Donna Karan Is Only Half of the First Couple of Seventh Avenue

“You’re getting two for the price of one,” repeated Bill Clinton during his presidential campaign, implying that his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was qualified enough to compete for the job as well. Already in the new Administration, husband and wife have expanded the role of the First Lady to more than a hostess and charity organizer.

The two-heads-are-better-than-one concept typifies the agenda of a number of baby-boomer couples. Standing side by side, instead of one behind the other, they can better meet contemporary challenges as a team.

Take Clinton power pals and Hollywood’s darling duo Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who together produce the TV shows “Designing Women” and “Hearts Afire.”

And then there’s the designing first couple of fashion: Donna Karan and Stephan Weiss.

By clothing the modern women who are the antithesis of Donna Reed, Donna and her artist husband have built an empire that in 1992 sold $250 million and has expanded beyond her signature couture and sportier DKNY collections to include lingerie, menswear and children’s lines and a beauty product division.

The Donna Karan Beauty Co. was initiated into the billion dollar beauty industry last year with, what else? Its first perfume, Donna Karan New York, which is sold through a toll-free number and at select department stores. In the west, Nordstrom exclusively carries it.

As part of their national tour, they will make their only Southland appearance at Nordstrom South Coast Plaza next Friday .

Meeting with the public has become another part of their working and personal partnership.

“We’ve worked together for so many years,” Karan said by telephone from New York earlier this week. “Stephan has always played a very supportive role.”

In a separate phone interview, Weiss echoed his wife’s view: “Commitment is not something you make once and put it on a shelf. It’s an ongoing effort. Donna and I are both committed to the marriage as if it were a third entity. There’s my life, her life and our marriage. We commit to it, invest in it, sacrifice and share.”

The couple met 26 years ago. Weiss was a decade older than Karan and married with two children, Cory, now 30, and Lisa, now 28. Karan was an 18-year-old Parson School of Design drop-out who had decided after a summer internship at Anne Klein in New York to skip classroom instruction for real life experience.

She married retailer Mark Karan and had a daughter, Gabriele, now 18. After Klein’s death in 1974, Karan joined Louis Dell’Olio at the company’s designing helm.

Four years later, Karan and Weiss, both divorced, rediscovered their friendship. They were married in 1983, and the following year, she left Anne Klein to start her label, financed by Klein’s major stockholders, Takhiyo Limited. (Karan and Weiss own 50% of the company.)

Her premiere signature collection debuted in fall 1985.

The quintessential Donna Karan look emerged--bodysuit blouses, primarily slenderizing black collections, and above all: comfortable, well-cut pieces.

Much like Coco Chanel did earlier this century, Karan redefined the uniform of the independent woman. Her shapely career clothes offered an option to professional women who no longer felt that dressing for success meant dressing like a man.

“Women have really evolved incredibly in the last 20 years,” Weiss noted. “Subdominance is not an issue (anymore). It’s really more an issue of independence, self-assuredness and being comfortable with oneself.”

Both admitted they allow work to absorb much of their daily life, too frequently taking the office home at night. “Thank God we have other interests, other desires,” Karan added.

They dedicate time to social causes, particularly Seventh on Sale, the fashion industry’s major AIDS fund-raiser, which she has chaired.

Their greatest attentions, however, go to family: three children, two grandchildren and more than 800 employees, whom Karan characterizes as young, energetic and mostly female. “We’re into just being sort of nurturing . . . and playing the Ma and Pa role,” she said.

Working to establish a long-lasting family name, Weiss, who handles the business end, serves as the long-term visionary, balancing the instant, frenetic approach his wife must take in the unrelenting arena of fashion.

“We are more interested in building a brand that would last 50 years,” Weiss said.

Appointing Steve Ruzow as chief operating officer two years ago enabled Weiss to devote more time to developing new joint ventures--such as the company’s first fragrance.

The fruit--or rather, juice-- of their efforts arrived after five years, more than 5,000 modifications and countless evenings where Weiss would sit at home with eye droppers filled with scents that he hoped would meet Karan’s request for “something warm and sensual--what my black cashmere blanket would be about . . . cuddly like the back of my husband’s neck.”

Karan, who never before wore perfume, also desired hints of Casablanca lilies and suede. Just as she designs with the philosophy that a woman makes the clothes and not the other way around, she sought a fragrance that did not overpower a woman, that can “arise their senses like I did with my clothes.”

Added Weiss: “It’s for the woman who steps on the elevator . . . and everyone leans toward her.”

Weiss designed the curvy, black and gold bottle that has some critics saying it looks like a woman’s shoulders and back, while others claim to see an abstraction of a female reproductive organ or a phallic image.

For Karan, the bottle represents her husband’s artwork, which “is about sensuality, modernity, almost future and classic.” Just in tune with the designer’s own work.