My Journey

by Donna Karan

  I was especially excited to have a company home in Milan. So was Stephan, because I had been using a suite at the exclusive Villa d’Este hotel in Como, north of Milan, as my base of operations, and the bills were astronomical. As it was, Julie Stern was still screaming at me about my extravagant fabric bills. Fabrics remained my drug of choice, and now I had a lot more money to spend.

  —

  Success also freed us up to explore all the parts of a woman’s wardrobe. Donna Karan Toners, our shapewear hosiery introduced in 1990, was a huge hit, and another innovation born out of a personal need. I called them “the sixty-second workout,” because all you had to do was pull them on to look slimmer and firmer. We also introduced Donna Karan Intimates with Wacoal, where we could do modern versions of the foundation pieces my mother wore (one generation’s girdle is another’s body shaper), along with supportive but sexy-looking bras. (I may not have worn them, but I appreciated that most women did. And I learned that making a bra was almost as complicated as nuclear science—this was serious stuff!) Because I was known for body-conscious jerseys, I felt I had to provide the right undergarments to suck everything in and smooth every inch while still being comfortable. I didn’t want my customers to ever have to sacrifice comfort to look good.

  My friend Sonja Caproni who, after leaving the luxury department store I. Magnin, had gone on to work for Paloma Picasso and Karl Lagerfeld, joined us to head our accessories division. I drove her crazy, of course. Once we were working on a fall collection and all the jewelry was gold. A week or so before our show, I started feeling more silver.

  “No problem,” she said. “We’ll switch it.”

  Then at nine o’clock on the night before our show, I changed my mind back. Sonja thought I was joking, until she saw that I wasn’t laughing. She paused, swallowed, and said, “Okay. Let me see what I can do.”

  She called up her suppliers, and they opened their studios that night to dip the silver pieces. By the time we showed the next morning, the accessories were gold—and probably still wet.

  —

  It was the winter of 1990, and Stephan and I were sitting on our vicuña suede sofas, having the same old argument. He was determined to build a business far bigger than our fashion one. Stephan wanted a legacy, and he felt that fragrance was the way to do it.

  “Donna, hemlines go up and down, but fragrance is forever. Look at Chanel!” he said with great impatience.

  “But I hate fragrance. Hate!” I said. I truly did. It was always too strong, too fake, too old-lady-ish. I loved essential oils or the clean, fresh scent of shampoo and soap.

  “I promise you, Donna, we will make a fragrance you love. We will create and control everything about it.”

  “Good luck,” I said, and rolled my eyes.

  “You like Casablanca lilies, right?” he said, pointing to our foyer table, which always had a giant bowl of lilies on it. “Let’s start with that. What else do you like?”

  “Vicuña suede.” My hand caressed our sofa.

  “Okay, what else?”

  “The back of your neck,” I said, leaning into him, rubbing my nose in his neck, and inhaling.

  He smiled. “That might be hard for me to smell, but I’ll work on it.”

  That’s all it took. Stephan was off and running. Like me, he loved a creative challenge, and this was a doozy. And also like me, when Stephan was in the creative zone, he became obsessed. Our bedroom was transformed into a laboratory, with my mad-scientist husband constantly mixing essences in tiny vials—a drop of this, a hint of that. He tried them on me and every woman he ran into, from friends to employees to women in our building. No one was safe. I couldn’t keep the samples straight, but he did. I went to sleep smelling of them.

  One morning he put three vials in front of me. “These are your choices,” he said. “Choose one.”

  I picked an intoxicating blend of exotic flowers, patchouli, amber, and sandalwood. I loved how personal it was to me in every way—dark, sensuous, and evocative—and unlike any traditional fragrance I’d ever smelled. But I couldn’t let it be, of course. I said to Stephan, “You need to give me a beauty company, not just a fragrance. I want hair care, body lotions, soaps, deodorant—everything a woman actually uses. And candles!”

