by Brenda Polan
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.
PART 6
1990s–
Introduction
The 1990s saw a decisive rejection of the power dressing of the previous decade. Fashion became minimal and decidedly low key in the early years of the 1990s. Grey was the preferred colour, and slimline silhouettes with narrow shoulders dominated the fashion catwalks. Names such as Germany’s Jil Sander and Austria’s Helmut Lang focused on evolution rather than revolution, advancing step by step.
For a while, this led to a new emphasis on casual style (American retailer Gap was a hip choice in the early years of the decade) and a deviation into grunge, a dress-down look inspired by rock bands and teenagers from Seattle, picked up by young designer Marc Jacobs. A more conceptual response was the deconstructionism of Belgium’s Martin Margiela, creating new shapes by rethinking garments in their component parts.
The sense of moderation could not last. Dolce & Gabbana, in their very irreverent way, Gianni Versace (until his death in 1997) and Tom Ford at Gucci led a return to glamour. Ford’s success encouraged the business trend for hot young designers to be parachuted in to revive venerable old fashion houses. The globalisation of fashion advanced apace through the decade, creating untold wealth for luxury brands but also prompting fears about the homogenisation of world culture.
The boundaries between high and low culture were decisively rejected during the 1990s. Designers stole from the street as much as the street stole from designers. Cross-cultural references were piled high. Whereas designers working in previous decades of the twentieth century had tended to reference one earlier decade, the 1990s saw every decade of the century plundered and remixed. Retro fever swept through fashion, worn best by the supermodels (replaced as cover girls by Hollywood celebrities by the end of the decade). Always ready to challenge the status quo was the intellectual Miuccia Prada, who became influential for her deliberate championing of ‘bad taste’, including 1970s furnishings prints.
Two British designers, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, led the way for a revival of haute couture in a modern idiom, with Galliano at Dior proving particularly influential. British designers, including conceptualist Hussein Chalayan, created the most buzz in the final years of the twentieth century, often emerging from the hothouse of London’s Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design.
A new century opened with the dot.com crash, but in truth this was no more than a blip. The Internet transformed communication around the world, also influencing the process of design and the pace of cultural development. The 9/11 terrorist attacks on America in 2001 prompted insecurity in Western society. Fashion’s response was a further retreat into the past, turning chic and ladylike in homage to the 1950s.
But the mood changed again—and fast. Speed, driven by technological progress, was the new mantra. Fast fashion, with rapid changes of style and colour, swept through chain stores in Europe, led by names such as Zara and Hennes & Mauritz (H&M). Responding to this, designers swelled their bank balances by working directly with the chain stores. At the luxury end, they championed the limited edition and the made to measure, seeking to create a point of difference with the mainstream market.
After a long period of minimalism, fashion emerged more colourful and maximalist. Handbags and accessories became as important as clothing, driving profits in luxury goods companies. The environmental threat of global warming, which was widely accepted by 2007, raised questions about the very existence of fashion, with its reliance on built-in obsolescence. Vintage and second-hand clothing enjoyed a surge in popularity.
In the late noughties, the world became a darker place, and the global economic slowdown hit designers hard. Ostentation was firmly out of fashion; the rich avoided flaunting their wealth. Emerging economies, such as m
ainland China and Russia, became more important to designers, although these countries were not immune to the worldwide downturn. The fashion world looked to Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga for direction.
45 MIUCCIA PRADA (1949–)
When Miuccia Prada, who had a PhD in political science but no fashion or design experience, took over the family business in 1978, she did so through gritted teeth. But this Italian intellectual went on to become the most consistently influential international designer through both the 1990s and noughties. Perhaps her status as an outsider gave her a broader vision of fashion design, understanding how it fits into the wider creative firmament and beyond to the world of politics and current events. Even today, she stays relatively aloof from the fashion game, with a much-cited penchant for walking in the mountains in her spare time, wearing the dirndl skirts of her youth.
As the journalist Alessandra Galloni pointed out in 2007, Miuccia Prada has spent most of her career apologising for what she does, her collections expressing her own ambivalence towards her involvement in fashion. By the time she had reached her mid-fifties, she had formulated a strong case for fashion, convincing herself (as much as anyone else) of its importance and relevance in society. ‘It’s true women often don’t want to admit it. And yet fashion enthralls everyone … Some say it’s about seduction, but I think that’s limiting. What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.’ She is a risk-taker, constantly pushing the boundaries of taste, including her own, excited by the challenge of moving fashion forward. Each of her collections, said Ingrid Sischy, editor of Interview magazine, is ‘some kind of throwing down the gauntlet to established ways of thinking.’ An outstanding example of this was her autumn/winter 2008 collection in which she explored lace, treating its reinvention as an intellectual challenge. Her starting point was to avoid the colour white. Lace, for her, was an opportunity to explore ambiguity, to posit a series of interpretations, although in the final analysis she expressed herself still uncertain. ‘I still don’t understand why I like lace,’ she said. ‘But it is such an accompaniment of women, through childhood, marriage and being a widow.’
The very speed of change in fashion both frightens and enthralls Prada. ‘In the end, I like the changes,’ she said in an interview in 2004. ‘In fashion, once you’ve got something, you’re already thinking about what’s next … Every day I’m thinking about change, it’s a constant anxiety and probably a reflection of society’s anxiety in general. The big deal about fashion is really very recent, this hysterical pursuit of newness. It may be a good thing, or a bad thing, but it’s really defining this moment.’
