In 1996 when Donna Karan took her company to the stock market, New York magazine put her on its cover. The picture showed a youthful, doe-eyed woman with glossy long dark hair looking straight to camera, her hands before her mouth in a praying posture. The selling copy beneath read, ‘Donna Karan, Corporate Goddess. The most successful woman on Seventh Avenue has gone New Age, and now she’s going public. Will Wall Street love Donna as much as her customers do?’ Inside, journalist Rebecca Mead concluded, rightly, that Wall Street doubtless would. Donna Karan is the third and youngest of what fashion observers came to think of as the great triumvirate dominating American fashion in the 1980s and 1990s, the threesome—Lauren, Klein, Karan—who made the rest of the world take American fashion seriously for the first time.
Backed by the marketing, advertising and public relations techniques at which Americans excel, these three designers became global brands at an astonishing speed, each quickly establishing an identity which not only set them apart in terms of all-American modernity but neatly set them apart from each other. If Lauren appealed to the romantically aspirational, the dreamer and the fantasist, and Klein to a classic, understated, minimalist, country-mansion moneyed chic, Karan was sharply focused on young, ambitious working women, those moving up the corporate and professional ladders, paying their own bills and making their own rules. She put them in clothes—mostly black—that were easy, chic, carefree. While Lauren’s twenty-page runs of movie-still style advertisements recorded re-imagined mythic times and communities, Karan’s best-known multi-page advertisement from 1992 shows the inauguration of a woman president (played by model Rosemary McGrotha), all pinstripe suit and pearls. The ad’s slogan, ‘In Women We Trust,’ was Karan’s mantra and one reason the women of the press loved her. However hard they tried, she implied and women believed, male designers could never get inside women’s skins in the way she could. ‘I am a woman,’ Karan told Brenda Polan for The Mail on Sunday in 1994. ‘I’m a female designer, a working wife and mother. I understand the lives of other women and the last thing any one of us wants to do is worry about our clothes. We want a simple system whereby we get dressed fast and go.’
An article in Vogue in 1989 put it this way: ‘A kid from Queens is now Queen of Seventh Avenue. Karan’s professional rise has a lot to do with the current rise of “fortysomething” female executives, like herself, who want to look pulled together but not prim.’ Valerie Steele gives context to the relief with which women embraced Karan’s capsule-wardrobe dressing in the mid-1980s. ‘At a time when the strict man-tailored Dress for Success look was getting tired, and when executive women no longer felt so much pressure to look like men, Karan developed a sophisticated, sensual alternative to the business suit. Based on her own experience, Karan suspected that women would appreciate a system of dressing that was as easy as men’s wear, while also retaining the comfort and sensuality of clothes to fit a woman’s body.’
In fact, John T. Molloy’s Women: Dress for Success was one of the most proscriptive and pernicious little tomes ever written. It droned at tedious length and in tendentiously enervating prose about the imperative necessity for women to adopt the ‘skirted’ suit if they wanted to be respected in the workplace and advocated wearing it in background-blending tones and softened by only a pussy-cat bowed blouse tied right up under the chin. In response to the surrogate man theory of how to smash the glass ceiling American designer sportswear at all levels of the market had got harder-edged, bulkier and bigger-shouldered season by season. Karan’s collaboration with Louis dell’Olio at Anne Klein was in this vein—which made her new vision all the more sensational when she launched her own label in 1984. ‘Yes,’ Karan said at the time, ‘women’s clothes should be almost like men’s but they should be more comfortable, sensual, womanly.’
The designer was born Donna Faske in Queens, New York, in 1948. Her father, Gabriel, ran a haberdashery and tailoring shop called Gabby Faske and her mother, Helen, was a model and then a saleswoman on Seventh Avenue. Her father died when she was young and she was, she has said, bitter because the mothers of her friends did not go out to work as hers did. Nevertheless, she was, she said, obsessed with fashion from a very early age and, at fourteen, she began working part-time as a sales assistant in a boutique. She was a baby boomer growing up in the 1960s when youth fashion became a dominant force and girls were being encouraged to envisage careers in their future rather than simply marriage and motherhood. Karan was completely focused on design as her future career; she began designing clothes as a teenager, fitting patterns on her own body. After high school she attended Parsons School of Design but never graduated because, in 1969, a summer job at Anne Klein secured for her by her mother led to a permanent post as designer. Anne Klein was a major sportswear designer who pioneered the concept of tailored separates. ‘She was,’ said Karan, ‘a woman who understood women. I was in awe of her, she was such an innovator.’
After nine months she was fired because her concentration was not on the job but on Mark Karan, the boutique owner who was to become her first husband and the father of her daughter, Gabby. Anne Klein rehired her and by 1971 she held the post of associate designer. Anne Klein died in 1974 just five days after Karan had given birth to Gabby. Although Karan admitted to feeling ‘terribly guilty’, she went back to work immediately, working with a classmate from Parsons, Louis dell’Olio. Together they polished up the Anne Klein style, giving it some urban sophistication which precipitated it into the Fashion Week limelight. Suddenly, the international fashion press recognised it as a brand worth watching.
