Karen Walker
KAREN WALKER IS A FASHION BRAND WITH A REPUTATION FOR ITS ORIGINAL, EFFORTLESS AND UNPRETENTIOUS STYLE. KAREN WALKER SHOWS EACH SEASON AS PART OF NEW YORK FASHION WEEK AND HAS PERMANENT SHOWROOMS IN LONDON, NEW YORK, TOKYO AND SYDNEY. SINCE 2002 KAREN WALKER HAS BEEN WORKING CLOSELY WITH STYLIST HEATHERMARY JACKSON ON ALL COLLECTIONS.
Karen Walker collections are high casual with one foot in tailoring and the other in street wear. The reoccurring theme is taking extremes and pushing them together — masculine and feminine, tailored and street, luxury and non luxury, dark and super-cute. Overall the label has a feeling of effort lessness and has been described by the U.K.‘s Independent newspaper as being “the kind of look that provides a means of appearing cool but not trying-too-hard, cute but not saccharine, altern ative but not self consciously so. The fact that these clothes appear to be so totally not ‘fashion’ is what makes them so now”.
The collections all have the outsider as their inspiration. Karen Walker’s work celeb rates the anti-‘it girl’ — characters like Ally Sheedy’s heavy fringed weirdo in ‘The Breakfast Club’, orphan Annie, the juvenile delinquent prom queen who climbs out the window after curfew to run with the bad crowd, Woody Allen’s persistently dissat isfied Annie Hall, an Amelia Earhart inspired adven turess who, after crash landing in the jungle, turns her back on civil isation in preference of tribal life or 1930s comic book super heroines leading double lives.
Phaidon have included them in their recent book ‘Sample’ which curates the 100 most influ ential designers to emerge in the last 6 years and Taschen have also included them in their recent book ‘Fashion Now 2′ which highlights the world’s most important 160 designers as selected by i-D magazine.
Past collaborative ventures include a pop up store in New York’s East Village with concept store The Den, a makeup project with Boots 17 in the U.K. and a shoe collab or ation with the U.K.‘s Pointer Shoes and Beau Coops.
Karen Walker is stocked in over 350 stores throughout the world in cities including New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Sydney and Tokyo. There are five Karen Walker flagship stores in New Zealand and one flag ship store in Taipei.
Celebrities such as Björk, Sienna Miller, Alexa Chung, Beth Ditto, Jennifer Lopez, Claire Danes, Cate Blanchett, Liv Tyler, M.I.A., Mandi Moore, Shirley Manson, Kate Hudson, Claudia Schiffer, Drew Barrymore and Madonna all favour her work with four pieces from the ‘Dust’ collection featuring on Kate Winslet in Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s legendary ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’.