  First we approached Chanel to partner with us, but the company didn’t want to take on an outside beauty business. So, fearless as ever, Stephan hired Jane Terker, a beauty executive from L’Occitane, as our new division’s president, and the two of them forged ahead. Tomio, Frank, and Steve did not want to open a beauty business. They wanted us to go the traditional route and license it to an established company. Stephan, we don’t have the capability to do beauty. We can hardly produce and distribute our clothes, protested one. Another objection was, No one does their own beauty company—the startup costs alone will bleed us. Yet another was, Established beauty companies have the machine in gear. We can’t reinvent the wheel.

  But Stephan wouldn’t back down. He and Jane traveled the world to develop our products. They worked with perfumeries, visited glass-making factories, and researched every last detail that affected the business. The one thing we had that no other beauty company had was an in-house sculptor to create our bottles. Stephan wanted them to be evocative and abstract, and to feel good in a woman’s hand. He loved curves, especially the curves of a woman’s back, and he was very into mixed media and pairing opposite materials. That’s how he came up with our trio of bottles made out of matte black metal, brass, and glass. Like our clothes, they were curvy, sensual, and modern.

  Creatively, Stephan and I were so connected. Over time I’ve come to appreciate that more and more. He’d always say art was creating something from nothing. His artistic process was based on string theory in modern physics—or, as he put it, “connecting the dots.” He’d scatter dots on a page and then connect them with fast, lyrical strokes. A figure would emerge, and he’d translate that into a drawing, a painting, a sculpture. Similarly, my hands follow the lines of the body when I’m draping, and I re-create those curves with a seam. The beauty bottles were the place where his two worlds came together: the businessman he had become and the sculptor he had always been.

  When he moved on to ancillary products (cleansers, creams, and so on), I put my foot down once again. “I don’t want to wash my hair or clean my face with my fragrance! Let’s make the bath product scent subtler, cleaner, and softer.” It sounded so reasonable, but what I was asking for was revolutionary. Once again, Stephan delivered: He took a few notes from the fragrance, and we named the bath and body collection Cashmere Mist. The body lotion was its star. It sold five times the amount of any other product in the line, and almost the same amount as the original fragrance. I wore it morning, noon, and night.

  One day two years later, I came across a beautiful frosted bottle with the name Cashmere Mist on its label. Excuse me? I grabbed it, stormed into Jane’s office, and screamed, “What is this?” I may have thrown the f-word in there.

  “Stephan didn’t tell you? We’re making a fragrance of Cashmere Mist.”

  “No, my loving husband didn’t tell me,” I said, furious. But it’s a good thing he didn’t. Cashmere Mist remains our bestselling fragrance.

  We also developed a skin care line named Formula for Renewed Skin with Dr. Patricia Wexler, the famed dermatologist and my good friend, and Mark Potter, a Texan chemist Jane had met through a reporter. Mark had worked on skin products for the troops during Operation Desert Storm, so we knew his formulas would be innovative and effective. Beauty editors loved our all-purpose gentle cleanser, exfoliating mask, and moisturizing SPF face tint. It’s a crime these products no longer exist.

  We tackled men’s fragrance next. Because Stephan was a race car and motorcycle fanatic, I wanted it to smell like race cars. When he and Jane met with International Fragrances and Flavors, they visited a garage with the engines on so they could smell the exhaust. It could have killed them all! But that was Stephan, passionate and co
mmitted. He even created a bottle that looked like a stick shift.

  I wanted to call the fragrance Thrust. I loved that it evoked the vroom of driving, and yes, that it was sexual. But our friend Hal Rubenstein, the fashion editor, said, “Don’t you dare, Donna.” We settled on Fuel for Men as the name. Next we did a women’s fragrance called Chaos, for which Stephan created a bottle shaped like a crystal shard, and one called Black Cashmere, with a bottle resembling a smooth and glossy river rock. We also offered bold, geometric scented candles, one called Calm and another called Invigorate.

  Stephan was still very much involved with the main business. His office was adjacent to Steve’s, and at the end of the day they’d open a bottle of scotch and close the door to review what was what. Stephan had my back, which gave me such peace of mind. If I wanted something, assuming it was reasonable, he’d insist I get it. He was also the calm, approachable one. He wore a ponytail, in part, so businesspeople would think he was an artist and underestimate him. But Stephan had the last laugh. He proved far more business-savvy than even I could have dreamed.

