"What I've noticed as a designer is that the longer I'm doing this, the more I can intuit how the social condition affects what people are going to want to buy," says Kamali. "And I'm realizing more and more that this intuit perspective is what gives me the ability to start trends rather than follow them. And some of the trends I've started have lasted years and years."
Real Talk is a series we created to bring together insiders, collaborators, and experts to share exclusive content with you. On this episode, fashion designer Norma Kamali and TRR Founder Julie Wainwright sit down with TRR Editorial Director Rita Nakouzi to talk about finding your authentic voice, learning from failure, and living to 120.
Norma Kamali is no stranger to one-of-a-kind, custom bridal gowns. For over 15 years, the designer has produced major wedding dress moments for her best friends, daughters, and celebrity brides alike.
Most recently, while designing a bespoke gown for a future bride, Kamali had a spark of inspiration; and instead of creating one look, she found herself designing 12 dresses! After a few curated additions, Kamali turned these pieces into her first-ever bridal line, which is now available on NormaKamali.com.
Norma Kamali has lasted 55 years in fashion by strategically reviving old styles and making them relevant for new customers. The formula requires more than a flip through the archives, though.
“I feel like I’ve come out of the pandemic just as I hit 30, and I don’t know how to dress anymore,” said one reader of her wardrobe. I’ve gotten a lot of questions like this lately: “Should your wardrobe change when you are about to turn 30?” asked another person. “I just turned 40 and have never thought much about my personal style,” said someone else. “Where do I start?”
“The really fun part about one’s twenties is the discovery of personal style,” says designer Norma Kamali in her memoir-slash-self-help-book. “You have the freedom to dress any way you would like at this time, so experimenting is the way to do it.”
“Feminism” and “womanhood” mean different things to different folks. With The F-Word, our essay series running throughout Women’s History Month, we’re highlighting different perspectives—the good, the bad, and the complicated—of what those concepts mean to people.
Winter is definitely my least favorite season. Being raised in the south (Houston) the blistering temperatures grind my gears like no other. Ironically, however, my favorite clothing item is coats. “Pieces” as I endearingly refer to them as, are my favorite accessory. It doesn’t matter if my outfit is just sweats or if I don’t have on any makeup and my hair isn’t done, a great coat elevates any look in an instant.
One coat in particular, Norma Kamali’s Sleeping Bag Coat, has a little extra razzle dazzle, though. So much so, that there’s never been a time I’ve worn it and haven’t gotten dozens of compliments and inquiries of where I got it.
The Norma Kamali Diana Gown ($215) is the dress of the season... and not just because it's the exact dress Carrie Bradshaw wore on her first date with that hot teacher in And Just Like That. For starters, it's what my mom likes to call "an investment piece." The one-shoulder style is timelessly chic, and it can be dressed up or down depending on your mood—pair it with strappy sandals and a pair of statement earrings for a casual beach wedding in Miami (done it) or sky-high stilettos and a pair of opera gloves for a black-tie affair in Switzerland (also done it).
“A designer learns through the seasons and years that our job is to have the tempo of what people are feeling,” the voice of Norma Kamali said over her fall collection video.
She echoed this message over Zoom, explaining that right now, optimistic fashions that exude the feminine, and are also timeless, are the key to how women are dressing and feeling.
Norma Kamali has an optimistic and realistic way of looking at the world and at fashion that has given a longevity to her clothes that many designers would envy. Take the shirred Diana dress: Designed in the 1970s, it was worn by Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw on And Just Like That… and is selling like hotcakes. As with everything Kamali designs, this sexy dress can be thrown in the washing machine, and since it stretches, it adapts to many body types.
Through her use of bias cutting and drawstrings, and translation of swimwear aspects like cutouts into ready-to-wear, Kamali has always made clothes that could be described as user-friendly, which means something different in 2022 than it did even 10 years ago. “A lot of the way we shop is through photos on a screen, and the way the light comes through the photos and how eye-catching the photos are, how appealing emotionally that experience is, is really a very modern thought process that many of us didn’t have to think about before,” said Kamali. “So if I have a dark color or something subtle, I have to do something so it pops off the screen.”
Jennifer Lopez was one of many women to champion slip dresses throughout the '90s and Noughties. Take the silk spaghetti-strap dress she wore to attend a Tom Ford for Gucci benefit for APLA in 1997. Or the sparkly "naked dress" she wore to the CFDAs in 1998.
Proving that slinky slip dresses have ever-lasting appeal, J Lo channelled her younger self in a cherry-red silk Norma Kamali dress and platform heels for an appearance on The Tonight Show.
If you haven’t already manically binged the latest episode of And Just Like That, scroll all the way down to the shopping section of this story to avoid spoilers and skip right to the very cute dress. If you have watched—let’s discuss! Finally, Carrie is back on her feet and ready to dip her toes into the dating pool (as advised by both her editor and Oprah, NBD) and of course, our girl had to school us all in first-date fashion. Carrie Bradshaw’s date dress has been living in my head rent-free since I first saw it in behind-the-scenes photos of filming back in 2021, and for just $215, it can be yours in any of 20 colors. Yep, that many.
And Just Like That costume designers Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago needed six samples of the blue Norma Kamali dress Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) wears in episode seven of the HBO Max hit series. It's the look she chooses for her first foray back into the dating world (don't pretend you weren't wondering what she'd wear . . . ), and it's not a bad choice. It's formfitting, it works as a great piece to layer with, and it's effortlessly sexy when teamed with a silver-foiled Max Mara blazer, Aquazzura jewel-strap heels, and Paco Rabanne snake-effect metal clutch.