Suzy Menkes, fashion editor of The International Herald Tribune, made the contrast with many of Prada’s contemporaries in fashion: ‘While designers mostly live in a fashion bubble, she has an urgent connection to what is happening in the world … No other creator has the same ability to distill the essence of what is modern, sampling the cultural heritage, anchoring shifting society and making it all seem relevant.’ Paradoxically, Miuccia the intellectual has recently sought to theorise less about fashion, voicing a plea in interviews that the clothes should simply be allowed to speak for themselves. While enjoying the pressures of the modern fashion system and its commercial imperatives, she has also gone through periods of depression over its constant demands. ‘Now the world is so complicated and loud, unless you scream no one listens,’ she said in 2006 with a hint of resignation. Her youthful enthusiasm for communism has clearly influenced her approach to design: challenging bourgeois notions of good taste, opting for the unconventional time after time, creating seemingly ugly colour combinations and looks that both bemuse and enchant. Ironically, the price tags on her accessories and clothes put them out of reach of all but the wealthy—a paradox that has certainly not escaped her attention.
Like many great designers, she was a double act from the beginning, having met her husband Patrizio Bertelli shortly after she took over at Prada. A passionate, combative personality, Bertelli was a supplier to Prada through his company, I Pellettieri d’Italia, based in Arezzo. He is generally considered the business brains behind the growth of Prada, although his wife has emphasised his creative contribution, too. ‘If I hadn’t met him, I probably would have given up—or at least not been able to do what I have done,’ she said. In the late 1990s, Prada developed into a group of designer labels, overextending itself through ambitious acquisitions that delivered poor returns. The financial fallout, which took many years to sort through, hampered the growth of Prada but did not stop Miuccia from producing a stream of outstanding collections that delighted and baffled fashion buyers and editors in equal measure.
Grandfather Mario Prada founded Fratelli Prada, an Italian leather goods business, in 1913. Miuccia was born Maria Bianchi in 1949 to Luigi Bianchi and Luisa Prada and had an isolated childhood for reasons that are still unclear but which culminated in her being adopted by her mother’s sister in adulthood. By the time she reached university in the late 1960s, the student wave of political activism was at its height. Miuccia, with a PhD in political science in her sights, was captivated by the energy of the period, signing up to the Communist Party and becoming fully engaged in the fight against capitalism. She has played down this period in interviews: ‘I was young in the Sixties, when Italian society was first becoming obsessed with consumerism, but my big dreams were of justice, equality and moral regeneration. I was a Communist but being left wing was fashionable then. I was no different from thousands of middle-class kids.’
However, she had another side to her intense personality—that of the bohemian with a creative streak, dressing in Yves Saint Laurent for a student march, studying mime at Milan’s Teatro Piccolo. All this changed in 1978 when she took over Prada, which had been run by her mother following her grandfather’s decision to step aside after World War II. Progressing to the family business was a tough move, she recalled. ‘You know, I had to have a lot of courage to do fashion,’ Prada recalled, ‘because in theory it was the least feminist work possible. And at that time, in the late Seventies, that was very complicated for me. Of course, I liked it a lot but I also wanted to do something more useful.’
Miuccia Prada’s impact was not immediate. For seven years, she learned the nuts and bolts of her new trade, developing experience and confidence with the support of Patrizio. She did not sketch, preferring to work at a conceptual level, and then building a collection from there. The breakthrough came in 1985, when Prada sidestepped the family heritage in leather and produced a collection of heavy-duty nylon bags that became must-haves for fashion editors the world over—with their readers in hot pursuit just a step behind. The handbag was reborn as a key fashion accessory, while nylon was rediscovered as a fashionable material. The nylon bags rapidly turned the Prada label into a fashion powerhouse, although it was another four years before Miuccia launched ready-to-wear in 1988. Her first collections received a mixed response, but by the end of the decade were setting the tone for a new spirit of minimalism, following on from a decade characterised by excess and extravagance. ‘The reason Prada works is because it whispers, it doesn’t shout,’ she has said. ‘If you want to be recognised wearing my clothes, you can be. And if you don’t, you don’t have to be.’
But sometimes Prada could shout—regularly, her collections oozed a sense of a designer challenging her own instincts, attempting to work against her own notions of good taste, as if embarked on an intellectual exercise for personal stimulus. ‘It’s very easy to know what I like and it’s very easy to do what I like. But I tend to have, let’s say, good taste,’ she said. ‘This is very boring for me. So, basically, I have to work with what I think is bad and wrong. In my company they’re always worried about that, everyone is always complaining.’ Prada says she is rarely interested in a look. She works on a concept, often referencing the past, but resolute about making it contemporary. For her spring/summer 2009 collecti
on, she drew criticism for sending the models down the runway in python-skin platform heels (some of them fell over). The clothes them-selves—’cave-woman couture’, she called them—were still more provocative, deconstructed, mixed up, crinkled and rumpled. It was an exercise in sophisticated seduction that puzzled and excited her audience in equal measure.
With her interest in other creative forms, Miuccia set up the Prada Foundation in 1993 to showcase leading contemporary artists. Outside her office window, she installed a playground slide that descended three levels; this playful touch was in fact an art work by Carsten Höller. She also worked with leading architects on her stores, including Rem Koolhaas for New York and Herzog & de Meuron for Tokyo. An installation, titled Waist Down, which toured Asia, America and Europe in 2005 and 2006, highlighted both her seriousness and playfulness with its focus on skirts designed by Miuccia, including her popular circle skirts. In 2008, she commissioned a short animation, Trembled Blossoms, to mark the spring collection, a lush landscape of flowers and nymphs with suggestions of Art Nouveau, Liberty and Aubrey Beardsley. Other projects have included temporary architecture-specific wallpapers, environments and interactive media for the Prada Epicenters in New York, Beverly Hills and Tokyo in a series of collaborations.
