by Donna Karan
“What are you doing?” Patti asked. “That’s Alida’s!”
“My name is on it,” I responded, perfectly serious.
“The whole company has your name on it, Donna,” Patti said, laughing. I didn’t see how this was funny; I just felt weird. Donna Karan was now a brand, not a person. It was my name, but owned and traded on by everyone else. This marked the beginning of my evolution from a private woman to a public fashion brand, and I won’t pretend I was comfortable with it—I’m still not. My name would never be mine and mine alone again.
Our first trunk show, a small gathering where VIP customers preview a collection and place orders in advance, was at Bergdorf’s on June 18, 1985. We were going to be in all of Bergdorf’s Fifth Avenue windows—my ultimate dream come true—and Patti was helping set up the displays. Around ten o’clock on the Tuesday night before the show, I looked across my office to Beth and whispered, “Want to peek?” We called Marvin, hopped into the car, and headed uptown to 57th and Fifth. I was still holding my mug of hot water and lemon when we got out of the car, and when I saw that sheets of brown paper were still covering the windows, my heart sank. But one of the guys recognized me. He put his finger to his lips and rolled up the paper, and there it was: black background, black clothes, black hats, highlighted by the white shirt, the gold sequin skirt, the camel coat, and all of Robert’s gold jewels. Donna Karan New York was etched in gold on the glass.
My mind jumped back to 1972 and the time I’d found myself standing in front of the Bonwit Teller windows displaying the first holiday collection I’d done for Anne Klein. I had missed Harold so much in that moment. You did it, Donna, you did it, I imagined him saying now. “You’re right. I did it, Dad,” I whispered to the night.
The next day was bedlam. Our space was the first thing you saw at the very top of the escalator. Women went wild, and I looked on in wonder.
“What do you think, Donna?” It was Dawn Mello, who had come to stand next to me.
“I honestly never thought it would sell,” I said, without a hint of false modesty. “Not like this.”
The New York Times reported that in our first season, we produced the highest sales per square foot of any designer in Bergdorf Goodman, and Saks said the same about their stores that carried our clothes. Bergdorf’s became our brand’s home away from home. My memories from that time are endless and treasured. I wanted our in-store boutique to feel exclusive, so the clothes were hung behind sliding doors instead of just on racks (so elegant). Once I insisted on black cubbyholes to hold our sweaters, only to realize you couldn’t see our black clothes in them (not so elegant). And I was constantly running into friends.
“Barbara Walters is in the dressing room,” Patti said to me one day when we stopped by the store. “You have to help her.”
I did more than help. I literally gave Barbara the clothes off my back, which weren’t yet in the store. Barbara looked so chic and felt fabulous—a far cry from when she’d worn my Anne Klein clothes on TV all those years ago. Patti got me a terry robe from the intimates department, and I slinked out of the side entrance into my waiting car.
Another time, I solved a woman’s medical issue with a fashion remedy. I was doing a personal appearance for our accessories on the first floor when she approached me. “I’d love to wear your jewelry, but I can’t,” she said, pointing to a neck brace in her handbag. “Follow me,” I said, pulling her to the hosiery department. We opened a pair of black tights, made a black sleeve for her brace, and stuck on an RLM pin. Gorgeous. You’d be amazed what black tights can do in a pinch.
They can also save face. My friend Sonja Caproni of I. Magnin once went to a Fashion Group dinner in a bodysuit, hosiery, and gold sequined skirt. She started to dance with Michael Coady, the Women’s Wear Daily editor, and Michael, a practical joker, purposely untied the skirt, so it fell down to the dance floor. The press covered the moment, of course, but Sonja just laughed it off. “Thanks to the black bodysuit and tights,” she said, “it wasn’t half as embarrassing as it sounds.”
—
Speaking of black hosiery, Stephan and I agreed early on that we wanted to control everything about our business and make everything in-house. We would license our name only if we needed the expertise, and that’s how we came to work with Hanes.
