My Journey

by Donna Karan

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  With our new owner, LVMH, came a new president, Pino Brusone. I loved Pino personally, but he wanted me to be more like Armani. “Why must you do so much black?” he once asked. How could I even answer such a question? It would be like me asking him, “Why must you speak with an Italian accent?”

  Pino moved to the States for our company, but he was never really happy to be here, and I understood. He left a year later, and in 2002, Fred Wilson, who had been president and CEO of LVMH Fashion Group America, took over. I thought Fred was wonderful, a true sweetheart of a man. But it was yet another change, and I was facing too many changes at that moment. I even had a new executive assistant: Marni Lewis, who had toured with Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. She still works with me today at Urban Zen. When I interviewed her, she asked a question that threw me: “What do you most value in life?”

  “Huh?” I said, nonplussed. “What do you mean?”

  “What things are most important to you?” Marni said. “I’ve done some work with Tony Robbins, and he suggests we ask that of anyone we’re about to work closely with.”

  I liked that she thought that way, but I needed a minute to think about my answer. Then my list came right out: Creativity. Freedom. Love. Family. Health.

  After working with me for a few months, Marni made an observation. “I can see why you love work so much, Donna,” she said. “You’ve had a lot of obstacles thrown in the way of your values.” She went through the list. Love: My husband was gone. Family: Mine was grown up and spreading out. Freedom: I was answering to new bosses. Health: Stress was literally making me sick. “That leaves creativity,” she concluded. “And work gives you that.”

  She was right. Our new store was my only source of pure joy at the moment. It was my home away from home. I loved spending time in the dressing room with my customers, and I loved my “marketplace” area, where we sold objects from my travels. It was my first Urban Zen statement, and in my LVMH agreement, that’s exactly what we called the non–Donna Karan portion of the store. Stephan had put in that provision. He knew what a shopper I was and how much I loved innovating new products, and he didn’t want this section to be tied into the store’s finances. It was yet another gift he gave me before leaving.

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  I returned to Sun Valley in late March 2002 with my good friends Linda Horn, Lynn Kohlman, and Lynn’s husband, Mark, and their teenage son, Sam. We were set to stay at Richard Baskin’s house while he was gone, and he had asked his friend Steve Reuther to pick us up at the airport. I had never met Steve, so I was intrigued by this friendly, handsome single guy with long gray hair. He was a film producer, and I loved that he had an LA connection. Unfortunately, he wasn’t into me in the way I’d hoped. We were supposed to meet on the top of a mountain one day when I heard he’d gone heli-skiing with another woman. When I pouted about it to my ski instructor, Grady Burnett, he said, “How about if I take you heli-skiing?”

  Linda was against it. “It’s too dangerous, Donna. You’re not experienced enough.”

  But lack of experience has never stopped me. I was doing great, zipping up and down the hills. But it was early spring, so by our last run, the snow was starting to turn sludgy from the warmth. Of course I fell—and couldn’t stand back up. (Naturally, this happened right after Grady said, “Watch out, be careful.”) They had to medevac me out, and the last thing I saw was Lynn Kohlman holding on to a tree. She and five other skiers, including Secretary of State John Kerry, were stuck on the mountain for at least another hour until the helicopter went back for them. My right knee was badly broken—I had a tibial plateau fracture—and I had to have surgery in New York a few days later. Seven screws were implanted, and I was in a wheelchair for what felt like forever. I finally understood why we needed ramps in our store, as well as handrails and an elevator—all the required details that I didn’t appreciate while building it. I also understood why Stephan so valued his nurses and caregivers. They mean the world to you when you’re compromised.

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  Then, in September, something happened that put all my troubles in perspective: Lynn was diagnosed with cancer in her right breast. I immediately called my friend Evelyn Lauder, and she paved the way for Lynn at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where she had a lumpectomy a month later. During the procedure, they discovered that her left breast had suspicious areas, too. My fierce and brave best friend decided to have a double mastectomy, followed by chemo. We were devastated. How could this be? But as you must with cancer, you regroup and resolve to fight it with all your might. Lynn’s mother had had breast cancer in her fifties and had gone on to live another thirty years. We told each other Lynn would do the same.

