Norma Kamali
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And there was a white noise. I couldn't even hear anything after that. It was like, what did she say? So I felt confident about my portfolio. And I went on a job interview for fashion illustration at a garment industry company. And It was a situation that was really one about objectifying a young girl coming for a job. And it was humiliating and embarrassing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I think, you know, this first big job interview is important. So you dress appropriately. You make sure that whatever the presentation is, it's really great. And I was very serious about it. And of course, I hear my mother's voice, get a job, get a job, get a job. You better get this job, Norma. And so I walk in and he has his feet up on his desk. He's eating a tuna sandwich.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And he tells me to put my portfolio down and come over to him and turn around for him. I remember I just couldn't hold it in. And I just started crying and running out of the office with my portfolio. Like tripping over myself, basically, and feeling just awful and coming home. And of course, my mother, did you get the job? And I was like, no, mom, I didn't.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I couldn't even hear what else she was saying. And I remember. The place you would look for a job was the New York Times. So they would have a big classified section. I actually think it should still exist, this, because it was a great way to find a job. And so I was looking at all the jobs and I thought, I really want to travel.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And at the time, working at the airlines like Pan Am and TWA and Northwest Orient, that was really a great job, not as a stewardess, but in the office. And I had zero office skills. I didn't know how to type. Actually, I still don't know how to type. And I got the job and I was shocked that I got it because it was very strict and a difficult interview.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So the next thing I know, I'm sitting in front of a Univac computer and I'm amazed at the information that the computer is presenting, and I thought to myself, whoa, this is really something. So I If you think that's a big leap from my childhood to this UNIVAC computer, and it's still the mid 60s, we're not talking about years ahead.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I spent four years at Northwest Airlines and traveled to London round trip for $29 for the four years. So it was as if I was living in London for that period of time. And that's when, obviously, that was the beginning of a revolution that, starting with baby boomers, changed everything. And fashion changed completely. And I loved it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I started buying clothes from Biba and Bus Stop and other designers, bringing them to New York for friends. And then I opened a store.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I landed in London and somebody at the airline said, they have boarding houses you could stay at for $6 a night in this place called Chelsea. And they gave me the name of a place, so I made a reservation. And Chelsea, at the time, was the very beginning of what would be an incredible area.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
It was an artist area that then had these amazing shops that opened and everybody in music and film and everybody would be in Chelsea. And so I found myself by fate in the right place at the right time. And when I walked down the King's Road to see what was going on, it was basically very gray.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
very tweed gray, very gray everything, except for this one store that was painted big outside colors, colors, colors, and this music was blaring out of the store. And I believe it was, all you need is love. And that's all I heard. I was like a moth to the light. I was like, oh my God, what's there? And I just was boom, right in there. And I became friends with the people in that place.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And they said, there's this great club we go to on Margaret Street. You have to come with us. I went to the club and it was a place where all of these musicians that were just becoming were there. And it was everybody you could think of that was a British musician or group on the rise. And it started this beautiful adventure for four years. And then the reason I stopped the airline job is because
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
my business started to really take off. And the airlines saw I was getting press. I had a picture in time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Yeah, it wasn't a conscious plan. I'm going to do this. What I would do was one of the things you learned at the airlines was was how to pack efficiently. And one of the things, one of the tricks is you take let's say a dress, a little Biba dress, and you fold it and then you roll it really tight and you put rubber bands around it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So you have like a little Frankfurter, but there's this dress in it. And so I would roll all of these things, put rubber bands around them, get a garment bag and just fill the garment bag, this thick, right? And fill it up and then walk through, walk through customs with my garment bag. And then I would bring them home and open them up, steam them out. And friends were all asking me for things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And then finally, I thought, I think I should see if I can find them. a place to sell these things because I know now how to get more of them. I have a relationship with all of these people in London. They're my friends and they were excited that I was doing this too. And so I found a store, $285 and I was like, Thank you very much.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
