Trey Laird and Linda Evangelista on the Relaunch of Donna Karan New York
The relaunch of the Donna Karan New York brand has some major firepower behind it.
Under owner G-III Apparel Group, which purchased parent company Donna Karan International in 2016, the company turned to a bevy of supermodels — many of whom had been associated with the brand in its heyday — to be the faces of the reintroduction. They included Cindy Crawford, Amber Valletta, Shalom Harlow, Carolyn Murphy, Imaan Hammam, Karlie Kloss, Liya Kebede and Linda Evangelista.
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The mastermind behind the campaign was Trey Laird, who had worked with Donna Karan on the original campaign, “In Women We Trust,” in 1992.
In a presentation at the WWD Apparel and Retail CEO Summit, Laird and Evangelista offered a look back at the original launch of the label and how it grew to define an era of womanhood.
Laird recalled how his first job in 1988 was with “an assistant to the assistant to the assistant” of a small advertising agency, which was where he met Karan. He began working for her as the in-house creative before leaving in 2001 to launch his own agency. “Donna said she was going to be my first client,” he said, and she was for nine years.
Those early years taught Laird invaluable lessons that he could later apply to other clients such as Tom Ford, Tory Burch and Tommy Hilfiger.
“That experience with Donna Karan really taught me how to be a creative director,” he said. “How you really have to step up and look at architecture and events and logos and branding, graphics and images and everything all together to really be able to do that job.”
For Evangelista, she said her ascension to the top of the modeling world didn’t happen quickly. “My rise to success working with incredible photographers and magazines and campaigns didn’t happen overnight — it took like three years. Some of the other models went straight to the top, and my rise was so slow because what I was lacking was confidence. I think I didn’t have a look. I didn’t know how I was supposed to look. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be, until I found out I could be anybody I wanted to be.”
When Laird was charged with relaunching Donna Karan New York after it had been out of the market for more than a decade, he was initially reluctant. “I felt this big responsibility to do it justice and be authentic and true to what it stood for because it’s such a legendary American icon and I felt like it had been a little forgotten,” he said. “I wanted to tell that story to people that loved it but also those who didn’t know it.”
The best way to reintroduce the brand, he believed, was through storytelling. “I felt like it would be most authentic to tell the story with people that were part of it over different generations,” he said. “Part of the Donna Karan DNA was celebrating all different types of women. So I felt it shouldn’t be necessarily just about one woman, it should be about different types of women.”
But he thought the idea of getting all these famous faces to appear together in the campaign was “insane,” he said. “I’m never going to be able to pull this off. How can you possibly imagine getting all these women in one room? But I reached out to each one of them, and they all said yes.”
One reason may have been the fond memories they had. As Evangelista recalled: “Donna was such a fun show to do. She was there with us backstage, and we would get these pep talks. We never got pep talks from anybody. It was just, ‘Walk to the end, walk back.’ But she wanted us to be our authentic selves, strong women that embodied everything that she ever thought a woman was. She gave us so much confidence, and it was so much fun.”
She added that the clothes, too, contributed to this confident attitude. “Sometimes in fashion shows, you look around at the other models and what outfits they have, and you’re like, ‘Oh, how come they got that one?’ But it didn’t matter with [Donna] because her clothes didn’t overtake your personality. The black body suit was the basis of everything, and you build on that — it was so easy to get dressed as a woman. There are a couple things like that that I still wear today, because they’re resilient, they have longevity.”
Some of the campaigns were shot by the late German photographer Peter Lindbergh, whom Evangelista recalled fondly. Even though he didn’t love fashion, he loved women, she said, and it showed in his work.
“With Peter, I never felt so comfortable because he always wanted to capture the real me,” she said. “I never knew who the real me was, but he saw me as very masculine and always brought out that fluid, androgynous side of me.”
For the spring 2024 campaign, it was Annie Leibovitz who was commissioned to do the shoot. Evangelista said: “She knows what she wants, and she knows how to get it out of you. And what I love is like we look like ourselves. We’re not retouched.”
Allowing the models to look like they do today was important to Laird and spoke to the timelessness of the clothes. “We work in fashion, and there’s something great about the new, the new, the new,” he said. “But what about the best — things that last and stand the test of time?”
The conversation then turned deeply personal. Evangelista said she “spent years hibernating” following the disfigurement she said she experienced after CoolSculpting treatments. The procedure resulted in paradoxical adipose hyperplasia, which causes fatty areas to enlarge rather than shrink.
She spent five years in self-imposed exile, only leaving her house for her son and walking her dog at “obscure times,” because she didn’t want to be seen. “I was just so unhappy in my own skin,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of therapy since, but I spent years and years focusing on my looks. My self worth and value became about my looks, and I felt flawed. I didn’t love myself, and I didn’t understand why anybody would love me if I didn’t like being with myself or looking at myself.”
Adding insult to injury is that she was diagnosed with breast cancer twice: first in 2018 when she underwent a double mastectomy, and then in 2022 when she found a lump in her pectoral muscle. She underwent chemotherapy and radiation and is now taking medicine that she said is “horrible. But I celebrate every day that I’m here.”
Despite her medical issues, Evangelista made a triumphant return to public life in 2022, when she closed the Fendi show. It was 15 years since she’d been in a fashion show.
Shortly after, Phaidon created a coffee-table book on Evangelista and showcased some 180 of her most iconic photographs shot by Steven Meisel.
“When I hit that book tour right after the Fendi fashion show, the people in line first to have their book signed were so emotional and shaking and crying,” she recalled. “Then I did book talks, and I saw the love there, and I couldn’t believe how much support was out there for me. [I wish I] had known that people aren’t as vain as I was then, that they would accept me the way I was and that there is support and love for me as a human being, not just a model.”
As a result, she has learned a major life lesson. “I really get what beauty is, and it’s not what I thought it was. It’s deeper than that, and people aren’t as fickle as I thought,” she said.
Returning to the topic at hand — the relaunch of Donna Karan New York — Laird said using Evangelista and the other famous faces spoke to the timelessness of the fashion. “The brand hadn’t been in circulation for almost a decade, so I think people had forgotten the power and the impact of that collection and Donna’s talent — her legacy and her design DNA,” he said. “So it really was like starting from the beginning again.”
One year since hitting the retail floors, the consumer response to the relaunch has been “phenomenal,” he said. “It’s blowing up.” He credited G-III with keeping the collection accessibly priced so it can reach the largest number of women. “The fact that it wasn’t around for a few years made people appreciate it, and there was a little bit of pent-up demand,” he said. “Things that endure need to be respected.”
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