In May 1985, in a showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue, New York, Donna Karan, then thirty-six, launched her first solo collection under her own name. The collection contained approximately twenty pieces. Karan had built it around seven foundational garments: a black bodysuit, a wrap skirt, a pair of tailored trousers, a cashmere sweater, a white blouse, a tailored jacket, and an evening accent piece. The collection’s press materials called the system “Seven Easy Pieces.” The lead garment was the bodysuit, a snap-crotch, body-skimming, jersey-knit one-piece undergarment that Karan had designed to layer beneath every other piece in the collection. The collection was the manifesto of a new American womenswear system.
Karan had spent the previous sixteen years at Anne Klein, first as design assistant and then, after Anne Klein’s death from breast cancer in March 1974, as co-designer of the Anne Klein label with Louis Dell’Olio. The Donna Karan launch was her first collection under her own name. The company was backed by Tomio Taki, chairman of the American branch of Takihyo Corporation of Japan, the parent of Anne Klein, who had agreed to finance Karan’s independent launch on the condition that Karan’s husband, the sculptor Stephan Weiss, run the business side. Karan, Weiss, and Taki were the three founders of Donna Karan New York.
The collection sold out within the first selling season. The bodysuit became the most-imitated single garment in American womenswear of the late 1980s. By 1988, Karan had launched DKNY, a diffusion line targeting younger urban professionals. By 1996, Donna Karan International had gone public on the New York Stock Exchange. By 2001, LVMH had acquired the company for approximately six hundred and forty-three million dollars. The Seven Easy Pieces system, in some derived form, was by then standard in almost every American department store women’s department.
Seven Easy Pieces, May 1985
The Donna Karan launch in May 1985 was unusual in its design philosophy. Most American womenswear collections of the period offered a season’s worth of look-coordinated outfits, organized by occasion or season, that customers were expected to purchase and combine across the next six months. Karan’s collection was organized as a system: seven foundational pieces that could be combined into infinite work-appropriate outfits across a five-day business week. The press release titled the system “Seven Easy Pieces.” The phrase entered American fashion vocabulary almost immediately.
The collection’s runway show began with models walking in black bodysuits and tights only. As the show progressed, models added pieces one at a time: the wrap skirt, the trousers, the jacket, the cashmere sweater, the white blouse, the evening sash. By the end of the show, each model wore a complete outfit that could be disassembled and recombined with the others’ pieces. The conceptual demonstration was unmistakable: Karan was selling a wardrobe system rather than a collection of garments.
The collection’s commercial reception was immediate. Bloomingdale’s, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus all placed substantial wholesale orders. Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Wear Daily, and The New York Times published features within thirty days of the show. The collection sold out at retail within the first selling season. The Council of Fashion Designers of America named Karan its Womenswear Designer of the Year for 1985.
The Karan philosophy was specifically aimed at a customer segment. Karan, by her own subsequent account, designed for herself and her friends: women in their thirties and forties who worked in fashion, publishing, advertising, finance, law, and media, who needed to dress quickly in the morning, who traveled for business, who needed clothing to function across day, evening, and weekend without requiring a different outfit for each, and who did not want to wear the buttoned-up suits-and-ties that American working women had been told they had to wear since the late 1970s. The customer was the working professional woman of the early Reagan years.
Forest Hills to Seventh Avenue
Donna Ivy Faske was born on October 2, 1948, in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, New York, the younger daughter of Gabriel “Gabby” Faske, a tailor and haberdasher who worked in the Seventh Avenue garment district, and Helen “Queenie” Faske, a model who also worked in the showroom of designer Chester Weinberg. Gabby Faske died when Donna was three. Helen remarried; Donna and her older sister Gail were raised by their mother and stepfather, also a suit designer, in Woodmere, in the Five Towns region of Nassau County, Long Island.
Karan attended Hewlett High School, where she spent most of her time in the art department, and graduated in 1966. She enrolled at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan. After two years she took a summer job at Anne Klein and Company on Seventh Avenue. She decided not to return to Parsons. She was twenty.
Anne Klein, then forty-five, was the leading American sportswear designer of the late 1960s. Her label produced relaxed, functional, layerable American women’s clothing in the tradition of Claire McCardell and Bonnie Cashin. Karan worked as Klein’s assistant from 1968 through 1971, was promoted to associate designer in 1971, and participated in the November 28, 1973 Battle of Versailles fashion show, where Klein and four other American designers (Halston, Stephen Burrows, Bill Blass, and Oscar de la Renta) competed against five French couturiers in a benefit show that effectively established American ready-to-wear as a legitimate global category. Karan was twenty-five at the time of Versailles.
Anne Klein was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1973 and died on March 19, 1974, at age fifty. Klein’s parent company, Takihyo Corporation of Japan, named Karan as Klein’s successor, with Louis Dell’Olio, Karan’s former Parsons classmate, joining the company as co-designer. Karan and Dell’Olio designed Anne Klein together from 1974 to 1984. They won four Coty American Fashion Critics Awards and were inducted into the Coty Hall of Fame in 1984. In 1982 they launched Anne Klein II, the company’s first diffusion line. In 1984, Karan’s Anne Klein boss Frank Mori effectively fired her after a series of disputes. Mori and Taki then approached Karan with seed money to start her own label.
The Bodysuit
The bodysuit was Karan’s most-engineered garment and the foundation of the Seven Easy Pieces system. The construction was specific. The body of the garment was knit from stretch jersey, typically a viscose-and-lycra blend (later cotton-and-lycra), in a single piece that fit close to the torso. The crotch panel was reinforced with a lycra-content cotton lining and closed with metal snap fasteners that allowed for bathroom use without removing the garment. The neckline was available in multiple variations: scoop, V-neck, turtleneck, off-the-shoulder, sleeveless, long-sleeved.