  —

  By now, circa 1991, our creative needs were too big to keep working with an outside agency like Peter Arnell’s. We had more divisions than I could keep track of, and every division required everything from in-store boutiques and ad campaigns to shopping bags and hangtags. I wanted what Calvin had: a dedicated in-house ad agency. Calvin’s was called CRK Advertising, and it was legendary. He and his creative director, Sam Shahid, had made an indelible mark in fashion and beauty advertising, beginning with Brooke Shields and her Calvins and right through to Kate Moss and Marky Mark. I called Trey Laird, who knew our brand well from working with Peter. Trey was now working at GFT, an American licensee to European brands such as Armani and Valentino. I asked Trey to work on a project that would show me creatively what he would do for my upcoming collection, inspired by the romance of poets and artists.

  Trey is a proper southern gentleman, with a shy, charming, boyish quality. Creativity comes in many packages, and his was the calm, contemplative kind—the opposite of mine. The first time he met me, he entered my typical whirlwind of a day. I was fitting on Doreen and Gina. Patti was holding the phone for a reporter who was about to interview me. I was trying on one shoe, talking to the shoe designer, and, yes, taking off my top (no bra, as usual) to try something on. If he was freaked out, Trey didn’t show it. For our next meeting, he found me mid-pedicure in my office. But by then, nothing surprised him.

  Trey and I had connected way back when he was a junior assistant. He had this unique ability to put everything back in place after I made a mess of it. I would rearrange presentations in several combinations, and he would quietly recall the order of, say, the fifth version I liked. He could follow my thinking and help organize, enhance, and express it as well. These were invaluable qualities that I had never forgotten.

  Now Trey returned to my office with his assigned project. He was wearing an Armani suit—and not just any Armani, but a black label Armani. “Let’s talk about this suit, Trey,” I greeted him. “The fabric is Bartolini. I know because I just saw it at Première Vision. I think of you as a polo shirt kind of guy. How do you, a boy from the South, come in here looking so amazing in an Armani suit made of Bartolini fabric?” He blushed. Before he could answer, I said, “Wait, I have one more thing to tell you—your fly’s open.”

  Trey’s presentation was totally on point. He was nervous about taking on a company as big as ours; after all, he was only in his late twenties. But I believed in him. When I sense that someone is talented, age or lack of experience doesn’t faze me in the least. Trey was instrumental in designing our DKNY London store, and he had never done a store before. Early on he brought in Hans Dorsinville, who was just out of design school, maybe twenty-two years old, and we had an immediate connection as well. Hans is a soulful Haitian Canadian with the kind of even temperament suited to riding creative waves. (Years later, Hans came with me to Haiti to shoot our ad campaign, more dots connected.) Trey and Hans both got me.

  They also take my sometimes impulsive decisions in stride. God knows I’ve sent them on many a wild goose chase. For the spring 1994 collection, we did outerwear pieces—trenches, ponchos, anoraks, balmacaans—made from a reflective fabric by Mectex, which we found at Première Vision, the huge annual fabric fair in Europe. In natural light, it looked chic and matte in mineral colors like icy blue, jade, and gray. Yet in a direct, focused light, it glowed almost white. Very cool. I only discovered this a couple of days before the show. I realized that you couldn’t appreciate the fabric’s glow without some kind of eye-level light. “Trey!” I screamed. He and his team somehow sourced fifteen hundred miner’s headlamps with batteries and had a hangtag printed to explain the reason for the hats placed on each seat. (Before signing off on this idea, Patti called the office of Vogue’s Anna Wintour to make sure she’d wear one, and the answer was yes.) We had the models come out twice: first in the dark with the audience’s headlamps as the only light, and again after we turned on the house lights. The effect was sensational and totally worth the last-minute scramble.