It's really interesting. It's a great question because I actually was just speaking with Twyla Tharp and we were talking about our childhoods. And I remember growing up in Manhattan in a neighborhood with a lot of kids, and we would always be out on the street playing and doing stuff together. And when we didn't have something to do, I felt that I had to come up with something.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Of course, it was a little basement store that you had to go down into. But I was in a group of buildings that were all painted lots of colors now because now we were more into this period where the painted colors on everything not was just in that one store in London, but now it was everywhere. And it was very successful. It did really well. I decorated it with furniture from the Salvation Army.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I found snakeskin wallpaper, fabulous, at the Salvation Army. And I painted a pattern on the floor. I remember painting it while I was wearing high heels, of course. And I didn't have a dressing room. The way I had a dressing room is if the door was open, we had a dressing room because it made a spot behind it. If it was closed, we didn't.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
But nobody cared about taking their clothes off at that point anyway. It wasn't a time for being a prude or shy. So it did really well. And... Then I started making some things because I had ideas that I didn't see anywhere that I thought would be really good. And those things started to get press.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Coincidentally, there were some editors that happened to live on 53rd Street who would come down into my little basement hall and just really give me lots of press. I mean, I had two full pages, one in Vogue and one in Harper's Bazaar in the first six months that I was in business. I mean, which is unheard of. And so there was a picture of me and Eddie in Time Magazine wearing snakeskin.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And this buzzer went off at the airline. This is a big room where everybody's sitting with things on. And if you did something wrong on a call, a buzzer and a red light would go on and you'd have to go up to the front. And so all of a sudden this buzzer and a red light is going and they call out my name. I thought, I'm doing a good job. What's the problem here?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And so they had the magazine and they called me into this room and they said, what is this? And I said, oh, oh, that. And they said, We can't have this. You can't be doing this. You have to make a choice. And I said, I understand and I fully respect your wishes, but I think I'm fully engaged in this and it would be hard for me to give it up. And so I had to leave.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Of course, it was a different time. But it was $80 a week. But the benefit was the travel. But at this point, I had already hired some people to help me make the clothes. We had already progressed to having a sample room. And so the truth is, it was time. It really was time. And I was not wanting to give up the travel, to be honest. But I was working till 2 and 3 in the morning to do both jobs.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So it was definitely a lot of hours. It was a gift. It was a lot of hours. But I am forever grateful to the experience, the UNIVAC computer, the lessons I learned about service. The teaching and the training at airlines even today is extraordinary. And then it was beyond extraordinary. I learned a lot about how to run an office, which I never would have known.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I learned so much from that experience. And most people would say, well, if you're an artist, that's not what I'm going to do. I'm not going to sit in an office. That four years was a school. That was another college for me of learning about business, learning about technology, and learning about travel. Not only did I go to London, but I would go to Paris. There was a Trident plane.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
The Tridents used to go up and then down. And you could go from London to Paris in a short time. So I would shop in Paris as well. And then I met people there and I would go to clubs in Paris and then go back to London and go back home. And then I traveled. I went to Iran. I went to Greece. I went all over Europe traveling.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So it really was a very fruitful four years and very well worth the time and my age and the experience.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So I would make up these games. and make up stuff for everybody to do. And they would ask me, what's next? And I would make up more. And she was saying the same thing, that she would organize these things. And she didn't know why, but she was just organizing them. And I think that for anybody in your audience who is one of these people,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So, Eddie Kamali, actually, Mohamed Hossein Kamali is Iranian, and his spoken name was Mansour. He was gorgeous. He was six feet one, a great dancer, a very sweet dancer. human being who grew up in boarding schools. He was born to a family that was very close to the Shah. He was sent to boarding school at 11 years of age, and on his own, basically, away from his family.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
He had three brothers and a sister. He was the youngest. He went to boarding school in England, and then he came to the U.S. and was going to Columbia. And He was very Western because he spent more time outside of Iran than he actually did in Iran. I love to dance, which is why I keep mentioning clubs, because at that point in my life, no matter what was going on, I was going out dancing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
That was it. And I might add, I'd never taken, I still have not taken a drug. I don't drink alcohol. And I would just dance and drink water and be happier than anybody. So there was a friend of mine was the first person
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
