Word: karan
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...trade, where rivals try to rip one another to shreds every season and a designer is only as good as his or her last collection, Karan's performance has been virtually seamless. At 44, in business for herself for just eight years, she has not only shaped a distinctively comfortable, sexy style as a designer but has also amassed a formidable empire as a businesswoman. Her revenues this year should reach $268 million, up from $119 million in 1989. By 1995, with more and more sales coming from overseas markets, revenues might top the half-billion-dollar mark...
...Karan has tailored a full-line apparel conglomerate. There is the Donna Karan collection for men and women, top-of-the-line fashion ($650 for a pair of woman's pants, $1,350 for a man's wool crepe suit). Then there is the exploding DKNY division, which showed other designers how to sell chic women's sportswear at relatively modest prices ($450 for a woman's wool blazer vs. - $1,100 for a comparable collection garment). Now DKNY has been expanded to include clothes for children and men. Karan also has licensing deals to make hosiery, a line...
...precedent, clearly, is Ralph Lauren. Lauren brilliantly created a multibillion-dollar kingdom by exploiting middle-class Americans' yearning for a patrician past they never had. As his empire grew, his vision stayed focused. No one admires the Polo king's achievement more than Karan, whose great ambition seems to be to repeat his success...
...theater openings, often seen in the company of high-profile friends like Barbra Streisand ("There's probably no one I admire and respect more than Barbra"). Though older friends recall a time when she was "shy and introverted" at public functions, those days seemed long gone in September when Karan hobnobbed with Bill and Hillary Clinton at a Hollywood gathering. Still, Karan works too hard to spend much time on the social scene, or even at home in her sunny four-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side (lots of suede furniture and sweeping city views...
Some designers create beautiful fantasies, hopelessly beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. Karan's gift is that she makes wearable, flattering clothes for real women, whether they are corporate lawyers, Candice Bergen or the well-heeled wives of orthopedic surgeons. That sounds simple, but it is a rare talent on Seventh Avenue. "No one understands a woman's body better than Donna Karan," says Andrea Jung, executive vice president at Neiman Marcus. Harper's Bazaar editor in chief Elizabeth Tilberis points out that Karan's designs, unlike those of some of her rivals, work as well for a size...