The Bodysuit Under Everything
In the fall of 1985, on a runway rigged inside a showroom on Seventh Avenue, a model walked out wearing what appeared to be almost nothing — a black bodysuit, snapped at the crotch like a dancer's leotard, over which she would layer, piece by piece, the architecture of a life. A wrap skirt. A tailored jacket. A cashmere sweater. Leather. An evening piece. Seven garments total. The audience — buyers, editors, the merciless front-row apparatus of the American fashion press — watched a woman get dressed the way a woman actually gets dressed: not in a single, decisive costume, but through accumulation, through the daily improvisation of self-presentation that begins at 6 a.m. and doesn't end until someone turns out the lights. Women's Wear Daily called it revolutionary. What it really was, was obvious — obvious in the way that only the most radical ideas are, the ones so close to lived experience that nobody had thought to formalize them. Donna Karan had not invented the bodysuit. She had not invented the wrap skirt or the leather jacket. What she had invented was the system — a modular philosophy of dressing that assumed its wearer was a person with a job, a child, a dinner reservation, and no time to go home and change. "Seven Easy Pieces" it was called, and within a year it had made Karan the most talked-about designer in America, the only woman crashing a boys' club whose permanent members were Ralph, Calvin, Bill, Geoffrey, and Oscar.
The collection had not come from nowhere. It had come from a very specific place: the body of a woman who had been dressing and undressing in her own office for years, who routinely went topless at work because she didn't wear a bra and insisted on trying everything on herself — "just about everyone I've worked with has seen my breasts," she wrote later, without apology — who practiced yoga before yoga was a lifestyle brand and wore a leotard as a base layer before base layers existed. It came from the closet of a woman who packed her suitcase the way she designed: asking what could be rolled, layered, recombined. From a working mother who had been fired from her previous job at Anne Klein because her bosses told her, with a candor bordering on affection, that she was incapable of doing anything small. "Maybe seven easy companies," they said, "but not Seven Easy Pieces."
They were right.
By the Numbers
The Donna Karan Empire
$643MLVMH acquisition price (DKI + Gabrielle Studio, 2001)
$650MG-III Apparel purchase price (2016)
$268MAnnual revenue by 1992, eight years after founding
7Original 'Easy Pieces' in the debut 1985 collection
31Years as chief designer of her namesake brand
6CFDA Awards, including 2004 Lifetime Achievement
100+Company-owned and licensed stores worldwide at peak
A Tailor's Daughter in the Two-Family House
Donna Ivy Faske was born on October 2, 1948, in Forest Hills, Queens, to a family that lived inside the garment industry the way other families live inside a religion — not by choice but by gravitational inevitability. Her father, Gabby Faske, was a custom tailor who made men's suits. Her mother, Helen — known to everyone as Queenie — was a fit model and showroom saleswoman on Seventh Avenue. The marriage between Gabby and the needle trade was permanent; the marriage between Gabby and Queenie was not. He died when Donna was three years old, killed in a car accident, leaving his daughter with no memory of him and a lifelong instinct for loss.
Queenie remarried. Harold Flaxman, the stepfather, was also in the rag trade — because on the south shore of Long Island, in the only two-family house in the affluent Five Towns, what other trade was there? The family was Jewish but not observant. Young Donna spent the High Holidays with her friend Beverly Adwar's family instead, craving the ritual her own home lacked. "When you don't have religious touchstones in your life, you crave them," she later wrote. "At least I did." What she also craved, and never quite received, was her mother's approval. Queenie was emotionally distant, depressive, a keeper of secrets. When eleven-year-old Donna discovered old family photographs hidden in the attic — Queenie with an unknown man, evidence of a first marriage nobody had mentioned — her mother grabbed her by the hair, threw her down the stairs, and grounded her for a month. "I grew to hate secret keeping of any kind," Karan wrote in
My Journey. "I'm convinced I'm completely uncensored because my mother was so closed."