The garment solved a specific problem in working women’s professional dressing. A tucked-in blouse comes untucked over the course of a workday: it bunches at the waistband, rides up under a jacket, and creates an unprofessional silhouette by mid-afternoon. Karan’s bodysuit eliminated the problem by replacing the tucked blouse with a single one-piece undergarment that could not come untucked. The user could pair the bodysuit with any combination of skirt, trousers, jacket, or sweater and remain professionally polished from morning to night.
Karan has said in subsequent interviews that the bodysuit came directly from her yoga practice. She had worn leotards at her yoga studio in the early 1980s and had recognized that the leotard’s professional analogue, with appropriate neckline and finishing, could function as the foundation of a working wardrobe. The first commercial bodysuit in the Donna Karan collection wholesale-priced at approximately eighty dollars, the kind of expense a working professional woman could justify if the garment formed the foundation of her professional wardrobe across multiple outfits.
By 1988, almost every major American womenswear manufacturer offered a bodysuit derivative. Calvin Klein, Anne Klein under Dell’Olio’s continuing direction, Ralph Lauren, Liz Claiborne, and Jones New York all produced versions at various price points. The bodysuit became, by industry consensus, the single most-copied garment in American womenswear of the late 1980s.
DKNY, 1988
Karan launched DKNY in 1988 as a diffusion line, with substantially lower prices and a younger urban customer. The brand name was Karan’s husband Stephan Weiss’s idea: DKNY stood for Donna Karan New York, but the abbreviated form was intended to read as the city itself. The Manhattan branding was deliberate. DKNY was a collection for the daughter of the Donna Karan customer: the twenty-something woman in advertising, magazines, fashion, or finance who lived in a studio apartment in the East Village or the West Side, who took the subway to work, who shopped at Bloomingdale’s basement, and who could not yet afford the Donna Karan collection’s main-line prices.
The first DKNY runway show took place in February 1989. The Helvetica Bold black-and-white DKNY logo, developed for the launch, became one of the most-recognized fashion logos of the 1990s and was eventually painted in twenty-foot letters on the side of a building on East Houston Street in SoHo, where it remained as a Manhattan fashion landmark until the 2010s. DKNY Jeans launched in 1990. DKNY Men launched in 1992. DKNY Kids launched in 1992. DKNY Underwear, Active, Pure, and Juniors followed in the next decade.
The Karan empire by 1995 included Donna Karan New York (main line), DKNY (diffusion), DKNY Jeans, DKNY Men, DKNY Kids, Donna Karan Beauty Company (fragrance, launched 1992), Donna Karan Home (introduced 2000), and the licensed timepieces and eyewear collections. Annual revenues exceeded six hundred million dollars by 1996, the year Donna Karan International went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker DK. The IPO valued the company at approximately five hundred million dollars and made Karan a personal fortune of roughly eighty million dollars.
The cultural reach was wider than the commercial reach. The DKNY logo appeared in rap lyrics (Lil’ Kim referenced it on Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s 1995 “Player’s Anthem”), in television series (Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw wore DKNY on the early seasons of Sex and the City, 1998), and in fashion editorial across the late 1990s. The brand had become, by Karan’s own subsequent account, the most recognized fashion label in the world that wasn’t European.
Selling 2001
The 2001 acquisition of Donna Karan International by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French luxury conglomerate run by Bernard Arnault, was the structural endpoint of Karan’s twentieth-century career. LVMH paid approximately six hundred and forty-three million dollars in October 2001. The acquisition came at a particularly difficult moment in Karan’s personal life: her husband Stephan Weiss, who had run the business side of the company for sixteen years, had died of lung cancer in June 2001, four months before the LVMH deal closed. Karan agreed to the sale to be able to step back from the business operations Weiss had handled. She remained as Chief Designer of the Donna Karan main line.
The Karan period under LVMH ownership ran from October 2001 to June 2015. The fourteen years contained both success and difficulty. LVMH expanded DKNY into a global presence, with flagship stores in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Moscow. The DKNY Jeans line became one of the largest denim-licensed businesses in the United States. The Donna Karan main line lost some of its commercial momentum as Karan’s design contributions decreased. The Council of Fashion Designers of America gave Karan a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. She founded Urban Zen, a wellness-and-humanitarian lifestyle brand and foundation, in 2007. By 2012 she was spending most of her professional time on Urban Zen and on humanitarian projects in Haiti and elsewhere.
In June 2015, Karan announced she was stepping down from her position as Chief Designer of Donna Karan International to focus exclusively on Urban Zen. LVMH initially attempted to continue the brand with the design team of Public School designers Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osbourne, but commercial performance under the new design leadership declined. In July 2016, LVMH suspended the Donna Karan main line. In December 2016, LVMH sold Donna Karan International, including both the Donna Karan and DKNY brands, to G-III Apparel Group for six hundred and fifty million dollars. The price was seven million dollars more than LVMH had paid fifteen years earlier.
Karan published a memoir, My Journey, in October 2015. She continued to operate Urban Zen as a private company and a foundation. As of 2026 she remains active in humanitarian work in Haiti and continues to design occasional Urban Zen collections. She has never returned to mass-market commercial fashion design. The Seven Easy Pieces system, in some derived form, remains standard in essentially every American department store women’s department.
Halston needed Ultrasuede. Karan needed stretch jersey, snap closures, and a black bodysuit that fit under every other piece in the closet. The 1970s woman went out at midnight. The 1980s woman went to work at seven.