  I went to all of her doctor’s appointments with her and her husband, Mark. I was right by her side when she had her surgeries. I asked Jill Pettijohn to cook and care for her. And most of all, I tried to keep Lynn laughing with silly stories. I showed her photos from Halloween, when I dressed like a human cyclone (how perfect, right?) and Gabby dressed up as me, with bangs, a Cold Shoulder dress, and too much gold jewelry. I told her how Barbra had me chasing down a particular Prada bag all over Europe, and how I recently wouldn’t let my plane land because I was watching the show 24 and it was a really good part. “I swear, Donna,” she would say, cracking up at my latest caper. “You really are Ab Fab. If people only knew….”

  Once again, illness and birth came hand in hand. As we absorbed Lynn’s news, Gabby announced that she was pregnant with Gianpaolo’s baby and that they wanted to get married. I was ecstatic. I was a grandmother five times over at that point, but now my baby was having a baby. This was a whole new level of bliss. I adored Gianpaolo. Handsome, warm, and unpretentious, he reminded me so much of Stephan. He was also a Virgo. And just like Stephan, he was totally unimpressed with my world, which he knew nothing about. I’d met Gianpaolo three years earlier. The first night I took him to a rather edgy birthday party; there were people gyrating on the bar. Then I took him to a restaurant where the waitstaff were transvestites. (I swear, neither was intentional.) The following night was the Met Gala. The only suit he had was his Alitalia pilot uniform, so I took him to our publicity office so we could outfit him in a tux while the car waited outside.

  “Gabby, why is your mother’s name everywhere in this building?” he wondered. This young pilot from Naples had no idea who I was, and Gabby had kept it that way for as long as she could. Within the hour, we were walking the red carpet surrounded by celebrities. He didn’t know what hit him, but he handled it with ease and grace, just as Stephan had.

  While planning their wedding, Gabby was clear: “Mommy, we want a small wedding like you and Daddy had on the beach in Parrot Cay. Really intimate. And I want a dress like yours.” So I made her a dress like mine: simple, circular, perfect for a pregnant woman. She hated it. “I want one more like Barbra’s,” she said. “Only for the beach.”

  That was my first clue this wasn’t going to be the bare-bones, barefoot beach ceremony Stephan and I had had. There was nothing simple about Barbra’s dress, which I’d designed for her 1998 wedding to Jim. I had been on a silent retreat when Barbra tracked me down and asked me to do it. “Oh, come on, Donna,” she said to me on the phone. “I’ll do all the talking. You design it in silence.” She had such a clear idea about what she wanted that I broke my vow of silence and said, “You design one, and I’ll design one. I’ll make both, and you choose.” She sent me countless sketches, which I studied in silence.

  After my retreat, I flew to Barbra’s house in Malibu with our master seamstress, Nelly Bidon, for muslin fittings, and went again when the fabric arrived (it was hand-beaded in India). My design was a crystal-on-tulle lace pattern with tiny lock-rose diamonds; Barbra’s was Chantilly lace with crystal seed pearls and diamanté. Mine wrapped around the body; hers flowed away from it. But even two dresses weren’t enough for Barbra to choose from. I discovered six more in her closet that she’d found online and would later return. In the end,
Barbra chose my design, and we finished it with a crown of antique hand-knotted flowers atop a beaded veil. It was one of the most intricate couture pieces I have ever created, and she looked stunning.

  We had a month to plan Gabby’s December 2002 wedding. You’d be amazed at how ridiculously over the top a wedding you can plan in a month. Because that’s what it was—a no-holds-barred beach fantasy under the stars. First I rented a huge plane to fly our one hundred or so guests to Parrot Cay. We took over Como Shambhala, and some guests had to stay on a nearby island. When our boat pulled into the harbor, the most remarkable rainbow encircled it, which I chose to view as an embrace from Stephan. The night before the wedding, we built a bonfire on our property, and everyone wore the brightest, most saturated colors, in contrast to the all-white day ahead.

  I’m serious when I say all white. The chuppah was made from hundreds of hand-strung orchids that draped to the ground. The silk aisle was strewn with white rose petals. The Sylvia Weinstock cake flown in from New York (studded with white orchids made of sugar) was the perfect finish to the seafood feast flown in from the restaurant Nobu in London, a gift from the Ongs. And, of course, everyone wore white. It was so pretty, so pure and fresh.