The uncensored part was true. The rest — the neediness, the perfectionism, the relentless drive to create something that would make people pay attention — was more complicated. Donna was not a good student. She was not a good rule-follower. She was, at fourteen, a very good saleswoman, having lied about her age to get a job at a local boutique, where she discovered she could see how clothes worked on a body, could mix and match garments for mothers and daughters who came in looking uncertain and left looking like themselves. "I tell would-be designers that they should first work in retail," she said decades later, and she meant it: the woman who would dress Hillary Clinton and
Barbra Streisand and Bill Clinton for his inauguration learned the craft not by sketching but by selling, by watching a customer's face change when the right jacket met the right skirt.
She was accepted at Parsons School of Design on the recommendation of her mother's employer, a designer named Chester Weinberg. It was, characteristically, a backdoor entrance. She failed draping — the foundational skill of her future career. And then she quit.
The Death That Made Everything
Anne Klein was everything Donna Karan was not: disciplined, established, legendary. A Brooklyn-born designer who had been revolutionizing American sportswear since the 1940s — first with Junior Sophisticates, which pioneered petite fashion, then with her own eponymous line — Klein was the prototype for the kind of designer-as-brand-builder that Karan would later become. She believed in separates, in giving women a coordinated wardrobe rather than a single finished look. She was demanding, exacting, and she recognized in the twenty-year-old Donna Faske something kinetic and useful.
Karan had walked into Anne Klein's office seeking a summer internship after her sophomore year at Parsons. Klein mistook her for a model and asked her to walk. When Karan showed her portfolio instead, Klein hired her on the spot and told her to quit school. "You're already a designer," Klein said. Karan did as she was told. Within two years, she was associate designer. She married Mark Karan, a boutique owner whose surname she kept long after the marriage ended. She became pregnant with her daughter, Gabby. She made plans to become a stay-at-home mother — the kind of mother, one suspects, that Queenie had never been.
But a week after Gabby's birth, in 1974, trucks pulled up to the quiet cul-de-sac in Lawrence, Long Island, where the new family had settled. Out tumbled racks of clothes, seamstresses, and an unfinished pre-fall collection. Karan had thought her coworkers were coming to see the baby. She'd bought bagels. What she didn't know — what nobody had told her — was that Anne Klein was dying. The two women had been on the phone days earlier, debating whether a navy blazer should have six buttons or eight. Klein was in one hospital; Karan was in another. "I had no idea she was dying," Karan recalled, "and I never saw her again."
Klein died of breast cancer at fifty-one. Donna Karan was twenty-five, with a newborn and a fashion house to run. Takihyo Corporation of Japan, which had acquired Anne Klein, elevated her to head designer. She brought in Louis Dell'Olio, her former classmate from Parsons — a quiet, technically gifted designer whose temperament counterbalanced her chaos — and together they sustained the Anne Klein label for a decade. They won the Coty American Fashion Critics Award in 1977 and again in 1981, were inducted into the Coty Hall of Fame. In 1983, Karan introduced the Anne Klein II line, one of the first "bridge" collections — a less expensive secondary line that anticipated the entire future of American fashion retail.
I certainly did not feel that I would be acknowledged at the Anne Klein show, the first show that I did. I had just given birth to my daughter, my boss dies, I am thrown into having taken over this company at the age of 25. It was a big pill to swallow. But I did. And it was enormously successful.
She was, by every metric, a success. She was also, by her own account, miserable — or at least restless, which for a certain kind of person amounts to the same thing. The idea for Seven Easy Pieces had crystallized at Anne Klein, born of the same logic she'd applied as a fourteen-year-old salesgirl: what do women actually need? She pitched the concept to her employers. They said no. Then they fired her, gently, and with a kind of knowing grace. Start your own business, they told her. You can't do anything small.
Stephan and the Scaffold
If the first marriage — to Mark Karan, the boutique owner — was the practice run, the second was the architecture. Donna met Stephan Weiss while still engaged to Mark. Weiss was a sculptor and painter, a tall, calm man whose quiet center of gravity would become the structural beam supporting every building Karan ever erected. She fell for him immediately. The timeline was complicated — she was still with Mark, became pregnant with what she believed was Stephan's child, and had an abortion before the situation resolved itself — and she wrote about all of it in her memoir with the compulsive honesty her mother's secrecy had instilled.
