design everything I needed, so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore" Agins, p. To this end, she devised a sophisticated twist on the mix-and-match concept and called her line Donna Karan Essentials.
It consisted of a bodysuit, tights, dress, skirt, jacket, pants, and accessories-"seven easy pieces" meant to be replaceable with minimal updating. It was a modern way of dressing designed to go from day to evening, pack easily in a travel bag, and be ready to wear at a moment's notice. Her system of dressing was based on a cashmere bodysuit, on top of which could be layered silk body blouses, sweater-like jackets, unconstructed blazers, and easy-fitting skirts or trousers.
In addition to answering her own needs and those of many other women, Karan drew inspiration from the pace and attitude of New York City, naming her collection Donna Karan New York. Soon the label included fragrance and beauty products, a men's collection, a children's line, and a home furnishings collection. In she launched DKNY, a casual line of less expensive, more youthful fashions.
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