Norma kamli
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When you were starting out, was it hard to convince customers or employees to trust you? They didn't have stylists at the time everybody had their own taste and wore what they liked. Actresses, actors, athletes, a lot of musicians, singers would come and shop. In that time, people shopped as sort of a sport - you'd get dressed to go shopping. You had quite the clientele … Bette Midler, Yoko Ono, the New York Dolls.Īnd it was a little basement store! Then we got a parlor floor. "In that time, people shopped as sort of a sport - you'd get dressed to go shopping." It was unbelievable to me that people were paying to wear these things. I was sure I would have to pay people to buy them. She was really very talented, and she helped me. How did you start your own line?Īfter four years, I started to see what my designs would look like. When you opened your store, you sold clothes by other designers. Those dresses are still in my collection today. I designed a group of dresses out of a jersey knit, and one of the dresses was called the All In One, and you could wear it a million ways. That was one of the most prolific times of my life. Take us back to when you were 28, to the early 1970s. … Especially at this age, I can really say, ‘Listen to me. “I do think my purpose in this life is to serve women. “I see it as a handbook for women,” she says of the guide, which is organized by decade. Now in her eighth decade, she’s engaged to be married a second time, and she has compiled her advice on life and aging in her first book, I Am Invincible, out today.
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In 1977, she launched a new company: OMO, or On My Own, Norma Kamali, and she hasn’t slowed down since. “But unless I, all of these other doors would have never opened.” At 28, she hit her stride, creating a convertible dress, the famous pillowy coat (which she came up with by cutting up her own sleeping bag on a camping trip), and an adjustable draw-string “parachute” dress made of actual parachutes that established her as a fashion visionary.īut a year later, in 1975, she would walk away from her marriage, and lose her business in the process. The native New Yorker soon began offering her own designs, too - tie-dye velvets, rhinestone-studded tees, and hot pants that attracted stars like Sly Stone, Diana Ross, and Cher. In 1968, when she was just 22, she and her then husband had opened the Norma Kamali boutique on 53rd Street, selling groovy fashions sourced from London. Or it may be due to the fact that 75-year-old Kamali, who is best known for her “sleeping bag” coat and for designing the one-piece red swimsuit that made Farrah Fawcett an icon, still loves her work as much as she did at 28.īy that point, Kamali was already a successful designer. That may be because, over the past decade, the beloved American designer has become a bona fide health guru, frequently extolling the virtues of intermittent fasting, acupuncture, and exercise. Norma Kamali doesn’t appear to age at all.
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Here, iconic designer Norma Kamali remembers the early years of her career, risking it all to leave a bad marriage, and finding love almost 50 years later.
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#Norma kamli series#
In Bustle’s Q&A series 28, successful women describe exactly what their lives looked like when they were 28 - what they wore, where they worked, what stressed them out most, and what, if anything, they would do differently.