Hosiery had become an obsession with me. The black tights from the Italian garage lady weren’t cutting it. The material didn’t have the kind of memory I needed. This was fine for a show, but real life was another story, and the knees of my tights were getting baggy! Cathy Volker, a brand-new executive at Hanes, came to my office. “I want one thing and one thing only,” I told her. “I want a pair of matte tights you can’t see skin through. Not even a hint. Not even when your knee is bending. I will personally test it. And they need to suck you in from your toes to your neck, so you don’t need a girdle.”
There was a reason I was insisting on total opacity. My next fall collection would be all short skirts. I wanted one fluid line, and I didn’t want women getting hung up about their legs. I didn’t want to chance anyone rejecting a new proportion because she was feeling self-conscious about her thighs or calves.
Cathy got it. She went back to the Hanes factory and made them innovate the technology to achieve the opacity I demanded. She told me they went through thirty iterations to get it right. It wasn’t just using a heavier yarn; it was the way the yarn was knitted and the technical manipulations of the needles. Like me, Cathy didn’t know from the word no. She made it happen, and a new hosiery machine was born in the process.
The black tights were so crucial to my looks that I insisted that every dressing room have a pair in it so women could wear them when trying on clothes. My reasoning was that a woman buys her fall clothes when it’s still warm and she’s not wearing hosiery, and everything looks too new and heavy against a bare leg. (It’s the opposite of buying a swimsuit in the middle of winter—neither situation is ideal.) When stores told me I was out of my mind, I fired back, “Yeah? See how many more garments you sell with the hosiery in the rooms, and then tell me I’m out of my mind.” Today, having hosiery on hand is a given in high-end stores.
—
“Stephan, are you out of your mind?” I asked. “I’ve already said no.” I would do many things, but hawking a deodorant was a step too far.
“We need the money,” he said. “They’ve raised the offer to $100,000, plus another $100,000 if they use it next year. We can’t afford to turn it down.”
He had a point. We were going through our original $3 million like water. When the ad agency for Gillette’s Dry Idea first came to Beth with a $25,000 offer to feature me in a commercial, I said no, absolutely not. But the agency raised the offer, and Beth took it to Stephan, because she knew he would get on board. We signed the deal, and they even invited us to help write the copy. They asked us to come up with three “nevers,” which all ended up in the ad:
KARAN: There are three nevers in fashion design. Never confuse fad with fashion. Never forget it’s your name on every label. And, when showing your lines to the press, never let them see you sweat.
ANNOUNCER: That’s what new Dry Idea solid is all about. Maximum control. It keeps you drier than any other solid.
KARAN: Feeling tense is understandable. Looking tense is unfashionable.
ANNOUNCER: Dry Idea. Never let them see you sweat.
There I was on TV, wearing as many Donna Karan New York pieces as I comfortably could—it was, after all, a national commercial. The spot was a hit, and given all the buzz I was getting, Gillette quickly renewed our contract for another year and another $100,000.
Now I had another line: never turn down a free commercial for your brand.
Credit 13.1
Credit 13.2
14
WOMAN TO WOMAN
I realized I had truly made it when I landed on the cover of the New York Times Magazine on May 4, 1986. There I was next to the headline “Designer Donna Karan: How a Fash
ion Star Is Born” for a feature story written by famed fashion editor Carrie Donovan. I was already feeling pretty fabulous. Right out of the gate, I’d won the 1985 CFDA award for womenswear designer of the year for my first collection, as well as a 1986 special CFDA award for influence in head-to-toe dressing. But that cover story meant more than any award. For a native New Yorker raised on Seventh Avenue, it didn’t get any better.
It was also terrifying. Success is tricky that way. You never trust it or think it will last. I had poured my heart, soul, and life into that first collection, and now I had to do it again, and again, and again. What if I didn’t have anything new to say?
Meanwhile, Peter Arnell was pouring my life into the ads. “We’ve shown the view from your car,” he said. “Now’s the time to turn the camera around on you in your home, in your office, in the car with Marvin.”
