Norma Kamali may as well be fashion’s patron saint of ease, so integral is it to her brand’s DNA. Ergo it only makes sense that she would choose to make things a little simpler for her customer this season. Where previously Sweats, Swim, and diffusion line Kamali Kulture existed as separate entities, they’ll now live under a single umbrella. “Nobody’s life is just active; nobody’s life is just swimwear,” the designer effused at her showroom. Indeed, boundaries don’t exist in the way Kamali’s fans of all ages wear her clothes, so why should they in name? While the marketing may have changed slightly, and for the good, what’s inside continues to evolve incrementally. Still on the docket were gorgeous wrap dresses and tops to throw in a carry-on, confident in the fact that they won’t be wrinkled at the other end of your journey. Separates that bore tiers of shimmering, shaking fringe also spoke to up-for-anything good times. Last season’s compression pieces returned, in all of their belly-flattening, spine-straightening glory, but what does the pioneer of activewear do when the market is, as she dubs it, “glutted with active”? She brought in “real” fabrics, such as raw-edged denim and mattress ticking, and whipped them into utterly on-trend fitted jackets and flares. Leave it to a pioneer to go and mix things up in the face of the mundane.
Norma Kamali
