When DKNY approached us to create this chapter, we were all instantly overcome with two unanimous emotions: excitement and fear. Excitement, because as a company with strong roots in NYC—and some diehard fashion heads on staff—FRANK is always trying to work with iconic brands and visionaries that share the same sentiment. And fear, because it’s no easy task putting together a comprehensive book for a groundbreaking company that’s been making history since 1984. Inspired by the city that gave Donna Karan and her brand life, this particular chapter is all about NYC. With help from the DKNY Fall/Winter ’14 #WeAreNYC campaign models, plus a few legendary New Yorkers and local characters, the chapter features everything from an editorial styled by A$AP Illz, to a look through Ricky Powell’s star-studded archives, to a Guide to NYFW illustrated by Kevin Lyons—not to mention a slew of interviews and incredible imagery. We hope you’ll be as mesmerized by this collection of features as we were putting them together.
Donna Karan's Love Letter to NYC
New York City. It’s the world in one place. A city that can’t stand still. Old, young. Exotic, familiar. Modern, vintage. Moving forward, always changing. Everyone with a dream comes here to make their mark. Especially the creative, because New York City attracts innovation of every kind, be it art, technology, industry or Wall St. It welcomes, nurtures and encourages true individuality—the freedom to be you. Every neighborhood has its own personality, its own color—uptown, downtown, chinatown, little Italy, Brooklyn—it’s all here. To know this city is to know its icons: yellow cabs blurring by, the chaos of Times Square, the calm of Central Park, speeding messengers, green markets bursting with fruit and flowers, shining sky–scrapers overhead and gritty pavement underfoot. A kaleidoscope of color melds and flashes day into night. There’s the 24/7 energy, the nonstop pulse, horns and sirens blaring, boom boxes singing, people rushing, subways swooshing by. And my favorite—buildings lit up like sequins against a black sky. I was born in this city, and have never wanted to leave it. Why? It’s my fuel, the inspiration for everything I do, a part of who I am. It’s a love affair that still fascinates, mesmerizes and forever takes my breath away. I travel the world, but always come home to NYC.
Peter Arnell
Though it only takes one person to have a vision, it takes a solid team to execute it, and together dynamic duo Peter Arnell and Donna Karan have skillfully and passionately transformed a simple thought into a religion, taking the DKNY clothing brand and turning it into a lifestyle. As a mother, designer, an overall female powerhouse, Karan has embodied everything the American dream stands for—it just took a little help from Arnell to define it. Though Arnell has lent his creative genius to a slew of big marketing campaigns, working for the likes of GNC, Pepsi, and even Chrystler, he’s perhaps most famously recognized for conceiving the infamous DKNY Houston Street mural in SoHo. Hued entirely in greyscale, which Arnell believes most accurately depicts NYC, the mural featured only the DKNY initials, with the city’s iconic skyscraper landscape filling in the letters. No models, clothing, or branding was featured—an earnest preference of Arnell’s, who also happened to shoot the photo himself. The murals intent comes into play: was it a marketing scheme or simply aesthetic preference? Either way, and long since painted over by a plethora of other murals, none even remotely as arresting, any true New Yorker will vouch that there’s never been anything like it. It was a brick surface as important to the brand’s history as it is to the visual history of downtown Manhattan. But with all of that said, the DKNY brand measures beyond the three-story brick backdrop, a project demanding crews of people and six weeks of hard labor—we took a moment with Peter to delve deeper into DKNY’s roots, Donna’s sensibilities, and the nurturing nature of NYC.
Frank Interview with Peter Arnell
Frank: You mentioned in an interview that you believe New York City is black and white, even when viewed in color. What do you mean by that?
Peter Arnell: Well, fundamentally it’s a monochromatic city, right?
F: Yeah.
PA: Other cities are, but the farther you go away to see the skyline, you just see it in black and white; you don’t see any color in the city, right? There are other places where color is better put. I was in Hong Kong, for example, and it’s a huge metropolis made of color.
F: It makes perfect sense. There are places like Miami or even Los Angeles where there are green trees and yellow buses but New York seems very much a gray scale.
PA: There’s a lot of ways to view New York, yet somehow it’s still black and white. I think it has to do with the grid of the city and the buildings on that grid, and all of their variations of building material. When you look at it all, the steel, the metal…the impression in my mind always comes from things like Berenice Abbot, Stieglitz, Streichen and people who photograph the city, turn of the century, and through the beginning of the century in black and white film. Form and shape of the city are much more prominent than anything else when you view the image of New York City.
F: What about Donna Karan’s vision, both independently and as a brand, drew you towards working with her?
PA: Well, I think you should ask her that question more than me about what drew me to work for her. For me it was simply an assignment that happened to hit the right rawness; she was able to navigate some of my talents towards thinking into her organization. But I think at the end of the day, for me, it’s not the work but it’s the process of Donna Karan that turned me on. The process of Donna Karan is of course, she’s a kind of witness of our times, and in doing so, she’s able to personally experience and then develop from those experiences and observations modern and advanced ways of dressing a woman.