“Peter, my life is a mess,” I told him, my mind flashing to the piles of paper on my desk and the heaps of clothes all over my bedroom. Even any hotel room I stayed in looked like a cyclone had hit it minutes after I arrived. (When Julie and I traveled together, he always threatened to take pictures.)
“But that’s the point,” he said. “Everyone’s life is a mess. You’ve created a brand in answer to the mess.”
“Okay, but they can’t be about clothes. Nothing bores me more,” I said. I meant it. Fashion for fashion’s sake had never done it for me. What fascinates me is the woman who wears the clothes. My goal with designing has always been to make the woman be the first thing you see. If you comment on her clothes first, I haven’t done my job.
Peter and I decided to tell an intimate story in a series of ads, to document how a woman (me, my customer) lives on the move, juggling the private and the professional. Like me, her only quiet time would be in her car. If it looked like she was self-conscious or posing in any way, we’d throw it out.
We cast the model Rosemary McGrotha as my alter ego. (So many people thought she actually was me—I wish I looked like that!) We gave her a husband, the actor Peter Fortier, and a baby, Mackensie—Lisa’s baby, who was actually Stephan’s and my first granddaughter. The fabulous photographer Denis Piel caught our woman getting ready in her bedroom with her baby sitting on an unmade bed playing with jewelry. He captured her having a pedicure, on the phone at work, walking off a plane with her bags, being hugged by her husband in the kitchen, and in the car with her baby playing with a phone. You’d only see hints of her clothes because she was the focus. That was the whole point of the campaign. Of course, this was a rather airbrushed view of things: she still looked amazingly serene no matter how much luggage she carried, and her baby never cried or drooled. There’s reality, and there’s reality.
My reality was filled with messy, unplanned moments. The day before my spring 1987 show, I had Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and Linda Evangelista (the original supermodels) in my design studio for a fitting. These were the years when models were paid exorbitant rates with two-hour minimums ($7,500 for a fitting and show, and they did multiple shows a day). My mouth was full of pins when Beth put a phone up to my ear and told me it was Stephan.
“Gabby’s in the hospital,” he said. “She had a cigarette, which triggered a bad attack.” Gabby was a teen now and had chronic asthma. “Look, I’ve got this one,” he continued. “Come up whenever you can.” Pulling the pins out of my mouth, I started crying. Should I stay or should I go? What was the right thing to do? Like any juggler, I did both. I stayed for the fittings, and Patti and I went up to the hospital late that night. I wound up sleeping in Gabby’s room and heading straight to the show the next morning.
—
As women, we all have the same issues, insecurities, and how-do-I-do-it-all moments. It doesn’t matter how famous, rich, or accomplished you are. No one looks in the mirror and thinks she has it together. Women have to go to work, take care of their families, travel, and constantly be “on.” We don’t have a lot of time to spend on ourselves. We just do the best we can. I haven’t met the woman who thinks her body is perfect—even the ones with perfect bodies! We’re all looking to feel good about ourselves, to feel sensual, to feel comfortable in our skin.
Since my first show, I had met and dressed so many celebrities, women I’d long admired and assumed led charmed, ideal lives. But the minute I got them in a dressing room or into Patti’s office, we’d start sharing personal stories. I came to think of them as private people with public lives.
What I loved most was that we were dressing women, not girls—people who had a sense of who they were and what they wanted to project, and who knew their bodies. Anyone can dress a beautiful girl. They look great in anything. But to dress a woman, a true peer, who wants to look fabulous, sexy, confident, and still age-appropriate, was an accomplishment. We dressed Susan Sarandon and Bernadette Peters, both of whom still wear our clothes today. In the 1980s, Candice Bergen, who was starring on Murphy Brown at the time, shopped the line without any stylists and wrote up her own order. She looked amazing in our clothes, as did Patti LaBelle (who later sang at our Christmas party), Anjelica Huston, Isabella Rossellini, Sigourney Weaver, and Annette Bening, who visited us with her husband, Warren Beatty. Annette and Warren asked us to dress them for the cover of W, and proudly showed us a photo of their first baby. We even met with Raisa Gorbachev, who arrived with four bodyguards. We dressed Uma Thurman, and she and I eventually became friends through our philanthropic work. And we regularly outfitted Marisa Berenson, my old twin from St. Tropez.
