Donna Karan New York 2015 Ready to Wear Dress
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Reimagining Donna Karan
The first thing I thought was: This can't have been the way she wanted it to end.
The second thing I thought was: Actually, maybe it was.
When the news broke on Tuesday that Donna Karan was leaving her job as chief designer of the company she founded in 1984, it was both shocking and not unexpected.
Her relationship with her corporate owners at LVMH, which bought the brand in 2001, has never been particularly easy. In the last year, her Madison Avenue flagship has closed; LVMH has appointed new designers to her second line, DKNY; and her closest employee has left the company. In May, at her resort show, I asked her whether she was staying, and she laughed and obfuscated.
But what was truly startling was the idea that the main line was being "suspended," and that there were no immediate plans to replace her. No search firm had been engaged. There would be no Donna Karan show at New York Fashion Week in September.
DKI (Donna Karan International) will continue, as will DKNY (the contemporary line, which will have a show), but the name behind the acronyms will, at least for the time being, disappear.
This is the first time I can remember that a designer left a company — whether under his or her own steam or under pressure, or, as in this situation, probably a bit of both — and the owners did not even pretend they would try to find a replacement.
Cristobal Balenciaga famously asked that his name die with him, but his heirs ignored the request, and the brand that bears his name is now part of the Kering Group and thriving on the Paris Fashion Week schedule, albeit in a form the founder probably would not have recognized.
Houses routinely go on without their namesake visionaries (Dior, Givenchy, Jil Sander, Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, to name a few) and, after some adjustment, mostly do just fine. Indeed, LVMH in particular has made something of an art out of managing the maison sans founder.
And while it is possible to see the phasing out of the main line as a slap in the face to Ms. Karan, it is also possible to see it as a bit of fashion realpolitik, an acknowledgment that, in this case, no one could really be the next Ms. Karan. More than most designers, she was integral to the company she built and everything it stands for; her DNA was its DNA, and her customers felt a personal bond with her as a designer that went far beyond what they felt with most labels.
To them she was their friend, and she understood them (even if LVMH didn't understand her): their dreams and ambitions, their work-life problems and their issues with their thighs.
And from the seven easy pieces that started her collection in 1985 and changed the C-suite woman's wardrobe (between bodysuits and stretch cashmere, Ms. Karan arguably had the sort of impact on professional female dress in the 1980s that Giorgio Armani had for men) to the ad campaigns that imagined the first female president, she gave them solutions, because they were also her own solutions: the uniform she wore to be a mother and a wife and a mogul, a philanthropist and a widow and a grandmother and a girlfriend.
In 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton — a first lady ready to differentiate herself from her immediate predecessors, Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan, and take on a more active policy role — wore a Donna Karan dress to a White House dinner. Candice Bergen's TV working woman, Murphy Brown, could often be found in Donna Karan.
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If in recent years Ms. Karan went slightly off-piste and started getting more arty and conceptual on the runway after trips to India and Bali, her quest (for self-actualization and peace) was still something her customer could understand.
Smarter, really, not to try to replace her — that would just make people mad — but to reimagine the brand she built in a different form. As she may well have known, consciously or not. She never groomed a successor, after all.
That may be an overly generous interpretation of the situation; an accidental benefit of a bloodless corporate strategy.
But it is worth calling out, because it acknowledges what a designer can bring to a house, and that some people are so embedded in the fabric of fashion their legacy can't be unpicked. We have been in a period of diminishing the role of the designer in favor of the brand, but when the designer is the brand, his or her contribution is undeniable.
It's why, I think, so much of the reaction to Ms. Karan's news has read almost like an obituary. But Donna is not gone (at 66, she is a committed yogi and activist) and I expect she is going to reinvent herself pretty thoroughly.
What is dead is the idea of her dressing her women, from Susan Sarandon to Katie Holmes. That's what the elegies are about, and all the tweets mourning the end of an era. It is, but perhaps it is also the beginning of another, not just for Ms. Karan, but for fashion itself.
Yes, it's a loss, but it is possible to draw a real lesson from the mess. We just have to apply it.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/fashion/donna-karan-the-next-chapter.html
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