"LET'S SPRAY THE MODELS! PATTI, COULD you get me some perfume?" Straight pins bristling from her mouth, safety pins stuck on the black cashmere sweater wrapped around her waist, designer Donna Karan is stalking the runway where she is about to present her spring collection to the fashion flock. She was up for most of the night, coping with the usual crises. The oversize linen hats, for instance. A nice theatrical touch, but they didn't fit through the entrance to the runway. (The models learned to take them off and put them back on, fast.) Then there was the jewelry. Karan decided she needed more gold. Fistfuls of silver pieces were hand-dipped in gold. All wrong. Back to silver.
As the models begin striding out for the show, Karan is in constant motion behind the curtain, tucking, smoothing, adjusting angles by an imperceptible (to anyone but her) fraction of an inch. Nothing escapes her eye. Everything has to be perfect. "Are you accessorized? . . . I told you I need a beret! . . . Lynn, move the belt!" From out on the runway comes the sound of Madonna singing her version of Peggy Lee's Fever as each model passes through Karan's last-minute scrutiny and touch-up. "Little black glasses! Who's next?"
Such painstaking, relentless attention to detail, fueled by an insatiable drive, defines everything Karan does. It has made her the powerhouse of Seventh Avenue, the darling of the fashion faithful, the quintessential stressed-out New York City career woman-cum-celebrity. She is the only female interloper in the all-boys club of leading U.S. designers, whose longtime members are Ralph, Calvin, Bill, Geoffrey and Oscar. The future of American retailing, though, may belong to Donna.
In the rag 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 of intimate apparel and eyeglasses. And a few months ago, she took the plunge into the highly competitive, celebrity-glutted fragrance market with the launch of her Donna Karan perfume.
The 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.