For pre-fall, Norma Kamali turned out all the stops to debut a celebratory, bridal-forward collection. Although the designer had previously designed one-of-a-kind bridal looks in the ’90s, for 15 years, her pre-fall collection started when the designer had offered to design a princess-inspired gown for the daughter of a close friend. A handful of dress samples later, Kamali (who is also engaged) wanted to expand the assortment to offer the collection for any bride-to-be.
Norma Kamali is and always has been pro-woman. For pre-fall she’s also pro-princess (bride). The impetus was her own impending nuptials and the assignment to create a dreamy wedding dress for the daughter of a good friend, who happens to be a neuroscientist with fairy-tale good looks.
For about 15 years starting in the mid-’90s, Kamali designed custom bridal looks, including for one Cynthia Germanotta, whose daughter Lady Gaga wears it in her video for “You and I.” This time around Kamali’s offerings are off-the-rack and aimed at a variety of brides (Disney princess, Jessica Rabbit, and so on). “They’re modern, they’re easy to take care of,” said Kamali on a call, adding that they are relatively affordable. “The amount of money you spend on a gown doesn’t necessarily mean that that gown is more beautiful, or it isn’t more fantastical or magical, or makes you feel any better because you spent more,” she said.
Bye-bye, tutu! Get a peek at the timeless dress that’s about to become the “Sex and the City” character’s next big thing.
When Sarah Jessica Parker was seen on the And Just Like That... set in a draped, powder blue bodycon dress by Norma Kamali, fans recognized the look as pure Carrie Bradshaw, if not a little more grown-up than her looks from the original Sex and the City. They might not have known that the latest Carrie dress is a $215 style Norma Kamali first introduced more than forty years ago.
Kamali was excited to see her dress appear on the show, but she didn't expect fans to be familiar with its history. "I’ve been doing this for 53 years. So a lot of the people who are buying the Diana now have no clue or could care less about the fact that that dress was done such a long time ago," the designer tells BAZAAR over Zoom. "They know Norma Kamali today."
Norma Kamali, the woman behind the Carrie dress 2.0 – the baby blue ruched bodycon number Sarah Jessica Parker wears in the Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That – has experienced unprecedented demand for the design. “It’s as if we’re giving it away,” Kamali says over Zoom from her home in New York.
The Diana dress, it turns out, has been flying off the shelves for the best part of a year. Thousands sell per week, with retailers keen to stock up the moment it sells out. “I can truly understand why people love it,” she muses. “It fits a moment in time.”
One of the most memorable style moments from Sex and the City was the slinky, gray bodycon dress worn by Carrie Bradshaw, aka Sarah Jessica Parker, in Season 2, episode 15. (You may know the formfitting number as the “Carrie dress.”) The surprisingly understated look became a cult favorite for fans. And according to recent photos of Parker, who wore a similar dress while filming And Just Like That..., the curve-hugging silhouette will be revived for the show’s reboot. Parker’s new “Carrie dress” is Norma Kamali’s Diana Gown. And as opposed to the party girl spirit of Carrie’s ensemble from Season 2, her new outfit reflects a more mature and evolved fashion aesthetic.
“I think Carrie Bradshaw is iconically linked to the fashions that represent the show’s original time period, which was playful, feminine, and timeless. But [Parker] has a different body now and is aging with power,” Norma Kamali says to TZR. “I think the draping and the color of the Diana Gown matches her energy as Carrie now.”
There are endless outfits from the original Sex and the City series that fans have committed to memory, but there’s one particular dress that stands out. The body-sculpting LBD (more charcoal than black, to be specific) that Carrie Bradshaw – aka Sarah Jessica Parker – wears in season two, episode 15 is nothing short of iconic....
Glimpses of the new installment And Just Like That – which is currently being filmed in New York City – suggest that there’s another potential “Carrie dress” in the works. Unlike her hero ’90s LBD, her 2021 style comes in an elegant powder-blue shade.
Miley Cyrus knows a great look when she sees one. If she wasn’t busy making music, the star could double as a fashion historian. Cyrus’s love of vintage, haute couture, and emerging designers makes her one the most stylish celebrities, so when she was preparing for her sets at Summerfest in Milwaukee and Atlanta's Music Midtown festival this weekend, Cyrus made sure that her wardrobe was top notch.
"Norma Kamali is an ever-evolving designer. She goes from understated to over the top, and that is a talent in itself. She's inspired me to do the same"
Norma Kamali’s spring collection looked back into her own design history and brought forth modernly printed "Americana comfort clothing."
The Norma Kamali parachute jumpsuit and sleeping bag coat on view in the Costume Institute exhibition “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” was pulled from her spring 2022 collection, but she first designed these pieces in the 1970s. It’s a decade that parallels the 2020s in ways that go far beyond fashion, she thinks.
The revival of the Bennifer romance has provided the world with quite the summer distraction – particularly die-hard J Lo fans who could never have dreamed that the couple would reunite decades on from their Noughties engagement. (Not to mention recreate that yacht moment.) The new relationship has also seen J Lo up the ante on her already notoriously alluring dress code.
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Welcome to Style Diaries, a new series where we research the physical manifestations of our closet tours IRL. We're asking friends and tastemakers to show us what they're *actually* wearing during the week and to provide a little insight into their thoughts on the current state of fashion. This week, we are speaking with Norma Kamali. Her job is extremely hands-on, so the iconic New York-based designer takes a uniform-approach to dressing, opting for comfortable, casual separates rendered in cheerful loud prints. Don't forget the emblematic eyewear and platform crocs!
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