DJ to ever play records in a club and it was a small club and he invited me he said I'm gonna be playing records at this club and there's dancing and I said records you know like records really you're gonna do that and he said yes it's gonna be great so of course I went and And there was dance contests were very popular then. So they were having a dance contest.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And he said to me, I know you can win this dance contest. And I have a guy that you will dance with. And the two of you will win the dance contest. I said, cool. How much? He said, $500. I said, okay, let's do it. So he introduced me to Eddie, which is the name everybody used for dance. Eddie Kamali. And we never danced together.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And we just started dancing and then we were like, okay, we got this. And we won. So this was now a reason for us to be together. And of course, get married. And he was a student and trying to get through college. And of course, there was a lot of the disruption now is starting in Iran. And there are these two factions of Iranian students, some pro-Shah, some anti-Shah.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So there was a lot of turmoil going on. But there was also a lot of drugs and a lot of partying and all of that. And what happened was our paths started going in different directions. And the more successful the business was, the less I wanted to go out and dance, because I was sewing till 3 in the morning. And I much preferred to do that than to dance.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
who as a child, and we recognize that it's realizing that it is a childhood action that really identifies the core principle of who a human's going to be or what they're going to do. So I'm still... coming up with games for everybody to play, and she's coming up with things for her dancers to do.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I mean, I still love to dance, but you end up with different priorities. And he still wanted to dance and continued to do so. And we just really had different priorities. And I believe strongly that my determination and the recognition, nobody knew me because he was in the store and I was always in the sample room. Nobody knew what I looked like. They didn't know anything about me, really.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So I think what happened was he started to be more social and I started to become more and more involved in designing and learning how to make patterns, learning how to run a company. And I was just so thrilled by the fact that I could see who I was supposed to be and what that meant.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I'd say, oh my God, Eddie. How could you do that? And he'd say, because it's worth $2,000. And of course, he'd take the skirt into the store and sell it in about 20 minutes. And he was a very big advocate for what I was doing until I think he felt my independence. might be a problem for him. And so he controlled the money, which is what men did at the time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Men controlled the money, men ran businesses, women didn't do that, right? And so I believed that too. And then finally, I think because he'd been dating the sales girl and I'd fired her several times and he rehired her several times. And when she came in to tell me that she was going to start designing and she had some ideas of what she wanted to design, I said, oh, okay.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I packed up my things and I walked out and that was it. And so she said, Just like the guy with the tuna fish sandwich is an important person in my success because both of them forced me to do something I never thought I would be able to do, no matter how difficult it was becoming with Eddie, no matter how I knew he was doing all of these things. I knew he was taking drugs.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I knew he was spending all the money. the fabric on these things. I couldn't imagine leaving my things. I had $98 to my name. How could you leave with $98? And at that point, we'd separated. I had an apartment. I had a mattress. I didn't even have curtains. I didn't have anything, but I had this feeling that... something good was going to happen. And I had no reason to believe that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I had zero reason. And nobody knew me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Oh, half of the business. Are you kidding? He kept changing. First of all. I never had half of the business. He always had more of it because he was the man. I can't explain to you, but that was the way it was. And I accepted it because that's the way it was. It was the way women were trained to believe, and I was trained to believe that he could probably run the business better than I could.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I had no idea why because I saw my mother handle money very well, but... It was also a partnership, so I accepted the role I had. And I have to say, that girl is so responsible for my freedom as a person, my awareness of my skills, skills I never thought I had. And I think... There was a point later on where she tried to get in touch with me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And we were really laughing about it, but I think that's the best telltale sign as to what your path is going to be, even more than if you know what you're going to be doing. But there's a character trait that obviously is defined very early.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
She had gone through AA, or I wasn't sure it was drugs or alcohol. And I think there's one of the steps is to ask for forgiveness. And she wanted to do that. And I told her she didn't have to, that she was an important factor in my success. And I would always be grateful for the role she paid, even though she misunderstood what I was talking about.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So one of the things that is really important, I think, for people to know is the relationship was very abusive. I mean, he never touched me, but it was verbally abusive. It was trying to make me fearful. And that abuse, I would never talk about. My mother wasn't speaking to me because I got married so young. She didn't speak to me for a long time. She was very upset with me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I didn't have anybody to confide in. And so I had to live with this fear secret about my life. And so I didn't have a confidant. I didn't have somebody to say, you shouldn't be doing this or try something else. So at that point, again, another one of these universe things, there was an editor who had been trying to make an appointment with me, a fashion editor, to talk to me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
