Norma Kamali | |
|---|---|
| Born | Norma Arraez June 27, 1945 New York City, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Fashion Institute of Technology |
| Occupation | Fashion designer |
| Years active | 1968–present |
| Website | normakamali |
Norma Kamali (born June 27, 1945) [1] is an American fashion designer and entrepreneur best known for the "Sleeping Bag" Coat, sweats as everyday sportswear, and swimwear. She lives in New York City. [2]
Norma Arraez was born on June 27, 1945, to Estrella C. Galib Arraez Granofsky and Salvador Mariategui William Arraez, a middle class family residing in Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York City. [1] [3] She is of Lebanese and Basque descent. [4] Aspiring to become a painter. [3] Kamali attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and earned a degree in illustration. [3] [5] Upon graduation, she worked as a freelance fashion illustrator for a year. She also worked for Northwest Orient Airlines from 1966 to 1967. [6] In an interview, she says that her mother Estrella planted a seed when telling her to become independent and pushed her to make her own cloth early on. [7]
In 1969, Kamali opened a New York boutique with her then-husband Mohammed Houssein "Eddie" Kamali, concentrating on London-style street looks. In 1974, the couple opened a shop called Kamali on Madison Avenue. After their divorce in 1978, Kamali opened her own independent boutique called OMO Norma Kamali, OMO standing for "on my own." [8]
During the early seventies, she started producing one-piece maillot bathing suits stripped of structuring to achieve a sleek, racy shape on which she altered leg cuts and back cuts to create a great variety of looks, those in glamour fabrics like gold lamé garnering particular attention from fashion-watchers. By the mid-seventies, she was well known for her swimsuits, and the very high leg cuts on some of her swimwear from the second half of the seventies set a trend that lasted through the following decade. [9] Kamali designed the red one-piece bathing suit worn by Farrah Fawcett in the iconic 1976 poster [10] and the bathing suit worn by Whitney Houston on the back cover of her 1985 debut album. Farrah Fawcett's suit was donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2011. [11]
She became known for her line of clothing made of real silk parachute material, which included the innovation of being adjustable in length and fit by drawstring, a characteristic feature of the mid-seventies Big Look period. [12]
She is one of several designers credited with popularizing the shoulder pad in women's wear in the 1980s [13] and played a prominent role in adapting exaggerated shoulder pads to casual clothes at the beginning of the eighties shoulder-pad era in 1978. [14]
She reached a peak of fame during the early 1980s [15] with her 1980 "Sweats" collection, a variety of casual garments done in sweatshirt fabric, most famously flounced, hip-yoked miniskirts called rah-rah skirts in the UK, [16] a style she had first presented in other fabrics in 1979. [17] These garments were the first mini-length skirts in ten years to gain widespread public acceptance, repopularizing miniskirts for the eighties. [18] The "Sweats" collection of 1980-81 also finally won the public over to the large shoulder pads that the fashion industry had been trying to get women to wear since 1978, partly by making the pads removable via velcro, the first designer to make prominent use of velcro for this purpose. [19]
Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [20]
Kamali was the first designer to create an online store on eBay. [2] In addition to designing clothing, she has also produced a fitness, health and beauty line. [21] In 2008, Kamali produced a collection for Walmart. [22]
After completing a generative AI course at MIT in 2023, [23] Kamali trained an AI to produce clothing designs in her style. [24] [25]
In 2021, Kamali published a memoir entitled I Am Invincible. [26]
In 1981, Kamali won a Coty Award, called the "Winnie" but formally titled the American Fashion Critics' Award. [27] She received the CFDA Board of Directors Special Tribute Award in 2005, [2] and was awarded the CFDA Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016, [3] which was presented to her by Michael Kors. [28] In 2019, Kamali received the Women's Entrepreneurship Day Pioneer Award [29] at the United Nations.
In 2010, Kamali received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, the Fashion Institute of Technology. [30]
Kamali has a plaque on the Fashion Walk of Fame. [22]
In 1968, she married Mohammad "Eddie" Kamali. They divorced in 1977. She got engaged to her longtime partner, Marty Edelman, in 2020. [31]
At nineteen, Norma married Eddie (Mohammed Houssein) Kamali,a student from Iran; and, a year later, they opened a basement boutique on East Fifty-Third Street. They stocked it with kicky 'sixties Carnaby Street London things...[T]he shop moved, in 1974, to a...space on Madison Avenue. It was called Kamali. After the Kamalis divorced, OMO Norma Kamali was born – in 1978.
First, there are Kamali bathing suits...In 1972, Kamali first made maillots out of gold lamé...
Norma Kamali...has become famous for her parachute dresses, sexy, shirred bathing suits, pegged, draped skirts...and...padded shoulders.
One year ago [1982], all you saw being worn by fashionable women was Norma Kamali.
Norma Kamali launched her 'sweats' collection: rah-rah skirts, leggings and jogging suits cut in grey and brightly coloured cotton sweatshirting. The tops often had huge, American-footballer shoulder pads. These low-priced co-ordinates were copied worldwide.
Kenzo, Chloé and others now showed pretty, floral printed-cotton versions of the rah-rah introduced by Kamali and [Perry] Ellis in 1979.
Short 'rah-rah' skirts...sold out...across the country....'Girls would buy 20 pieces at a time.'...Her rah-rah skirts were 'the first minis, since the early 'seventies, to sell in volume'.
...[In] the late `70s...really big shoulders reappeared,...broader than ever. Reactions to the doorway-wide affairs generally ranged from 'not for me' to 'never!'...In the spring of `81, Kamali slipped oversized shoulder pads into vastly oversized sweatshirts in a collection of sportswear that took off overnight and found women, girls and even kids across the country happily looking like female footballers.... Since then, shoulder pads have become a way of life to the fashion-conscious,...
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