They married in 1983. The next year, with seed money from Tomio Taki — chairman of the American branch of Takihyo Inc., the Japanese textile firm that was also a major partner in Anne Klein — Donna and Stephan launched the Donna Karan Company. He was her co-CEO, her business partner, her muse. When she launched her first men's fragrance in 1992, she told the perfumers she wanted it to smell like "Casablanca lilies, red suede, and the back of Stephan's neck." This was how she worked: from the body outward, from the intimate to the global, from what she knew by touch to what she could build by instinct.
Weiss provided what Karan could not provide for herself: stillness. She was chaos incarnate — Barbra Streisand, who wrote the foreword to My Journey, called her "the most scattered, disorganized human being you'll ever meet" — and Weiss was the counterweight. When she was up all night before a show, pins in her mouth, dipping silver jewelry in gold and then back to silver, shouting "Little black glasses! Who's next?" while Madonna's voice poured over the runway, it was Stephan who ensured the business kept functioning beneath the creative frenzy.
He died of lung cancer on June 11, 2001. It was, for Karan, the defining loss of her adult life — the one around which all the other losses orbited. Gabby Faske's car accident when she was three. Anne Klein's death when she was twenty-five. And now Stephan, gone at the exact moment the business they had built together was being sold to LVMH for $643 million. Birth and death, deal and grief, tangled together as they always were.
Ralph, Calvin, and Donna
For a certain era in American fashion — roughly 1985 to 2000 — there was a holy trinity, and it went: Ralph, Calvin, and Donna.
Ralph Lauren, the Bronx-born son of a housepainter who changed his name from Lifshitz and built a multibillion-dollar empire on middle-class America's yearning for a patrician past it never had. Calvin Klein, the minimalist from the Bronx whose aesthetic ran to clean lines, nude palettes, and provocation — the man whose underwear ads and fragrance campaigns rewired the American relationship between sex and commerce. And Donna Karan, the Queens-born tailor's daughter in all black, the only woman in the room, who dressed not for aspiration but for identification.
"I could always tell who worked for who when staff got on the elevator," Karan recalled, "because of how they dressed." Calvin's people were neutral and spare. Ralph's were jeans and vintage shirts. Donna's were black, always black. "Calvin was more of a minimalist, very neutral and beautiful and worldly in color," she said. "Ralph was jeans, vintage shirts and ties. And I was all black."
What made Karan different was not just the palette but the premise. Ralph and Calvin were men imagining women; Donna was a woman recognizing herself. "When Donna Karan started, I felt there was a really enormous need for women to be addressed as women," she told the Associated Press. "Because they were either wearing men's clothes — suits and ties and shirts, kind of buttoned up — or they were the ladies who lunched, and kind of wearing cocktail dresses. So who was really expressing the working woman? She was just not being addressed." The insight was plain enough: somewhere between the bow-tied power suit and the Oscar de la Renta cocktail dress, there was a woman who needed to get from the subway to the office to the restaurant to the school pickup without changing clothes. Nobody was designing for her. Karan did.
When I first started Donna Karan, I realized there was a void in the marketplace and I wanted to fill it. At the time, there was an uptown fashion look — Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass — and then you had most fashion designers doing clothes that were like women wearing men's suits.
The "In Women We
Trust" campaign, shot by Peter Lindbergh in 1992, distilled the fantasy. Model Rosemary McGrotha, in a Donna Karan double-breasted blazer, being sworn in as president of the United States. It was pure fiction — a female presidency was science fiction in 1992 — and it became an instant icon. Karan was not just designing clothes; she was designing a political imagination. Hillary Clinton wore the cold shoulder dress. Michelle Obama wore Donna Karan. Barbra Streisand wore Donna Karan to every concert, and they designed her wedding dress together. Bill Clinton, who gave Karan two days' notice to make a suit for his first inauguration, would later write of her: "Donna's creativity and passion as a committed philanthropist are matched only by her gift for friendship."
