On L.A. Tour : Designer Pulls It All Together in Preview of Fall Offerings
Donna Karan is poolside, polishing off a plate of rigatoni without smudging her fresh nail polish. The New York designer has been zipping around Los Angeles this week, from Muscle Beach to Melrose Avenue and back under the sun umbrellas at the Hotel Bel-Air. Now she’s getting fortified for an evening fashion show of her fall ’88 collection.
Armed with an order pad, she also plans to spend a day at Saks in Beverly Hills selling cashmere jackets, wool crepe skirts and satin body suits to women who buy clothes in June that they can’t wear until September. You know who you are. But more than that, she knows who you are.
“I wouldn’t want to say it’s a cult,” Karan suggests of her followers. “People who travel wear my clothes the most. Executive, business-oriented women.”
Moments after she explains this, a taxicab skids up to the hotel entrance. Kathleen Sullivan, the New York-based TV news reporter, dashes out of the car. She’s wearing a body-contoured black jacket, a short, tight skirt and black hose. And the lining of her Donna Karan black, sling-back high heels matches her coral-colored skirt exactly. It’s beyond pulled together. It’s perfect. And it’s a coincidence that she’s at the designer’s hotel.
If Karan makes career women happy, she says it’s luck. She’s really just designing for herself, to the point where she’s still wondering what possessed her to put a pink sweater in a recent collection, insisting, “I never wear pink.” She wears black. Today she is in skin-tight, stretchy pedal pushers and a body suit, covered by a blousey but belted, sand-colored jacket, all from her own design room. “It’s about being aware of the body, not about tight clothes,” she says of her style.
But there’s more to it than that. It’s about serious shoes and sunglasses, real crocodile belts and bags, hand-finished jewelry brushed with 24-karat gold, super-chic hosiery that sells for $10 a pair.
The erstwhile wonderkid from the Anne Klein company, who took over when Klein died, then shared designer credit with Louis Dell’Olio, has gone off and built her own fashion empire. It’s a $36-million-a-year operation, she says. And it’s growing.
At her fashion show in the Pacific Design Center Monday night, hosted by Saks and the Imperial Grand Sweepstakes, a support group for Cedars Sinai Medical Center, the men in the audience seemed to like her evening wear best. They whistled at models who slinked past in velvet dresses with necklines that plunge to the waist, or in near-sheer sarongs that glitter with Lurex, or translucent body suits topped by nothing but tuxedo jackets.
But Karan’s svelte black pants, in narrow as well as wide-leg styles, worn with fitted jackets in royal purple, claret or goldenrod, drew more applause from the women. Especially a jewel-neckline jacket with a streamer over the shoulder.
Three years after showing her first line, Karan announces she’ll soon introduce DK NY, the budget gourmet answer to her very, very expensive clothes (an average Donna Karan fall outfit costs about $2,000). It will be half the price of her main collection and will be available in stores next spring. Within two years, she says, there will be a Donna Karan store.
It’s all part of the fashion business of the future. “Designers are taking control,” she notes about the manufacturing and marketing branches of her work. She is producing most of her own accessories in-house now, having learned the pitfalls of licensing during the ‘70s, when Anne Klein and other big-name fashion companies sold their names to manufacturers and lost control of quality. “Anybody can design a fashion collection,” Karan shrugs. “You need to understand the marketplace. And you need a concept.”
Her concept seems to be a kind of antidote. There’s hardly a decoration to be found on most of her designs. Often there isn’t even a color mix. If a sweater and skirt are bottle green, so are the gloves, shoes, hosiery and belt. “To be a minimalist in a world of pouf you have to be even more so,” she says.
Last spring she tested her own theory. She showed an untypical collection of lace, flowers and bows. “I had a lot of flak about it,” she admits. “My customers are not asking me for glitz. They want a polished look, pulled together.”
She calls anything else in fashion a passing moment and predicts that streamlined, contoured clothes are the long-term alternative. “Body awareness is as feminine as anything,” she says.