  But back to Gabby’s dress. Five months pregnant, she wanted to look sexy and bare, so we created a micro-mini slip dress with a dramatic train of beaded, sequined tulle. It took forever to hand-embellish, as we didn’t have time to have it done in India. (On the other hand, my silk stretch Grecian-style wrap dress took a quick evening to make.) I was incredibly hurt when, in her excitement, Gabby got dressed without me. I couldn’t stop crying. I know, I know, it sounds so dramatic. But like every mother, I wanted to experience that moment. Gianpaolo was happy to wear the white serape I made for him. Teamed with a white jacket and tailored shirt, he looked so hot, so Parrot Cay.

  Speaking of hot, it was at least as hot as it had been at my first wedding to Stephan. The humidity was oppressive, not that any of us noticed as we partied into the night. Gabby cut off the train of her dress to dance, and Nelly had to sew it back on by the next morning for photos. And there was Lynn, with a giant smile, snapping pictures. We ended the night with a spectacular fireworks display to a rousing rendition of music from Madame Butterfly. It was a bit much, but it was also perfection. I can only imagine what Gianpaolo’s family thought of the whole thing, starting with the family their son was marrying into. About thirty of them made the sixteen-hour trek from Italy. My Italian isn’t so great, so I was only able to communicate meaningfully with his father. But if their smiles were any indication, they were having a ball.

  The whole day was emotional for me. My past and present were there in the faces of all our family and friends, but I felt profoundly alone as I walked down that aisle. Stephan was in my heart, but I longed for his physical presence.

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  I came back to New York and back to work. Yves Carcelle had reached out to Peter Speliopoulos to replace Louise as our creative director. After four years of living in Paris, Peter wanted to come home, as his lifelong partner lived in New York. Our first collection this go-round was fall 2003. It was iconic and mostly black and ivory (sorry, Pino). It was based on—surprise!—The Body and The Suit. We started the show with The Body: bodysuits and dresses. We fused body-molded, sculpted silver keyholes by Robert Lee Morris onto draped jersey to expose slices of shoulder, back, and hips. For The Suit, we redefined power dressing with stretch tweed, molded tailoring, and fitted circular coats. The show was a hit with retailers and press alike. Style.com wrote, “With her boss (LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, in a rare U.S. appearance) and a fresh crop of company executives sitting in the front row, Karan sent out a sensuous, assertive collection that included references to her own groundbreaking designs of two decades ago.” The actress Cate Blanchett was our model for the campaign, and the perfect woman to convey the clothes’ strength and soul.

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  “I feel like Frida Kahlo,” Lynn said one day when she came to see me in the design studio. “I live in constant pain, morning, noon, and night.”

  Lynn’s surgeon had placed expanders under the muscles in her chest after her double mastectomy in preparation for reconstructive surgery. The thinner you are, the more painful that is, and Lynn was as slim as she’d been in her model days. It turned out that she had a terrible infection and needed to be hospitalized. Giving up on the idea of reconstruction, the doctors took out the expanders, and Lynn escaped with me to Parrot Cay for a yoga retreat with Rodney Yee. While at Parrot Cay, Lynn woke up with her head spinning, seeing all sorts of bright colors shooting up out of her body. Rodney and I were excited. “You’re experiencing kundalini rising!” we said in unison. Kundalini rising is an explosion of energy coursing through your chakras, usually precipitated by yoga or meditation, which we had been doing in spades. The only problem was that it kept repeating throughout the day. Finally I called my friend Dr. Susan Bressman, a neurologist and the wife of my lawyer David, who said to get Lynn home immediately.

  Days later, we learned that Lynn had brain cancer, stage IV. Unrelated to her breast cancer, it was a primary tumor, and she would need aggressive surgery to remove the tumor. Her operation was scheduled for April 11, which happened to be the same day I was supposed to have a facelift. (I was fifty-four years old and single, and thanks to my raw food diet and yoga, my body was looking great. But as my weight dropped, so did my face. I wanted everything to match.) I called my doctor, Dan Baker, to reschedule. “Don’t cancel just yet,” he said. “Let me talk to your friend.” He called Lynn, and the two of them agreed she could photograph my procedure before her brain surgery. He seemed to know that keeping her busy would be the best medicine of all. As planned, Lynn came with me, camera in hand. She only had time to stay for half of my facelift. Somewhere, locked in a vault, I have the photos. We’re talking serious blackmail material; may no one ever find them.

