Last year G-III woke up a sleeping giant in the American fashion ecosystem: Donna Karen New York, relaunching the collection business with a viral bang while staying true to founder Donna Karan’s legacy.
The revival included the “In Women We Trust” campaign, breathing new life into the label by featuring multiple generations of women as brand storytellers, including Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Amber Valletta, Shalom Harlow, Carolyn Murphy, Imaan Hammam, Karlie Kloss and Liya Kebede, each sharing their history with Donna Karan. It created a lighting strike moment, reestablishing Karen’s lasting impact on fashion today. It’s commonplace for modern designers to wax on about wardrobing their customer and creating pieces that feel effortless, but it’s an idea born out of Karan‘s original playbook with her revolutionary seven easy pieces formula for dressing. Now a year later, the brand is debuting its second spring offering, firmly planted in its roots but seen through today’s lens.
Up until now the palette was gray and black, but spring 2025 brings a renewed lightness with flesh tones, pure white and cloudy gray and hazlenut shades, each accented with gold hardware inspired by the Robert Lee Morris pieces the founder famously used in her work. The in-house design team said the spring lineup was loosely inspired by Karan’s love of travel.
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There was a thoughtful focus on fabrication and textures for the season with crinkled nylon, hammered satins, knit jersey, woven crepe, chiffon, georgette, cashmere (of course), cotton and linen.
Trends? Not here. Instead the team prefers to maintain the ethos of solving the problem of dressing for women with busy urban lifestyles in a way that feels luxurious and well designed. “It’s about attainable luxury,“ a member of the design team said during an exclusive walk-through of the collection.
Priced under $1,000, with much landing between $400 and $600 at retail, it’s clothing suited for a wide range of customers, a space the in-house team feels is missing from the marketplace. In fact, spring will see the brand’s distribution at retail expand.
Knits are a prime example of how the brand is innovating, used for coats, blazers, skirts, pants and even a trenchcoat. Cozy and a smart way to reimagine classic pieces through a new textured language. Tailored pieces included a bestseller soft blazer with hardware closure that proved to be a standout among retailers; the company is adding it to the core collection with plans to introduce it in multiple colorways each season. One sleeveless black blazer was remixed with a twisted halter top at the neck and closed with gold buttons dotted down the garment, while menswear style shirting used a gold brush stroke print detail— also found on various separates — to pair with wide leg pants and sharp suiting trousers. Across the collection there was an easy and refined season-less vibe.
Evening propositions were liquid jersey dresses and a semi-sheer sandy colored tank and skirt with clear paillettes. Accessories offered new versions of their Amagansett and Baldwin bags, styles the team said were bestsellers last season and now come in a wider range of sizes.
While the fashion and retail landscape has been through many evolutions since the heyday of Donna Karan herself, one thing remains a constant: customers crave well designed pieces that they can wear season after season with a chic, yet not overly trendy, point of view. The design team understands this, mining the brand’s archive as they aim to to reestablish it at the center of the conversation of well-priced, modern wardrobing today.
