As She Purges Her Archive, Norma Kamali Talks About the ’80s and Letting Go

As She Purges Her Archive, Norma Kamali Talks About the ’80s and Letting Go

Norma Kamali, who is celebrating 50 years as an independent designer, has a long list of firsts to her name: She was one of the first people to adapt activewear silhouettes and fabrics for fashion, and her ’70s sleeping bag coat (Rihanna has worn a newer Kamali version) is a progenitor of the ubiquitous puffer. Though she was often first, Kamali didn’t always profit from her innovations. “When I was younger, I would get so frustrated,” the designer tells Vogue, “because here were these big companies taking [my idea] and promoting it and making a lot of money on it and I’m thinking, ‘How am I going to pay the rent? How am I going to buy fabric?’” Nonetheless, as the saying goes, she persevered, and now Kamali is being celebrated and introduced to a new generation through a sale of her archives at What Goes Around Comes Around in SoHo.

Kamali only became aware of this cache of clothes about a year ago. “I actually thought I dismantled all of my archive when my business turned 50,” the designer says. And she’s not kidding. Having decided to get rid of everything, she sold her apartment and her possessions. “I just felt that my home, my things, were possessing me,” Kamali explains. “You know I saved things, I collected things—beautiful, beautiful things—and I looked around and I felt it was all so beautiful I couldn’t go beyond it.” Creating a blank page made room for Kamali to be creative.

The designer might have thought she had to out-Kondo Marie Kondo, but, in the process of having some old files discarded, racks of vintage pieces were discovered in an off-site accounting warehouse, of all places, and it’s these that the vintage reseller has on offer. These range from pieces made from industrial parachute fabric to dramatic draped looks. There are plenty of ’80s fashions, which are trending today. Kamali, who is regularly asked to reintroduce past styles into her current collection, recently made some jackets that have an ’80s vibe without being based on a vintage piece. A specific reference wouldn’t work, she explains, “because there’s a different eye now, there’s a different physical attitude.”

Though the designer says she’s surprised by ’80s revivalism, she does see parallels between the Greed Decade and now. “If you really think about it,” Kamali muses, “the ’80s was a time of women’s empowerment. Women were going in the workforce, having new attitudes about themselves, so [the ’80s feel] current in a really fresh way—almost like the way I described that jacket, it can’t be the same.” The future can be better, however; for Kamali it just doesn’t have to be bigger. “I don’t keep anything that I’m not using,” says the designer, who believes that objects can have different “lives” with different people. “There’s something really beautiful about that,” she says, “that I love a lot more than keeping things for myself.”