She heard that I was the designer. And nobody had ever wanted to speak with me. They spoke with Eddie. We had a date set where we were gonna have lunch. And it was the day after I left the company And my face was swollen from crying. And I thought, I don't know how to get in touch with this woman. I didn't have her telephone number. It was at work.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And so I just met her at the restaurant, looking like I'd just gotten beaten up. And it was a mess. And she said, what happened to you? And I just told her everything. And I felt so vulnerable. And I'd never, ever tell anybody anything. I mean, it was just not what you did. And she said, I'm going to help you. And so she started to help me find help. people to help me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And from that, I said, lesson learned is you have to talk to people in order for people to help you. And so I started to reach out and I was amazed at how many people wanted to help me and they did. And so I borrowed money and I paid everybody back. even when we didn't make that much money, I opened a store and we didn't make that much money. I would give them a little bit.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I remember envelopes, money, sending people letters. Thank you very much. Each week sending something. If I couldn't send something for the week, I would send a note saying, I apologize. And I'm embarrassed that I can't send you something this week, but I would send the note. And I, Remember when I paid everyone, that moment was extraordinary. It was wow.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I'm really free and I'm actually making money and I can buy fabric and I can make these decisions myself. How long did that take Norma? It actually didn't take that long because I got a tremendous amount of publicity going out on my own. And I used, if I was going to use the name Norma Kamali, I had to change it in some way. So I used OMO Norma Kamali on my own, Norma Kamali.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And there were so many articles. And it was a time when women were seeking this freedom, this independence. And the letters I received from women across the country saying, what you've done inspired me. I'm going to do it too. I can do that. And I realized it was that moment in time where my story was very similar. And it was around the same time Cher and Sonny broke up.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And Cher was a customer of mine. And she... I have a telegram. I still have a telegram from her congratulating me for leaving Eddie. And it was her experience, too, at that time. So... I think wherever women saw that this could happen, that you could actually do something without a man being in control of it, was very inspiring for women.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
One of the things is that I think about is when my parents were divorced, it was very rare that this happened. And I grew up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood, and you might have gathered that I'm not Irish and that we were a little different, but the church was very involved in the neighborhood. So it was a big disgrace and...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
It actually started the first week we were in business in the basement. I have no real idea why. It was famous men and women. And at the time, they didn't have stylists shopping for them. Everybody shopped for themselves. And so I got to meet a lot of these people who... were looking to create their own style. Don't forget, the 70s, nobody was styling Jimi Hendrix.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Nobody was styling Cher, other than her costumes for her show. She was styling herself. Bianca Jagger, styling herself. Everybody was. And I had these great customers. I mean, I remember...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
making every color feather jacket you could imagine for Sly from Sly and the Family Stone, if anybody remembers who he is, and making clothes for all of these great people who were famous and doing great things. And I've never given free clothes to anybody to wear my clothes. And so if people want them, they're obviously buying them and paying for them.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So I have no real understanding of why that is and why it still continues. But I'm very complimented by it. But I'm also complimented by seeing social media, by the way, offers a great... opportunity for designers. And for me, we have a hashtag, NKMyWay, and my customers around the world are the coolest women who style themselves in the most amazing ways.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
They take amazing photographs that they are in countries that you would never expect. or they're traveling to countries, and we are in awe of what we see. And that is the biggest compliment of all. And so I love that celebrities of the time, of the moment, are wearing my clothes. And it keeps going generationally. Sabrina Carpenter is wearing my clothes. It's an interesting phenomena, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Raquel Welch. I did every outfit she ever wore to the Oscars or any of those. Working with her one-on-one... With this body that's the most spectacular body, this gorgeous human being who focused on her body, her face, herself. And so what was designed, we worked together on them. So if you have somebody like that and then people today, it's an amazing experience.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
