DKNY fashion

To mark DKNY's 20th anniversary, Donna Karan switched from her usual standing-room-only venue, the Stephan Weiss Studio, to Bryant Park, where bottles of sparkling wine (a custom DKNY and Chandon Twenty Year Cuvée awaited each showgoer). The proceedings began with a short film—not a navel-gazing look at clothes past, but more of a love letter to New York: jump-cutting footage of taxis, the Empire State Building, and subway signs, as well as, naturally, DKNY's gigantic building-side advertisement on Houston Street. Fittingly, the clothes that followed were more connected to streetwear than they have been in several seasons. Karan offered her take on the cool girl's uniform: an inevitably layered amalgam of boyfriend jackets, sporty parachute dresses in black pieced with neon, anoraks in nylon and denim, striped tees, and little skirts. Everything was topped off with tangles of subversive chains, skinny scarves, and high-heeled sneakers. But all the mix-and-match soon became fashion mayhem, with too many ideas on display. Pulled apart, though, there are certainly clothes that DKNY's ever-growing customer base will flock to. Karan has every reason to smile beamingly, as she did while receiving well-wishers afterward on the runway: Though she didn't invent the concept of fast fashion, she unflinchingly embraced it 20 years ago when it was still an untested infant of an idea.