Ten years after taking over, the restless Karan decided it was time to move on, time to do something of her own. ‘It was time to start something from nothing,’ she told Ingrid Sischy. ‘That’s what I love to do the most. I wanted to start a new project which was going to be oriented around a system of dressing—my seven easy pieces. But my bosses at Anne Klein didn’t go for it so I decided to leave and do it for myself. I found leaving Anne Klein very hard to do.’ Since that epochal first Donna Karan collection and the press frenzy with which it was greeted, the growth of Karan’s company brand has been exponential. One of the selling points she loved to reiterate was that her body as well as her lifestyle more closely resembled that of most women—unlike most of her competitors. ‘I’m a woman with a rounded figure,’ she said. ‘I’m not a model size 8. I won’t design clothes that cannot be worn by a woman of size 12 or 14.’ She would use size and what she calls ‘the fallibility of a woman’s body’ as a bonding device with other women, especially the press, passing on tips like her trick of tying a sweater around the waist so that it draped concealingly around the hips, creating an illusion that all the perceived bulk in that area was knitwear.
The collection with which Karan launched her own label—‘a little niche business for me and my friends’—in 1985 was based around the body, a leotard with poppers closing it at the crotch, and various wrap pieces that were layered on top of it. The body stayed put and did not wrinkle or ruck up or come untucked as ordinary shirts and jumpers did. It looked trim and tidy all day. In the 1940s Claire McCardell had been one of the first to incorporate the leotard into everyday fashion. Later Azzedine Alaia would use the leotard as an integral part of his mega-streamlined, second-skin approach to dressing. However, no one has ever had quite the impact as Karan did when she made the leotard, revamped and renamed as the body, the central theme of her first collection under her own label. Her rationale was closer to McCardell’s than Alaia’s—not eroticism but convenience—although the wrap skirt showed a lot of leg.
The clothes were photographed in ads showing various working-woman scenarios—disembarking from a plane, catching up on office work at home. In 1978 Karan told Caterine Milinaire and Carol Troy for their book, Cheap Chic:
I believe that a woman’s professional clothes have to come from the inside out. The clothes are never going to make the woman … But I guarantee you that if a woman’s together, she’s going to know enough about herself to look outta sight … And when you have an assurance about yourself, honey, you can walk into any room and command anything. But you’ve got to work at it. It doesn’t come easily.
In 1982 Karan had married for the second time. Stephan Weiss, who died in 2003, was a sculptor who joined Karan in her company. The Donna Karan collection is pure luxury using the most expensive of materials and perfectionist of manufacturing techniques so in 1989 they launched DKNY (Donna Karan New York), a younger, less expensive line. For this, she said, she
wanted a name bigger than me, one that expressed my passion for the world. New York, to me, is the visualisation of the entire universe. Paris is Paris, it’s not the world. Italy is Italy. New York is the world. It is the bridge. It’s the spot that expresses the world. I wanted to say that I was a conscious designer of the people of the world, inspired by Chinatown, uptown, downtown, all the aspects, Central Park, people living in the street, all or it, the beauty, the electricity, the sickness, music, dance, theatre, art; it’s all here. Both companies, Donna Karan and DKNY, which evolved later—and which came out of my need for a pair of jeans, jeans that would fit a woman’s body—are about everyone, all of us, the larger family.
The hugely successful DKNY collection was followed by a jeans collection, menswear, children’s clothes and scent—Weiss sculpted the sensuous templates for the perfume bottles. ‘Stephan was a genius,’ Karan told Ingrid Sischy in 2004. ‘I couldn’t have done it without Stephan … He understood the art of doing business.’
Her fan base is wide and impressive, including as it does Isabella Rossellini, Anouk Aimée, Demi Moore, Jeremy Irons, Bruce Willis, Hillary Clinton, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli and Candice Bergen, the last four of whom all wore her 1993 cold-shoulder gown on the red carpet. ‘The ball of the shoulder,’ said Karan, ‘is the only part of a woman’s body that does not age. A woman never gains weight at her shoulder point.’
In 2002, Karan sold her company to Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessey (LVMH), the luxury stable that also includes Christian Dior and Givenchy. But its heart remains in America, a country where women aspire to look neither hard-edged and threatening in the boardroom nor vulgarly seductive in the bedroom. The urban American woman, an achiever in her chosen field, wants to look grown-up, intelligent, confident and in control of her own sensuality. It is a balance that Karan is uniquely skilled at maintaining. In 2004 she said, ‘Twenty years ago I set out to design modern clothes for modern people. Today that is still my mission. I’m inspired by the artist that lies in all of us, a sense of character, individuality, creativity, the soul that learns from the past, the spirit that anticipates the future, the body that is alive with sensuality, and the heart that knows no bounds.’
Further reading: Ingrid Sischy’s The Journey of a Woman: 20 Years of Donna Karan (2004) contains all the major advertising imagery and an extended interview with the designer. For context, however, Valerie Steele’s Women of Fashion (1991) is excellent.