phenomena to me that that happens but i have nothing to do with it i'm not giving clothes away i'm not paying people to come to support me it's really a beautiful thank you that i appreciate more than anything
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
How did you learn? Well, don't forget the airlines I was selling for four years. I was selling tours to the Orient, round-the-world trips, where I would learn if you liked oranges, I would find out everything you liked. So every time you were at a new hotel room, there would be oranges there. So I learned from the airlines.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I don't know if it's Lebanese people are born with the selling gene, but I'm Lebanese. And I think we just do it because that's somewhere it's streaming in our blood.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Negotiate. Right. But also, the idea of selling wholesale is very different from retail. So I remember... We had the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, and it was Christie Brinkley on the cover, and Francesco Scavullo took the picture. And Cosmo was the magazine du jour for this girl, this feminine kind of power that was happening. Helen Gurley Brown was writing all these provocative stories
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
My mother really showed great resolve and determination to be a single mom when nobody else was a single mom in the neighborhood or that we knew of. And she just got a job. a simple job in a factory. She had to support us. And I saw this incredible strength to do everything she could for the family, for my brother and myself. And I remember I was around 11. She said to me, Norma,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
articles about masturbation and everything else. And the cover was the cover to get more than Vogue, more than anything. And here I have the cover of Cosmo on Christie Brinkley, who nobody knew. And this gorgeous girl shows up out of nowhere wearing one of my swimsuits. And at the time, swimwear was, was more of a two-piece conversation from the waist down.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Some suits were lower rise, but mostly more covered and many prints, not so much solid suits. And I made this bikini that had two triangles, a small bottom with strings that would wrap around your body. And it just pushed me into the wholesale world. And in order to produce the amount of swimsuits we needed to produce, it was bigger in numbers. So we decided to try to sell them wholesale.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Being afraid is real, but trying to mitigate the seriousness of what's frightening you is key.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So we got a model. And we invited buyers up. And I remember when Bloomingdale's came up, I had the swimsuit, and nobody had seen swimsuits like this before. And I had a group of swimsuits, and I was showing some of the swimsuits over jeans and
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And they came up, they sat down, they didn't take off their coats, and they're looking at this model that I have, modeling the suits, and they just get up and walk out. And I thought, oh, this wholesale thing is really different. They don't say goodbye. They don't take their coats off. I just thought this was the way it was done.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I didn't realize that they were horrified by what they saw, and they just walked out. I remember years later, I was in a license negotiation and the buyer, our buyer from that group was at the meeting and it was a big table of people. And she was part of the team that was trying to get me to sign a license with this company. And I'm looking at her and she said, oh, hi, do you remember me?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I said, Yeah, I do. And I thought, oh, I can't resist this. I cannot resist this, but I have to tell the story. So I said, oh my God, I do remember. And I told the story and she was turning every color purple. And I said, and I'm fine with that. And I probably will sign this license, but I'm sorry. I had to give back a little, I had to give back a little love, but I was so naive.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I had no idea. I didn't even realize that that was, I just thought, oh, that must be the way it is. I just didn't know.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Let's just say I spent many nights sleeping. crying myself to sleep, thinking I'm going to have to close tomorrow because I'm not going to be able to pay the rent, or I'm going to have to find something else to do, or it's over. And now the problems are so much bigger and more of a drama than they were then, and they still keep me up and they still keep me on my toes.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
But when you're crying yourself to sleep, one of the things I learned and my partner thinks is one of my best assets is no matter how shitty it is when I go to sleep, I don't know why this is, but I wake up every morning in a good mood, like, today I'm gonna fix it. That was shitty yesterday, I'm fixing it today. And I think you can actually do that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And it's worked for me enough that I still really feel This is another day. This is another chance to fix it or do something better. So being afraid is real, but also trying to mitigate the seriousness of what's frightening you is more important. And so survival skills are key, really key.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I think the way you grow is to do something you never did before. So to the dismay of everybody that works here, I'm constantly... doing something nobody's done before. And I think after a few of those, they kind of get used to it and go along for the ride and really learn more about themselves too. That doing new things really expands your brain. There's real data to show that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I think it also... gives you a sense of your own power and your own abilities. And I think that that's really the key. If you stay curious, for me, it's reinvention or innovation, but everybody has a different desire and goal. But doing something new as often as possible is, I think, the secret to really seeing what your potential is.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
