Kamali: American Design Houses Did Not Truly Exist Until the 1970s
Norma Kamali · Norma Kamali: Norma Kamali · Feb 1, 2021 · at 7:59
Fashion designer Norma Kamali discusses the landscape of the fashion industry during the 1960s when she was graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology.
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“It wasn't until the seventies that being a designer in a design house was an American concept, right? So the jobs that you would get in the sixties would be manufacturers who knocked off European fashion. Even the department stores at the time would copy the collections and put them under their store brand. So if you look at vintage clothes, you'll see in a lot of the labels that the store that carried them, not necessarily the manufacturer or the designer because that was the way it was done. So the store was really the brand.”
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