Donna Karan Quotes

“Delete the negative; accentuate the positive!”

“Evening is a time of real experimentation. You never want to look the same way.”

“Design is a constant challenge to balance comfort with luxe, the practical with the desirable.”

“Age and size are only numbers. It's the attitude you bring to clothes that make the difference.”

“Everything in life… has to have balance.”

“I believe in comfort. If you don't feel comfortable in your clothes, it's hard to think of anything else.”

“I start my day with a mind, body, soul practice – yoga, Pilates or meditation.”

“We've come a long way. Power dressing now is designed to let the woman inside us come through.”

“Where there is creativity, there is hope.”

“Every problem has a creative solution.”

“Just take a breath and see what happens.”

“I believe in the power of women. As nurturers, we have a unique ability to care and share and make the world a better place.”

“Everything I do is a matter of heart, body and soul.”

“I'd rather promote New York than anything else in this world because New York to me means the world.”

“I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion.”

“I certainly did not feel that I would be acknowledged at the Anne Klein show, the first show that I did. I had just given birth to my daughter, my boss dies, I am thrown into having taken over this company at the age of 25. It was a big pill to swallow. But I did. And it was enormously successful.”

“When I first started Donna Karan, I realized there was a void in the marketplace and I wanted to fill it. At the time, there was an uptown fashion look — Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass — and then you had most fashion designers doing clothes that were like women wearing men's suits.”

“This is the one thing that is not about me. This is about we. We can change the world. Every last woman and man sitting here can change the world. It's time for us to all come together, to create communities, to create calm in the chaos.”

“The Seven Easy Pieces was a philosophy that I had that if you had these seven pieces you were great to go. I almost took it from a point of view of having a piece of luggage and what would you pack if you traveled.”

“I wasn't thinking about success or being 'big' or creating a huge business. I was thinking about answering a need, a void, creating something that wasn't there before.”

“When Donna Karan started, I felt there was a really enormous need for women to be addressed as women. Because they were either wearing men's clothes — suits and ties and shirts, kind of buttoned up — or they were the ladies who lunched, and kind of wearing cocktail dresses. So who was really expressing the working woman? She was just not being addressed.”

“If you can't sleep in it and go out in it, I don't want to know from it.”

“I could always tell who worked for who when staff got on the elevator because of how they dressed. Calvin was more of a minimalist, very neutral and beautiful and worldly in color. Ralph was jeans, vintage shirts and ties. And I was all black.”