There are so many things I want to do and I'm trying to do. at the same time, which is tricky. I'm enamored with AI, truly enamored. I think it's the future. It's everything in the future. The more I learn about it, the more I realize I want to try to tell everybody I know, just try to get into this now because you'll be very alone if you don't and try to adapt quickly to what it can offer.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I want you to keep in mind, you have to be your own person. You have to learn how to support yourself. So the man you marry has to be the man you love, not the man that you want to take care of you. And I did not understand what she was talking about. I was like, okay, mom. Okay. It sounds good. And I thought, I don't know what she's talking about here, but then, oh, okay. I get it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Being afraid of it is real, but if you're afraid of it and you don't know about it, then you really have fears. Besides AI, I have a lot of interest in education and in other things that I do that maybe are not in the fashion industry, not in the fashion world. But I think the luxury of living a long, healthy life is something I really focus on so that Now and tomorrow.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Now, right now, I think is the most exciting time in my life. Not my personal life, but in what's going on in the world, the possibilities. I think disruption is a mandate. Disruption in the fashion industry will make it better. Disruption in every part of our lives will make it better because what exists has reached the end of the road and we need to change things. So it's a very exciting time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So I'd like to live a long life so I can experience all of this excitement and be a part of it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
You know, I'm going to refer back to Twyla again, because we both agreed that our failures were so important in our development, and the failures that involved humiliation even more so. And so many people want to be perfect and don't want to make a mistake and don't want to look human or whatever, but those mistakes...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
while they're embarrassing and humiliating, if you take action immediately to course correct or to find another route or a solution or maybe just a U-turn and go somewhere else, that's really the key. And also...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
really taking a look at when something horrible is happening in your life, whether it's a person, situation, and think, the universe is here, so I don't continue down this road, that I try something else, or I make an adjustment in myself, or I take a look at myself in the mirror and understand what's happening. Those are really important. They're more important than the good things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
The good things only mean one thing. Good, then not so good happens, right? You can't stay on a plateau of good forever. So every time something great happens here, I say, don't get excited because this is when I get nervous. When everything is too good... it's going to get bad or it's going to be not so good.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So you have to then figure out a way not to make it a nosedive, but to kind of just a little valley till you get to somewhere else you're supposed to be. So it's tricky to deal with these embarrassments and humiliations, but you can't succeed. You can't do anything without having them as part of your life experience.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Well, thank you very much. This was great. I think this is a fantastic service you're doing for people. It was a good idea. I read your bio. You have a good history yourself, and that's great that you're using it to help other people. That's really commendable. Thank you. Thank you, Norma.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And it made an impression on me. And I really appreciate that she was so honest with me about the importance of being able to support myself and be independent at the same time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
It was the role that... You raise a family. And now, when I was 11, it was 1956. So put us in context of that time. Nobody had TVs, very few people, and not everybody had telephones. I mean, it's an incredible thing to think of. And my mother is talking to me about being an independent woman. So... Really, we are talking about somebody who is very unique.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And like I said, I didn't know what she was talking about until later on where I could appreciate.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I think fear and anxiety is a modern phenomena. I think people can be afraid of the dark and of ghosts and of things they don't know in my world in growing up. But the word anxiety... You don't even use that word in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. You're like, what the hell is wrong with you? These are words that are very self-indulgent if you come from the childhood I came from.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
You would just think, what is wrong with you? Get over it. And you got over it. And most people got over it. And if you didn't, nobody would attribute it to all of the things we think about now. And I'm wondering if maybe some of that isn't a bad idea because you learn survival skills. And you learn things about yourself when you have to just deal with it. Just deal with it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Nobody would say, and nobody would complain about it. If you complained, you were like, shut up.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So I think the fears, of course, my mother probably, as an adult, had more concerns because could she afford to support two children and have what we needed, not anything more, but just to make sure we had what we needed. We also had a great neighborhood where everybody took care of everyone else. The community idea was very important.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
