Norma Kamali

Norma Kamali (born June 27, 1945)^[1] is an American fashion designer and entrepreneur best known for the "Sleeping Bag" Coat, sweats as everyday sportswear, and swimwear. She lives in New York City.^[2]

Norma Kamali
Born	Norma Arraez (1945-06-27) June 27, 1945 (age 80) New York City, U.S.
Alma mater	Fashion Institute of Technology
Occupation	Fashion designer
Years active	1968–present
Website	normakamali.com

A coat Kamali designed in 2021 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the In America: A Lexicon of Fashion exhibition

Early life and education

Norma Arraez was born on June 27, 1945, to Estrella C. Galib Arraez Granofsky and Salvador Mariategui William Arraez, a middle class family residing in Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York City.^[1][3] She is of Lebanese and Basque descent.^[4] Aspiring to become a painter.^[3] Kamali attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and earned a degree in illustration.^[3][5] Upon graduation, she worked as a freelance fashion illustrator for a year. She also worked for Northwest Orient Airlines from 1966 to 1967.^[6] In an interview, she says that her mother Estrella planted a seed when telling her to become independent and pushed her to make her own cloth early on. ^[7]

Career

In 1969, Kamali opened a New York boutique with her then-husband Mohammed Houssein "Eddie" Kamali, concentrating on London-style street looks. In 1974, the couple opened a shop called Kamali on Madison Avenue. After their divorce in 1978, Kamali opened her own independent boutique called OMO Norma Kamali, OMO standing for "on my own."^[8]

During the early seventies, she started producing one-piece maillot bathing suits stripped of structuring to achieve a sleek, racy shape on which she altered leg cuts and back cuts to create a great variety of looks, those in glamour fabrics like gold lamé garnering particular attention from fashion-watchers. By the mid-seventies, she was well known for her swimsuits, and the very high leg cuts on some of her swimwear from the second half of the seventies set a trend that lasted through the following decade.^[9] Kamali designed the red one-piece bathing suit worn by Farrah Fawcett in the iconic 1976 poster^[10] and the bathing suit worn by Whitney Houston on the back cover of her 1985 debut album. Farrah Fawcett's suit was donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2011.^[11]

She became known for her line of clothing made of real silk parachute material, which included the innovation of being adjustable in length and fit by drawstring, a characteristic feature of the mid-seventies Big Look period.^[12]

She is one of several designers credited with popularizing the shoulder pad in women's wear in the 1980s^[13] and played a prominent role in adapting exaggerated shoulder pads to casual clothes at the beginning of the eighties shoulder-pad era in 1978.^[14]

She reached a peak of fame during the early 1980s^[15] with her 1980 "Sweats" collection, a variety of casual garments done in sweatshirt fabric, most famously flounced, hip-yoked miniskirts called rah-rah skirts in the UK,^[16] a style she had first presented in other fabrics in 1979.^[17] These garments were the first mini-length skirts in ten years to gain widespread public acceptance, repopularizing miniskirts for the eighties.^[18] The "Sweats" collection of 1980-81 also finally won the public over to the large shoulder pads that the fashion industry had been trying to get women to wear since 1978, partly by making the pads removable via velcro, the first designer to make prominent use of velcro for this purpose.^[19]

Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[20]

Kamali was the first designer to create an online store on eBay.^[2] In addition to designing clothing, she has also produced a fitness, health and beauty line.^[21] In 2008, Kamali produced a collection for Walmart.^[22]

After completing a generative AI course at MIT in 2023,^[23] Kamali trained an AI to produce clothing designs in her style.^[24][25]

In 2021, Kamali published a memoir entitled I Am Invincible.^[26]

Awards and honors

In 1981, Kamali won a Coty Award, called the "Winnie" but formally titled the American Fashion Critics' Award.^[27] She received the CFDA Board of Directors Special Tribute Award in 2005,^[2] and was awarded the CFDA Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016,^[3] which was presented to her by Michael Kors.^[28] In 2019, Kamali received the Women's Entrepreneurship Day Pioneer Award^[29] at the United Nations.

In 2010, Kamali received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, the Fashion Institute of Technology.^[30]

Kamali has a plaque on the Fashion Walk of Fame.^[22]

Personal life

In 1968, she married Mohammad "Eddie" Kamali. They divorced in 1977. She got engaged to her longtime partner, Marty Edelman, in 2020.^[31]