Donna Karan's creative flow - Telegraph Designer Donna Karan, famed the world over for her fluid, easy-to-wear glamour, talks to Lisa Armstrong about balancig her life between commerce and philanthropy. Of all the many ironies in her life, perhaps the most savoury is that Donna Karan - the doyenne of the drapy dress, jacket and tunic, beloved by millions for her forgiving, pragmatic yet glamorous clothes, richer by scores of millions of dollars because of them - failed draping at Parsons, New York's world-renowned art and design school. If you believe in destiny - and Karan does, along with Buddhism, yoga, spirulina and the Prince of Wales, whom she adores for his early adoption of the green movement - this was all part of 'someone's plan'. The fail left her disinclined to finish the course, deciding instead to stay with her summer job at Anne Klein, one of those big American chains that have no British equivalent, turning out luxury sportswear for real 35-plus women. Klein hadn't initially been that impressed with Karan, either. She told me my hips were a little too big. I thought, what's that got to do with designing? Then she asked me to walk. It turns out Klein had mistaken the 18-year-old Karan for a model. Easily done. She had turned up in a pinstripe suit and white fedora. The girl always had style. At 64, sitting opposite me in a fashionable London hotel wearing her trademark skinny black leggings and favourite flat boots with an equally treasured off-the-shoulder black tunic, it's still abundantly evident. The signature shiny walnut-coloured hair and supple tawny skin (she does not believe in SPF) are holding up well against shards of wintry sunlight. Is it the juicing? 'That and the facelift,' she deadpans, waggling a large take-away coffee. Even wheatgrass devotees occasionally fall off the wagon. WATCH: Anjelica Huston gets behind the camera for Donna Karan film Karan looks pretty fabulous, all glowy and healthy. She had the facelift a few years ago (she can't remember when exactly). I imagine most of us would do the same if we could guarantee it would look as natural as hers. 'Wouldn't you like to look like that at her age?' Yasmin Le Bon remarked rhetorically when I asked her what she liked about Karan's clothes (her answer, incidentally, was 'their ability to make you feel you're wearing pyjamas when you're in a fishtail evening gown'). Looks from the spring/summer 2013 Donna Karan show. Photos: Getty Karan is in London for some personal appearances at Harvey Nichols and at her own stores in Mayfair. The night before our interview she seduced the Harvey Nicks crowd with a classic Karan performance that combined practical advice ('Not only does she do sleeves,' Paula Reed, the fashion director at Harvey Nichols, sighed fondly, 'she does sleeves that aren't Old Lady') with musings on life, global warming, Haiti (she has remained a fund-raiser for this cause long after other celebrities have moved on) and her late husband, the sculptor Stephan Weiss, who died of cancer 12 years ago. It was while nursing Weiss that she became involved in healthcare reform. 'I realised what was missing in palliative care,' she says. She launched the Urban Zen Foundation, which, in typical Donna Karan fashion, combines an awareness- and fund-raising powerhouse with a stylish, cosseting space for cancer patients to hang out, shops selling chichi urban leisure clothes and Haitian crafts with Karan's instinctual pic'n'mix Eastern philosophy. She calls herself a Bu-Ju, practising Buddhism but culturally Jewish. It could all be a queasy mix but somehow it's welded together by Karan's charisma. It is also highly effective. Last year she received the Clinton Global Citizen Award - an arresting piece of sculpture that, naturally, she had also designed while, wouldn't you know, in Haiti. READ: Donna Karan courts controversy with new campaign shot in Haiti She is very fond of Bill Clinton, who presented her with the award, and whose first inauguration suit she designed. She also sorted out, many times, the wardrobe crises of Hillary Clinton - as she has for millions of other women. It was Karan, essentially, who made black seem chic and sexy after the first wave of internationalist Japanese designers had made it look austerely avant-garde. It was Karan, too, who popularised the notion of a 'capsule wardrobe', a system of dressing consisting of seven items, including the famous 'body'. So catchy were the names of her inventions - from the 'cozy' (a cardigan that can be worn a dozen ways) to the 'body' (a leotard-cum-silk-shirt that guaranteed you would never inadvertently flash the waistband of your knickers in the boardroom) - that it's easy to overlook what a brilliant designer she is. Before her, dressing for a high-powered career was a stark, boxy business of uninspiring suits and rules unchanged since the 1950s. Karan made it glamorous, sensuous and fun. By the early 1990s magazines were filled with models wearing slit Karan (or Karan-esque - it became generic) skirts and soft, tailored jackets, running for taxis, with the Financial Times in their bags, or photogenic babies clasped against their immaculate, satin-backed crepe suits - or, in one memorable campaign, taking the presidential oath. This was before the slow-cooking, slow-living movements somehow turned working mothers and stay-at-home mothers against one another. In those early days, the female work ethic looked exhilarating, liberating, and those Donna Karan clothes confirmed it was aspirational, too. Looks from the autumn/winter 1985 Donna Karan show. Photos: Getty. Karan still works like a fiend. Jokes about the facelift aside, it's what she attributes her youthful zestiness to. 