  Lynn went on to have her brain surgery, which left her with thirty-nine metal staples in a curved line on the side of her head. If anyone could make thirty-nine staples on the head look good, it was Lynn. In fact, a couple of weeks later, some kid came up to her on the street and asked who gave her the cool haircut. Without missing a beat, she replied, “Dr. Hollander at Sloan Kettering.”

  We recovered together. We went shopping on Madison Avenue, both of us in hats. I wanted to buy her a pair of Ann Demeulemeester boots as a form of retail therapy; they were on her bucket list and seemed like an easy thing to achieve. But they were out of stock. “Please, you have to have them sent to us. We need them for a shoot we have next week with Steven Sebring,” I said, referring to the famed fashion photographer. The girl probably thought we were nuts, me with my swollen face and Lynn with her punk hair. But we did have a shoot, just two weeks after our surgeries. Steven, who’s a great friend, took a series of photos of the two of us at my East Hampton home. The black-and-white photos are moody, raw, and beautiful. I’m wearing a cashmere blanket, and Lynn is wearing those boots, jeans, and not much else. We imagined doing a glossy book called Scarred, a contrasting study of life-affirming and lifesaving surgeries. But we had to let the idea go when, just three weeks later, Lynn’s tumor returned, requiring chemo and radiation. Still, she survived and, like Stephan before her, began the uneasy path of living with cancer.

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  My life gave me emotional whiplash: As Lynn was recovering from her second brain surgery, Gabby went into labor. I might not have been with her while she dressed for her wedding day, but I was not going to be deprived of this moment. Gabby knew better than to even try. “Gianpaolo, you stay by Gabby’s head, and I’ll be here at the bottom,” I directed him in the delivery room. And sure enough, I witnessed my baby’s baby entering this world. On May 28, 2003, baby Stefania Andrea de Felice was born. (Guess who they named her after.) She looked just like me, full head of hair and all. People always said Gabby looked like me, but I never saw it. But now I called the three of us Me, Mini, and Mini Me.

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  Being a new grandmother didn’t slow me down. I was constantly making plans in order to not be alone. That summer I went by sailboat to Corsica with Barbra, Jim, and Richard. Then I headed to the Maldives, where the Ongs had just opened their fabulous Cocoa Island Resort, where the rooms are individual boats positioned on the sand and surrounded by water. I practiced yoga with Rodney Yee and learned to scuba-dive.

  Everyone was thinking about who could replace Stephan, or at least someone I could date. Yves Carcelle introduced me to Gregory Colbert, a Canadian filmmaker and photographer best known for his “Ashes and Snow” exhibit, a study of surreally serene interactions between people and animals (picture a child reading to an elephant or kneeling next to a cheetah). He was looking for a place to store his work and asked about Stephan’s studio. I couldn’t imagine anyone’s work there but Stephan’s, so I offered my apartment instead. I had just moved into my Central Park West place, and the walls were bare. Gregory came and hung his pieces throughout. I was incredibly flattered—until I got an invoice for them. (They’re still hanging in my apartment today.) Clearly, the dating thing was not going to be easy.

  In late fall I met Barbra and Jim in Sun Valley. We walked into an art gallery, and I saw a sensational sculpture—soulful and primitive, almost ancient-looking. It was the work of a glassblower named William Morris, whom I had met while Stephan was alive. Bill was my kind of artist and my kind of man: sophisticated but raw, long-haired, built beyond built, and rugged as they come. I called my friend Ingrid Sischy, the editor of Interview magazine, and asked if she’d be interested in an article on Bill. “Absolutely,” Ingrid said. It turned out that Bill was well known. He’d collaborated with another renowned glassblower, Dale Chihuly, whose work was collected by Elton John, among others. Who knew the glass-art world was so rarefied?

  I didn’t waste a second. Weeks later, in November, Marni, Ruthie, and I set out for Seattle, where Bill lived, and he took us to the Pilchuck Glass School, where he taught and worked. I was mesmerized. I knew nothing about glassblowing and the physical stamina it took to hoist glass into and out of a 1,700°F furnace. I got burnt twice just trying. My mind raced with design ideas.