The Cold Shoulder and Other Resurrections
Here is a story about how fashion works, or doesn't. In the early 1990s, Karan designed a dress that exposed the shoulders while covering the arms — what she called the "cold shoulder" look. It appeared in her collection worn under a jacket, and when model Linda Evangelista took the jacket off on the runway, Women's Wear Daily savaged it. End of story. Almost.
Then Liza Minnelli walked into Karan's showroom looking for clothes to take to Europe. She loved the discarded dress, wore it across the continent, came back demanding Karan turn it into a gown, and then wore it to the Academy Awards. "Everybody loved the way she looked in it," Karan said. "Next thing, I see Hillary wearing it at the White House."
The logic behind the dress was characteristically Karan: the body as the starting point for design, not the other way around. "It is the only place where women never gain weight," she declared. "You gain weight EVERY OTHER place on your body except on your shoulders." This was her design philosophy compressed into a single observation — forensic, practical, slightly irreverent. She was not designing for the size-zero model. She was designing for herself, for a woman who had hangups about her hips and thighs and said so openly in an industry that operated on the pretense that everyone was 5'10" and slender. The cold shoulder dress was a garment built around a body part that never betrayed you. There was something almost poignant about that.
Four Letters and a Pair of Jeans
The origin story of DKNY, as Karan told it, had the quality of a parable. Her daughter Gabby started raiding her closet. So did Gabby's friends. "I said, 'Hey wait a second guys, you're all in my closet, and this is not fun. This is for me and my friends, you're a little too young for this.'" She needed a pair of jeans. She couldn't find a pair of jeans. And so, in 1989, DKNY was born — a diffusion line that was younger, cheaper, and, as Karan put it, devoid of "the pretentiousness of fashion."
"It's not got the pretentiousness of fashion," she said at the launch. "I'm bored with the concept of dressing 'the executive woman.' We're all working today. These are clothes to have fun in." The logo T-shirt was originally sold in packets of three, like Hanes. DKNY Jeans followed in 1990. DKNY Men in 1992. Kids. Active. Swimwear. Watches. Underwear. Fragrance. A flagship store on Madison Avenue. Another in London. Beverly Hills. Tokyo. Seoul. Shanghai. The brand became a lifestyle, and the lifestyle became an empire, and the empire became — as empires do — complicated.
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The Donna Karan Expansion
From a single women's collection to a global portfolio in twelve years.
1985Launch of Donna Karan New York — women's collection and accessories
1989DKNY ready-to-wear debuts; logo T-shirt sold in three-packs
1992Donna Karan Beauty, menswear, shoes, kids, intimates, and eyewear launch
1996Donna Karan International goes public on the NYSE
1997Karan steps down as CEO; remains chairwoman and chief designer
2001LVMH acquires DKI ($243M) and Gabrielle Studio ($400M) for ~$643M total
2016LVMH sells Donna Karan International to G-III Apparel Group for ~$650M
Going public in 1996 was the pivot. Karan rented a fabulous yacht for the IPO party. "That's the last good memory I have about going public," she wrote later. The pressure of quarterly earnings, the tension between creative vision and shareholder returns, the parade of CEOs and management teams — all of it eroded the intimacy she'd built the brand around. "I only wanted to sell to my friends and small boutiques," she said of her original intent. The marketplace had other ideas. "Whoever wanted Anne Klein also wanted Donna Karan," she recalled. "And that took it to a different level."
Mercury in Retrograde
The sale to LVMH in 2001 is one of the great set pieces in Donna Karan's mythology, and she told it on herself. When the papers were ready for her signature — the French luxury conglomerate about to pay $643 million for Donna Karan International and Gabrielle Studio, the licensing company named after her daughter — Karan walked into the room and announced that she had just gotten off the phone with her psychic, who informed her that Mercury was in retrograde, which meant this was a terrible time to enter into any kind of contract. Could they put it off for a while?
The room went silent. Eileen Nugent, her powerhouse mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, asked to speak with her in private.