  —

  Thanks to our DKNY flagship store, I was going to London every chance I got. My first stop there was always Egg, a store on Kinnerton Street in Knightsbridge, created and owned by one of my dearest friends, Maureen Doherty. A blond Brit, Maureen is my polar opposite. She is the minimalist of minimalists, a purist who edits everything down to the essential. Egg is a whitewashed former carriage house, and the clothes there are architecturally simple, mostly in white linen, maybe accented with natural, black, and gray. Maureen has an eye for artisans and introduces me to all sorts of people, from great knitters to potters. I wish I had even an ounce of her ease—she’s a spirit in a rocking chair, sipping tea (which she always serves). Once I asked her if I could open an Egg in New York City, and she laughed. “Donna, I’d love you to open a chicken soup store—a nice Jewish girl selling chicken soup, brilliant—but your first question would be, ‘How many kinds of chicken soup can I serve?’ ”

  Our DKNY London store (as un-Egg as it gets) was doing fabulously, and we were anxious to open its Collection counterpart. I found the perfect corner store on Bond Street, but it wasn’t available. The one next door came on the market, and Christina Ong nabbed it for us. I loved it because it had a basement, which I envisioned someday turning into a club or restaurant. We hired legendary architect Peter Marino to design it.

  Creating a store an ocean away can be a challenge. I wanted a dark environment, but the idea wasn’t translating. Patti and I flew to London and met Dominic Kozerski, a young, London-based associate of Peter’s. On the way to the store, we stopped at the Saatchi gallery, where we saw the British artist and sculptor Richard Wilson’s “20:50” installation, the floor of which was flooded with recycled engine oil. I was mesmerized by how the oil reflected the planes of the room. When we arrived at our new store’s raw space, it was still too white. I had asked for a black store with touches of white, but they gave me a white store with touches of black. Then it hit me: It should be a black shiny jewel box like the exhibit we had just seen. In the corner sat a pile of black trash bags. Dominic immediately slashed them open, and we started taping them all over the walls, then the ceiling. Brilliant! I realized we needed a floating wall to break up the space, and that it should be placed on the diagonal to give the rectangular room the off-kilter shift it needed. So we had the workers hold more plastic bags in a straight line, which I placed at the right angle by directing some of the men to move forward and others to move backward.

  Creatively, the London store, which opened in 1996, was a seminal moment for me. It was a gorgeous showpiece, with a gold-painted wall and hints of light everywhere. To celebrate its opening, we threw an over-the-top party, which Trey staged with the fashion show producer Alexandre de Betak. The event, held at a warehouse in Shepherd’s Bush, did a few things. First, it rocked London, which had never seen anything like it. C
elebrities like Richard Branson, Boy George, Liam and Noel Gallagher from the band Oasis, photographer Mario Testino, Yasmin Le Bon, and Gwyneth Paltrow, whom we’d recently outfitted for the film Great Expectations, danced into the night. The media dubbed it the “Party of the Century.” Second, it cemented my relationship with (and trust in) the young architect Dominic, who went on to work with Trey designing all our brand stores. In 2000, Dominic would establish his own company with his partner Enrico Bonetti, and the two would help design and build my homes, including my city apartments, my East Hampton houses, and our family compound in Parrot Cay, in the Turks and Caicos. But most notably, that party established my future décor and entertaining aesthetic. From that moment on, I wanted all my environments to be black and ivory, with low banquettes, touches of gold, candles everywhere, and the sexy vibe of a nightclub.

  A few years later, I took this to an extreme. Stephan and I were looking to leave East 70th Street, and we found a perfect apartment at the prestigious San Remo on Central Park West. Unfortunately, it was a rental, so I couldn’t do any construction. Instead, I said to Dominic, “Let’s paint it black!” And we did, from the waxed walls to the chandeliers to the floors to every stick of furniture; I really let loose. We installed black and gold banquettes and—the most fabulous focal point of all—a water wall lit from below. It looked sensational. I was smart enough to leave our bedroom ivory, and to leave Stephan a back room to do what he liked with.

  When Stephan came home, well, let’s just say he didn’t appreciate the drama as much as I did. “Donna, we have black clothes, black furniture, black rugs, black tables, black dishes, black everything!” he yelled. “How are we supposed to find our keys?” To make his point, he bought a hard hat with a miner’s headlamp and wore it every time he came home, including while he ate his dinner.