Donna Karan New York is back to remind us that long before fashion Substacks gave tips for curating the perfect capsule wardrobe and investing in fewer better things as a more sustainable approach to style, there were the Seven Easy Pieces. Trailblazing designer Donna Karan wrote the book on streamlined yet alluring minimal looks that stand the test of time with her debut Fall/Winter 1985 show where she introduced seven clothing archetypes that went on to practically define the New York woman of the nineties and early aughts: the bodysuit, the wrap skirt, the pencil pant, the tailored blazer, the wrap jacket, the trench coat, and the sequined bottom. Reimagined by the studio team at a more democratic price point for the brand’s Spring/Summer 2024 relaunch collection available at Nordstrom, Macy’s, and on donnakaran.com, these core essentials form the basis of a system of dressing that feels as strikingly original today as it did nearly four decades ago.
“Our design mission was perfection, not quantity,” Karan recalled in her 2015 memoir, My Journey. “Whatever the piece, it had to be perfect, the only one of that kind you’d need.” When Karan founded Donna Karan New York at age 36, her brand’s purpose wasn’t explicitly environmental, although its design ethos chimes with our current climate aware sensibilities. She was a designer, a CEO, and a mother who dreamed of a chic and easy day-to-night edit that merged masculine and feminine attributes and multitasked as effortlessly as she did. Eleven years prior, Karan had become chief designer of Anne Klein a week after giving birth to her daughter, Gabby, and that experience informed her vision of modular wardrobe building blocks that worked like fashion arithmetic.
The foundation for every Donna Karan New York look was—and still is—a sleek bodysuit inspired by Karan’s love of yoga and dance, either a sensuous white body blouse with a notch collar and cuffs that nods to a woman wearing an oversize men’s shirt or slightly utilitarian black matte jersey. Tie on a wrap skirt over the latter, add a wide contoured belt over the waistband, and you have a minimal luxe dress. Try the same styling trick with pull-on pencil pants, and the total look is a jumpsuit. Add a tailored blazer and the sum is a feminine power suit. Heading to an event straight from the office? Sub a sequined maxi skirt or pants plus some oversized gold jewelry to get a glamorously low-key take on evening wear.
The bodysuit can also be worn solo, perhaps with a belt and tights à la the Spring/Summer 1986 runway styling, lest Fashion Tok think Kendall Jenner invented the no pants look. A polished wrap jacket and a classic trench coat round out the offering. Most pieces are black, in Karan’s words, “the color that does it all.” For thirty years, until Karan stepped down in 2015 to focus on philanthropic initiatives, these seven core silhouettes were endlessly refined and recombined season after season. Karan added more great styles like draped tunics and cold shoulder tops to the rotation over the years, but the Seven Easy Pieces remain the absolute essentials.
“She has always been this sort of ultimate New York power woman juggling everything: the glamor, the chaos, the fast pace of fashion,” says Trey Laird, founder and chief creative officer of Team Laird and Karan’s longtime head of in-house creative services, who came back to work on the Donna Karan New York Spring/Summer 2024 campaign. “Every major designer in America in the 1980s—Calvin, Ralph, Oscar, Bill Blass—was a man and so I just remember being captivated by Donna and her energy.”
The Donna Karan New York campaigns showcasing strong women that Karan and Laird dreamed up together with legendary photographers throughout the 1990s and early 2000s were nothing short of iconic, from Herb Ritts’ Modern Souls (Spring/Summer 1995), a black-and-white portrait series of friends of the brand including Isabella Rossellini and Diana and Tracee Ellis Ross, to Mikael Jansson’s Urban Warrior (Fall/Winter 2001), a cinematic travelogue shot at a tented camp in the Moroccan desert featuring Amber Valletta and Jeremy Irons.
Among Laird’s favorites is Peter Lindbergh’s The Art of the Body (Fall/Winter 1996) starring Demi Moore in a backless gold devoré velvet gown with her then-husband Bruce Willis. “Demi and Bruce were like the Beyoncé and Jay-Z of the time,” Laird recalls. “We shot their doubles on an airplane tarmac in Idaho. They both touched down, Peter set up a black seamless in the airplane hanger, we got the shot, and then Demi flew off to the set of G.I. Jane and Bruce went back to whatever action movie he was filming.” It was but one chapter in the dress’s epic journey, which began with Carolyn Murphy walking it down the runway and continues in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
“She would try to instill this confidence in us, but once you were wearing her clothes you didn’t need it.” —Linda Evangelista
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, the relaunch campaign is an intergenerational group portrait bringing together eight of the famous faces who have walked for Donna Karan New York over the years: Valletta, Murphy, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Shalom Harlow, Liya Kebede, Karlie Kloss, and Imaan Hammam. It’s titled In Women We Trust, a callback to Lindbergh’s indelible Spring/Summer 1992 campaign of the same name depicting Rosemary McGrotha being sworn in as the first female president in Karan’s signature suiting that marries menswear tropes like an authoritative shoulder and strong lapel with a sculpted torso hugging the curves of a woman’s body. This was a full 24 years before Karan’s close friend Hillary Clinton’s historic presidential run, although she did design the fabulous cold shoulder gown for Clinton’s first state dinner as First Lady in 1993.
“It was like putting on your armor,” says Crawford, of wearing Karan’s designs . “It made you feel empowered. You felt badass.” Evangelista fondly recalls pep talks that Karan would give before fashion shows. “She would try to instill this confidence in us, but once you were wearing her clothes you didn’t need it,” she says.
If before Donna Karan New York offered a timeless system of dressing for customers of a certain tax bracket, today the collection, which is priced between $159 for a jumpsuit with a sculptural belt and $599 for a large leather hobo bag and is available in sizes 2 to 16, offers the chance for more women to experience the magic. A belted lightweight trench and a tie waist faux wrap skirt feature luxe gold-tone details, nodding to Karan’s love of statement jewelry. A double-breasted blazer with a nipped in waist and a belted wrap jacket with a flattering V-neckline hug in all the right places, pairing effortless with streamlined, straight leg pants for a very 2024 take on return to office dressing. And of course, a button-up bodysuit with a crisp stand collar still provides the perfect refined base layer.
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