Karan signed. LVMH took control. She stayed on as chief designer. And for the next fourteen years, she lived inside the central tension of every founder-turned-employee: the person whose name is on the building but whose hand is not on the checkbook. The partnership was, by most accounts, uneasy. LVMH is the world's largest luxury conglomerate — its chairman,
Bernard Arnault, the Napoleon of fashion — and its logic is institutional, financial, scalable. Karan's logic was personal, visceral, scattered. She worked with the body. She worked with the fabric. "It talks to me," she said. The fabric did not talk to LVMH's quarterly reports.
The Scarf She Could Not Untangle
The final decade at DKI was a slow unwinding. Karan was pulled in too many directions — the main Donna Karan collection, DKNY, her philanthropic work, the Urban Zen project she had launched in 2007, her health care initiatives, her work in Haiti, her Transcendental Meditation, her travels with Calvin Klein to Vietnam and Burma and India and Morocco. "The clock is ticking," she told Women's Wear Daily in 2015. "I have so many commitments and projects that require my full attention at Urban Zen, as well as my time-consuming philanthropic pursuits in healthcare, education, and preservation of culture. There are only so many hours in the day."
In the spring of 2015, she handed the creative reins of DKNY to Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne, the founders of Public School. In June, her head of public relations, Patti Cohen, stepped down after a thirty-year tenure. And then, on a day Karan barely remembers — the memory "clouded with nostalgia and disbelief," as Robin Givhan wrote in the Washington Post — she stepped down as chief designer of the company she had cofounded thirty-one years earlier.
"I knew I'd be sad, but it was truly heartbreaking," she wrote in the final chapter of her memoir, which she had been working on with collaborator Kathleen Boyes and which required a dramatic last-minute revision when the ending of the book suddenly became the ending of an era. "I had to say goodbye to the people who have become my family, who have stood beside me through every professional up and down, every good and bad review, and the many CEOs and management teams."
LVMH's decision to shelve the Donna Karan collection and focus exclusively on DKNY was, she said, "a very difficult pill to swallow, to say the least." A year later, the conglomerate sold the whole thing to G-III Apparel Group for approximately $650 million — a figure that, with accidental poetry, almost exactly matched what LVMH had paid fifteen years before. The brand that bore her name was now owned by a mega-licenser whose primary expertise was volume, not vision. Karan told the Business of Fashion that the sale had taken her by surprise, but that she had later visited the new DKNY — exclusive to Macy's — and been impressed by the quality.
One wonders what she really thought.
The Calm in the Chaos
There is a paradox at the center of Donna Karan's life, and she has never entirely resolved it, which is part of what makes her interesting. She built an empire on the needs of the working woman — comfort, functionality, the ability to move through a day without changing — and she did it while being, by universal testimony, one of the most chaotic human beings in the history of American fashion. She meditated. She practiced yoga. She chanted with Kabbalists and sat in silent retreats and tried leech therapy. She went from est to Transcendental Meditation to the Dalai Lama, whose photograph hung in her Central Park apartment alongside the black lacquered coffee tables and the orchids and the nubbly throws on low sofas. "When I'm on, I'm on and when I'm off, I'm off," she told an interviewer, which is perhaps the most honest thing any driven person has ever said.
The spiritual seeking was not a phase. It was the other half of the equation — the yin to the yang, as she would say, between Parrot Cay and Haiti, between commerce and philanthropy, between the bodysuit and the meditation cushion. Her yoga practice had literally originated the bodysuit. Her grief over Stephan's death had given rise to the Urban Zen Foundation, which focused on integrative health care, having watched her husband die in a hospital system that treated the body as a machine rather than a person. She created the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program at Beth Israel Medical Center, training therapists to offer five modalities — yoga, Reiki, aromatherapy, nutrition, and contemplative care — to patients and caregivers. By 2015, ninety-six therapists had been trained and were working in clinical rotations.
This is the one thing that is not about me. This is about we. We can change the world. Every last woman and man sitting here can change the world. It's time for us to all come together, to create communities, to create calm in the chaos.
Urban Zen was, in Karan's telling, a return to origins — to the small, intimate, direct-to-consumer model she had wanted all along. "Very few designers have the opportunity to go out there and start another business after you sell your business," she told Fortune. "It's very rare." The clothing was buttery suede and cushy cashmere, East-meets-West, sold exclusively through her own stores and a select group of small retailers. The accessories and home goods included woven bags and horn jewelry made by Haitian artisans. It was, she said, "a marriage of commerce and philosophy." If you couldn't sleep in it and go out in it, she didn't want to know from it.