And after years of men, I think it’s that sensibility alone and fabrication and design that makes things easier and simple for a consumer. She has incredible style and she’s very chic and I think ultimately that era of the ’80s provided an opportunity to support, acknowledge, and promote women as powerful symbols of progress for our society. So, the ads and photos were always driven by a visual depiction of that reality about power and the potential of that power, and they were very empowering because people saw those things as kind of aspirational vehicles for their minds to dream and believe that they could grow and be powerful. She was a great aspiration for the entire world, an embodiment of the American dream. There was this idea that if you could make it in New York you could make it anywhere, and there was this idea that everyone could be successful. The ’80s were a very powerful period; she was an icon that came out of the ’80s, she became the working mother, she became the entrepreneur, she became the CEO, she became the leader, and so what I was doing was trying to make the picture that would appear on the cover of the New York Times, I was trying to capture an image that would tell a story instead of just photographing Donna.
The best way to establish a brand’s image is to have the camera steal what the brand is most interested in and most excited by or stimulated by or inspired by, and we did it with our camera focused on New York. It was a real dream to move to New York, to be part of New York, to feel New York, and for a woman in the ’80s, it was a huge shift of contribution, power, and invention for women on a corporate level, and she was really driving that. So the photographs themselves didn’t need to be standardized through a set of principles that most people expect, it just needed to capture the emotion of that energy. I shot the early pictures with a Ricoh—it didn’t matter—I used to like the lens on that camera. I just used to shoot and shoot and shoot and there was some energy in that, a rawness, a quality that resonated during the early days. The first ads of the city were shot by Dennis Peo. My idea originally was simple: to shoot New York City, with the speeding car on 57th Street, and then there was the bridge, and at a certain point I took over. It was easier for me; I became more in tune with photography, so we just started shooting.
F: Amazing. The whole package is really brilliant. Along with black and white photographs and the city and the gray scale, Donna Karan’s clothing and
aesthetic is really implanted in New York as well.
PA: Well, there were rebuilt assets, representational assets. What I tried to do is capture and story board the way she was moving through time and space. I think the big explosion on the market was of course DKNY, and I collaged those things and cut out those letters because we were very chic, and in a funny way, we were very simple and subtle. It was couture when we launched—you know, making works of art, not really inducing ads. The real story about the company takes place during the first six or seven years of the company, that’s where it was all established. And then from there, it grew and evolved, but the imagery in my mind after I left, which I think was around nine years later, the imagery started to come in a funny way, of a school that wasn’t original enough. The elements in the beginning were raw, they were inventive, they somehow were always driving this kind of wow factor and the company grew and grew and grew and things got more standardized. Its real energy, its captured vibrancy…it was collaboration that existed between Donna and I that you can’t replace.
F: Absolutely not, there’s definitely a synergy there. Are you originally from New York?
PA: Brooklyn.
F: What about New York City do you think is so nurturing to fashion designers, both upcoming and established?
PA: Fashion in general is a very competitive, very tension filled and stressful industry. And what’s expected of fashion is this constant movement. There’s a demand of designers, that they have to produce and produce and produce. This started during the manufacturing days of the industry, and trading and the Dutch, there’s a very aggressive, very competitive energy in New York City, and I think that environment and culture provides very, very unique results. Because a designer living in this environment is clearly effected by the tension and craziness of the city.
F: Exactly. Well the city doesn’t sleep.
PA: Right. When in Paris, designers are affected by their environments differently. You can actually see the impact of geography, and I think here in New York City there’s a wonderful and positive destructive force that makes you challenge yourself everyday in a way that grows your product and grows your ideas. It’s also a melting pot of hundreds of different cultures, it’s an energy that’s really a stage for creativity. But creativity, because there’s nowhere to hide and be calm, it’s got this difficult, complex case to it. On one hand it provides you with all this excitement, stimuli, energy, visual delight, and at the same time it attacks you and gives a certain tension and strength to you and your work. I think that’s what fashion is a lot about, this dialogue between the manufacturing of something and the meaning of something.
When we started Donna Karan, we gave the company a huge amount of meaning, because there was a clear vision from a brilliant woman who understood modern women. It was liberating. And so the communications and the work and the identity all knew how to liberate. It was almost like giving people a passport to say it was OK to grow, it was OK to be independent and strong, it was OK to move forward, it was OK to open up our minds and see past the obvious. I really feel it was a time and place that will never be replicated again. I don’t know if it was the bigness of her ideas, that she just wanted great stuff all the time, you had to give her things that were bigger than life. So we did.
The other thing is that she’s an amazing teacher. So between the loudness of her presence and the obsessive detail oriented person, when she was at the helm building a company, she was doing more than building a company, she was building up a dream. And I think New York City is all about dreams; people come here to fulfill dreams, so all I needed to do was follow her life, record and depict those moments. It didn’t matter what the picture was, it mattered what the content of the picture was.