I’d known Diane Sawyer since I was at Anne Klein and was honored that she embraced Donna Karan New York, both on and off the air. No one has a stronger, more confident presence in clothes. She came to us looking for an outfit to marry Mike Nichols in, and she fell in love with a cream-colored lace jacket and pencil skirt. She said she’d just wear the sample (she was model size) even though Patti wanted to give her a new one. Talk about easygoing. Natasha Richardson asked me to design her wedding dress for her marriage to Liam Neeson; it was the first time I had done a wedding dress, really a couture piece. I made a simple ivory strapless dress with a sheer organza coat. Everyone in the design room looked forward to her fittings because she was so beautiful, sweet, charming, and so in love. (And who wouldn’t want to marry Liam Neeson?) Theirs was a great love story, which made Natasha’s sudden passing in 2009 especially tragic.
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“We’ve been asked to be on Oprah!” Patti screamed one day in the early 1990s. She was beside herself. Somehow we figured out the logistics of getting the models and clothes to Chicago, and everything went surprisingly smoothly. I did my best to act like talking to Oprah about clothes in front of a zillion people was natural. The actress Linda Gray of Dallas (another star we dressed) was her other guest. After taping the show, Oprah came into the green room to thank us.
“I’m flying to New York for dinner,” she said to us and Linda. “Would you ladies like a ride?”
Patti and I jumped at the chance, though I’m sure we acted cool about it. The flight back was a wonderful two hours of lively girl chat. Oprah mentioned that she was thinking of starting a book club on television, an inconceivable idea at the time. We talked about fame, and Oprah shared that she’d known she’d be successful the minute she’d stopped worrying whether everyone liked her. Women, we agreed, get too caught up in being liked. But the highlight of the flight was when she pointed to my outfit.
“Donna, I love what you’re wearing,” she said. “I wish I was wearing something like that for my dinner.” Within seconds, I pulled off my clothes and handed them to her. We got off the plane with Oprah in the very clothes I’d worn getting on it.
—
Right around now, my friendship with Barbra Streisand was starting to take off. I had called her when I saw her in a magazine wearing one of my off-shoulder pieces and complimented her on how gorgeous she looked. We got to talking, and she asked if I’d like to go with her to an antiques show. (This time I do remember what I was weari
ng: the camel jacket from the first collection.) We got along famously, and afterward Barbra invited me back to her apartment on Central Park West—a triplex.
“I’d love to see if you have sweaters that would match some of my stones,” she said.
We were in Barbra’s bedroom, which was very feminine, very elegant, very Barbra. It was all white, with vintage touches like an antique four-poster bed and crystal chandelier. (During that first visit, klutz that I am, I broke two of her 1920s candlesticks. I was mortified, but she was very gracious about it.) All her “stones” were laid out on her white carpet. Not emeralds or lapis, just necklaces with semiprecious or costume colored stones. She wanted exact matches. And I mean exact.
Barbra matches color like no other human being I’ve ever met. The only woman who comes close is Demi Moore, another good friend. They are precise and very detailed, catching things that mere mortals don’t. (Coincidentally, they also both have antique doll collections.) Performers are used to being magnified on the big screen. They know their bodies from every angle, and a sixteenth of an inch matters. They’ve taught me more about fashion than anyone. They’ve also shown me the power of celebrities versus critics as style influencers, which was a new concept back then.
I got my first taste of this in 1992, when I designed a dress called the Cold Shoulder, which had cut-outs on the shoulders. I had two thoughts in mind: First, a woman never gains weight in her shoulders, so everyone is happy to bare them. Second, it would look conservative under a jacket by day and supersexy at night. For our fall show, I put it on Linda Evangelista under a jacket, which she took off as she walked the runway. Women’s Wear Daily hated it—I mean really hated it! Thinking it was an embarrassing flop, I shoved the Cold Shoulder dress in the back of my discard closet, and that was that.