The Question of What Women Are Asking For
There is a moment in any honest profile where the narrative must accommodate something that doesn't fit — the fact that resists the arc, the quote that complicates the mythology. For Donna Karan, it arrived in October 2017.
Days after the New York Times broke the story of Harvey Weinstein's decades of sexual misconduct, Karan — champion of working women, designer of the "In Women We Trust" campaign, the woman who had imagined a female president in 1992 — stood on a red carpet and told the Daily Mail: "How do we display ourselves? How do we present ourselves as women? What are we asking? Are we asking for it by presenting all the sensuality and all the sexuality? ... What are they asking for? Trouble."
Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein's alleged victims, called Karan "scum in a fancy dress." A petition asking Nordstrom to drop Donna Karan products gathered over fourteen thousand signatures. Karan issued a statement saying her comments were "taken out of context," then appeared days later with Bridget Foley of Women's Wear Daily in a more extensive mea culpa. "It was not what I meant," she said. "I was exhausted, I was tired and — when it came back to me, I was shocked that I even said this myself. Because I was preparing in my mind what I was going to say in the theater. And I just went off on something that I shouldn't have."
It was, in its fumbling sincerity, very Donna Karan — the chaos, the mouth moving faster than the brain, the genuine bewilderment at her own words. But it also exposed something the brand had always contained without quite acknowledging: that celebrating female sensuality is a complicated position to occupy, and that the line between empowerment and something else is thinner than any advertising campaign can hold. Karan had spent four decades showing women's legs and shoulders, their hosiery and bras and fragrance, men and women together. The celebration of the female body was her entire aesthetic. And in one exhausted, unscripted moment, the logic inverted, and the woman who had always said the body speaks suddenly seemed to be saying it spoke too loudly.
She survived it. She had stepped down from DKI two years earlier. The brand was no longer hers in any operational sense. But the incident lingered — not as a scandal, exactly, but as a reminder that a life built on instinct will, eventually, produce an instinct you can't take back.
A Shoulder That Never Gains Weight
At seventy-six, Donna Karan still designs. She still travels — Cuba, Colombia, Vietnam, Bali. She still wraps scarves around the shoulders of journalists who look cold, cashmere shmatta included. She mentors students at Parsons and tells them she feels like she's "talking in cyberspace" because they are technologically oriented where she is visceral, flat-patterned where she is sculptural. "I work with the body, I work with the fabric, and it talks to me," she says. They don't understand this, and she doesn't understand them, and somehow the tradition continues.
The Donna Karan New York brand has been revived by G-III, the "In Women We Trust" campaign relaunched with a new generation of supermodels. Kate Moss wears archival Donna Karan. Zendaya wears Spring 2025 on the cover of Variety. Doechii wins Billboard's Woman of the Year in archive Donna Karan from Fall 2014. Hailey Bieber wears archive Spring 1996 to a Sephora launch. The pieces from 1985 and 1996 and 2003 are pulled from archives and worn on red carpets and magazine covers, not as vintage curiosities but as clothes that still work — that still do what they were designed to do, which is make a woman look like herself.
"I look at my clothes then and now — they haven't changed," Karan told an interviewer. "Maybe I'm boring." She was told that's not boring, that's a signature. "Right," she said. "It's just who I am. Black is black, and I'm not going to take it back. Stretch is stretch, jersey is jersey, and it's comfortable."
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, designs from Seven Easy Pieces are preserved behind glass — the bodysuit, the wrap skirt, the jacket. Artifacts of a revolution that didn't look like a revolution, because it looked like getting dressed. Somewhere in the West Village, in the sweeping, tranquil Urban Zen space on Greenwich Street, a woman who failed draping at Parsons sits on a low sofa and dreams about a living facility where you can get acupuncture and bodywork and healthy food and never leave except to go to work. "I want to live in that space," she says. The bodysuit is still under everything.