In an Irish neighborhood, there's usually five to ten kids per family. So there was such a camaraderie and community and friendship. one big family, really. We went to camp together. We did everything together. And if my mother wasn't home, somebody else's mother would make sure we had something to eat when we came home from school. My mother would do the same for somebody else's kids.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I got married so young. The relationship was very abusive. I mean, he never touched me, but it was verbally abusive. He'd been dating the sales girl, and I'd fired her several times, and he rehired her several times. And when she came in to tell me that she was going to start designing, I said, oh, okay. And I packed up my things, and I walked out. I had $98 to my name.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
So New York was an extraordinary place to grow up on the streets, learning about life. And really, I have to say, even though I didn't have a lavish sort of childhood where you had everything you could imagine. We had very little, but we had such a close, bonded family of a community that you can't
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Imagine the talk about the strength in that and that you always felt protected by the numbers of people that were looking out for you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I think I like alone time. I like quiet time. And what I did was, to have that quiet time, I would always have a pencil and paper, and I'd always draw. And I would draw anything. And I would draw dresses. And then I would start to draw things. And I remember one of the first things I drew was this vintage typewriter my mother had. And it was beautiful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And it was all black and it had these raised lines. letters, and I drew every detail of the typewriter. And it took me some time, and I wanted it to be exact, but it had the beauty of a freehand drawing of something very static. And I remember finishing it and thinking, oh, I want to draw something else. What else? And I would look around. What else can I draw?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I think I drew everything in the apartment that we lived in, literally everything. And if my brother would sit still for a second, I would draw him and say, stop doing that. And I would still keep drawing him. But I found a lot of comfort in drawing because it was always a surprise to see what would happen when I draw something else.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I did draw a lot of dresses, but I think it had nothing to do with wanting to be a designer. But in the 50s, the clothes of the 50s, you know, as we all know, of these big petticoated skirts and pencil skirts with sweaters. And all the girls that were older that would dress up for their dates or to go to dances that were wearing these clothes were so beautiful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
Irish girls are spectacularly beautiful. And I would draw them and look at their outfits and think, This is so great. The skirt is so full. And I would draw what they were wearing and think, oh, I can't wait until I can go on a date and wear petticoats. And I would wear petticoats to school. And at the time, white bucks were very popular.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And in order to keep white bucks clean, you'd always have this big powder thing to put on the white bucks. So I would go into my classroom. I remember with this big petticoat skirt that was wider than the room between the desks. And I'd walk through and the skirts wouldn't fit through. And then I'd have, you'd see white footprints because I put so much powder on my box that I'd turn around.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I'm like, oh, my God, my footprints are all over it. But that's when I realized that dressing up could be so much fun and wear petticoats and ponytails and sweaters backwards and just be cool. So that was sort of the beginning. So you loved fashion to some extent. I didn't realize that it was fashion. We didn't know about fashion. It wasn't a conversation.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
It was, what are the clothes of the time? Don't forget it's the 50s. And the fashion of the 50s was very high elegance or elegance. Paris-type fashion, which we never knew about in our neighborhood, or what movie stars were wearing. And so what the girls in the neighborhood mostly wore was what movie stars were wearing. And that wasn't Paris fashion.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
It was sort of like popular kind of look of the day.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I wanted to be a painter. And my mother was very clear about the fact that she wouldn't be able to put me through college. So if I wanted to go, I had to get a scholarship. And that I better think of something other than painting. I better think of something that you can actually get a job. So I got a scholarship to FIT.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
And I had some grants that I won for some of my paintings that gave me money for art supplies. So I was able to go to FIT and study fashion illustration. So here I was drawing dresses, which was my comfort zone. And of course, I could afford it because of the scholarships. And then that was where I was. But I didn't really dream to be a fashion illustrator. That wasn't in my mind.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Styling Beyoncé, Cher, and J.Lo: Norma Kamali’s Rise from Losing Her Company to Dressing Icons
I actually had a really good portfolio and I had a lot of support from one of the instructors there who, Anna Ishikawa, who was just unbelievable. She was very strict. She would make everybody cry. But if you got a compliment from her, I remember she complimented my portfolio. She never complimented anybody. She complimented my portfolio. that I was taking for my job interviews.