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"&amp;amp;#8220;If [Urban Zen] goes well, the medical institution as we know it will change.&amp;amp;#8221; &amp;amp;#8212;Christy TurlingtonBy Maryellen Gordon Donna Karan&amp;amp;#8217;s first collection under her signature label debuted on May 3, 1985&amp;amp;#8212;and according to The New York Times fashion writer Bernadine Morris&amp;amp;#8217; review the next day, &amp;amp;#8220;pandemonium broke loose.&amp;amp;#8221; Proclaimed Morris: &amp;amp;#8220;It was an immediate smash hit&amp;amp;#8230;. She doesn&amp;amp;#8217;t make [a working woman] look&amp;amp;#8230;like a clone of a male executive. The clothes have drama and style. In clothes for the businesswoman, this is a major breakthrough.&amp;amp;#8221; What the then 36-year-old Karan had done&amp;amp;#8212;daring to make clothes for professional women that actually acknowledged there was a female shape underneath&amp;amp;#8212;may not seem so revolutionary today, when women regularly show up for work in tight jeans. But &amp;amp;#8220;for 100 years prior to that, working women had dressed like imitation men,&amp;amp;#8221; says Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology]. By comparison, Karan&amp;amp;#8217;s collection&amp;amp;#8212;mostly bodysuits and wrap pieces in soft, sensuous fabrics such as jersey and cashmere&amp;amp;#8212;was barricade-busting. Ellin Saltzman, then corporate fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue and now fashion director of online retailer Bluefly, remembers she &amp;amp;#8220;absolutely flipped&amp;amp;#8221; over the collection. &amp;amp;#8220;The whole idea of the bodysuit, of using jersey, which had stretch, all made so much sense,&amp;amp;#8221; she says. &amp;amp;#8220;When I started the collection, everybody was doing suits for women that looked like men&amp;amp;#8217;s,&amp;amp;#8221; says Karan. &amp;amp;#8220;Women had lost their sensuality. There are few women who can wear mannish clothes and wear them well.&amp;amp;#8221; She adds with a laugh, &amp;amp;#8220;I&amp;amp;#8217;m not one of them.&amp;amp;#8221; Today she&amp;amp;#8217;s the genius behind Donna Karan International (DKI), a global fashion empire that includes everything from men&amp;amp;#8217;s and women&amp;amp;#8217;s apparel to home merchandise to accessories and hosiery. She built DKI, encompassing both Donna Karan and the lower-priced DKNY label, by believing in women&amp;amp;#8217;s strength rather than playing to their anxieties; in 1992 her iconic &amp;amp;#8220;In Women We Trust&amp;amp;#8221; ad campaign depicted a female president being sworn in. &amp;amp;#8220;She tried to speak to women through her product and her voice to say, &amp;amp;#8216;There&amp;amp;#8217;s nothing you can&amp;amp;#8217;t do,&amp;amp;#8217; &amp;amp;#8221; says Peter Arnell, a founding partner in Arnell/Bickford, the ad agency that produced the campaign. Arnell recalls that Karan &amp;amp;#8220;was in tears&amp;amp;#8221; when he showed her the photos for the campaign: &amp;amp;#8220;She absolutely believed in it, believed that women could in fact run this country better than men.&amp;amp;#8221; In 2001 Karan sold DKI for $643 million to the luxury conglomerate LVMH; she remains DKI&amp;amp;#8217;s chief designer. And now Karan is undertaking arguably her most exciting mission: her newly created Urban Zen Initiative, sparked by her experiences with cancer. Her close friend photographer Lynn Kohlman has survived both breast and brain cancer; Karan&amp;amp;#8217;s late husband, Stephan Weiss&amp;amp;#8212;whom she credits with devising the business plan that took her company from a small brand to a stratospheric force alongside Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren&amp;amp;#8212;passed away in 2001 after a long battle with lung cancer. In Karan&amp;amp;#8217;s mind, healing should be a complete integration of Eastern and Western medicines and yoga practices; she created Urban Zen, which was launched with a wellness forum in May, to help raise funds and awareness to achieve that. &amp;amp;#8220;When Stephan got ill, he was doing yoga every day&amp;amp;#8212;it helped him breathe&amp;amp;#8212;and acupuncture, and taking herbs,&amp;amp;#8221; she says. However, during his treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, one of the world&amp;amp;#8217;s best cancer hospitals, that sort of integrated healing was just becoming available; it&amp;amp;#8217;s still not an option at many hospitals today. &amp;amp;#8220;The reality is, the way people are treated in hospitals is not working, period,&amp;amp;#8221; says Karan. &amp;amp;#8220;Your health care choice should not be either conventional or alternative. It should be integrated.&amp;amp;#8221; Just three months after Karan&amp;amp;#8217;s forum, the initiative was in full swing: Funds raised benefited Friends In Deed, a New York City crisis center for patients and caretakers, and The Bravewell Collaborative, a philanthropic group that will produce educational videos on integrative medicine. On a larger scale, Memorial Sloan-Kettering is initiating a pilot research project evaluating patients&amp;amp;#8217; responses to, interest in and use of integrative therapies. Says Woodson Merrell, M.D., chairman of the department of integrative medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center, which has also received funds from Urban Zen, &amp;amp;#8220;By January we will have an optimum healing environment on our cancer floor. There will be yoga therapy, an expanded range of integrated practices and navigators who will help patients through treatments and classes.&amp;amp;#8221; Karan&amp;amp;#8217;s schedule this fall was an intense reflection of her own highly integrated life: She held fashion shows for her spring 2008 collections in September, then traveled to Israel to work on a video about Israeli and Palestinian children in conjunction with the Spirituality for Kids organization, and returned to New York City for the second Urban Zen forum, this one on children&amp;amp;#8217;s education and well-being. (A third initiative will follow; its focus is the preservation of indigenous cultures.) &amp;amp;#8220;There&amp;amp;#8217;s no question that Donna&amp;amp;#8217;s work is an extension of who she is,&amp;amp;#8221; her friend Calvin Klein tells Glamour. &amp;amp;#8220;There is a certain serenity to the kind of clothes that she does. But ultimately, what she has always been inspired by are American women&amp;amp;#8212;they&amp;amp;#8217;re working, they&amp;amp;#8217;re raising families, they&amp;amp;#8217;re involved in every way. She appeals to what we like to think of as the modern woman. She is that woman.&amp;amp;#8221;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/inspired/women-of-the-year/2007/11/donna-karan>