'It's not really work, it's life,' she says. But here's a second irony. The poster girl for working mothers, who founded a fashion empire that netted her $58 million when it floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 1996, then sold to LVMH in a deal that Forbes magazine estimated at $650 million, never wanted a high-powered job. She certainly didn't want to be a working mother. 'My own mother had done that, and my big sister, Gail, was eight years older than I was,' she says. So by the time Gail moved out and married, I was lonely and very insecure, I can tell you. She was born Donna Faske in 1948 in Long Island, on what she calls 'the wrong side of the tracks'. Actually, she grew up in affluent Woodmere, dubbed the Jewish Greenwich. Her mother, Helen, known as Queenie, was an in-house model who, according to her daughter, looked like Joan Crawford. When Karan was three, her father, Gabby Faske, a menswear tailor, died in a car crash. Queenie went back to work, although Gail later said their mother worked through choice rather than necessity, adding that Queenie never showed much interest in her daughter's designing ambitions until Donna became successful. READ: Christopher Bailey: 'Donna Karan got naked with me' If it was a spiky relationship (Queenie gave away an attic-full of clothes, including many her daughter had designed for her), it also worked as a call to action. Initially Donna had wanted to be a dancer. Not just any dancer but one who moved like Martha Graham (she would later recreate those fluid moves in her black jersey dresses) and sing like Barbra Streisand (whom she would later dress and befriend). But at 14 she fibbed about her age and worked in a boutique, where she discovered and honed her formidable talent for selling clothes. Next up was Parsons, then the Anne Klein job when she was 20... It was all going swimmingly until, nine months after offering Karan a job and convincing her not to complete her course at Parsons, Anne Klein fired her. 'Actually Anne didn't fire me. The assistant did. The assistant of the assistant... I guess I was a little young for the role. It was too intense. I was working till two every morning. Karan was mortified. ('Are you kidding? I dropped school for her.') She was also married - to Mark Karan, a menswear retailer whom she had met on a Long Island beach when she was 16 - and in love with Stephan Weiss. 'I was already engaged to Mark when I met Stephan, who was 10 years older than me, with two children,' she says. 'Artist, sculptor, kind of wild man - it was crush at first sight, but I'd already said I would marry Mark. I had to. I was afraid of living alone. Karan called Anne Klein and begged to be taken back. By the time she was 24 she was the formidable Klein's right hand. She taught me to do sportswear - to dress women. But Klein was ill - more than anyone knew - and in 1974 died of breast cancer, leaving Karan at the helm, aged 24 and pregnant with Gabby, who was born that same week. That's how the woman who started designing only because she 'wanted a wardrobe of clothes for herself' became a role model for millions of working mothers. And boy, did I feel guilty, because not so many mothers worked then. It wasn't easy. And I did not want to be like my mother... I still feel guilty. All I wanted was a conventional nuclear family. That never quite happened. By the time she was 25 her mother and stepfather, Harold Flaxman, who also worked in the garment industry, had both died. And don't forget she was in love with a man who wasn't her husband. 'It was,' Karan remarks with admirable understatement, 'very complicated. I went through so much stuff when I was so young. I think that's why I'm so Zen now.' Sofia Vergara at the SAG Awards in January, and Ashley Greene at the premiere of The Apparition, in Los Angeles last August, both in Donna Karan Atelier. Thank the Bu-Ju Lord for Zen. And yoga. She began practising when she was 18, and wishes all children could learn it. It made her flexible - physically and mentally. And really it was the inspiration behind my business - especially the Urban Zen collections, which I truly designed to take you from your morning yoga class to the office and on to dinner. It's quite a business. For although the main line Donna Karan was always eye-wateringly expensive ('I'm crazy about good fabrics,' she says with a shrug), almost from the start there was also the Donna Karan hosiery collection - an early exponent of bum-lift, thigh compression and the slimming properties of matt black. Sales rapidly hit the stratosphere. 'I always thought what you wore underneath was as important as what you wear on top,' she says. Not one of those stick women, Karan instinctively understood female hang-ups: empathy seemed to be stitched into every elongating jacket and tummy-control top. Sometimes, when the diet's gone well and yoga and Pilates, which she also now practises, have all come together, people tell her she looks skinny. 'And I say, trust me, it's the pants.' But as she says, an empire was never really the plan. Originally she wanted to do a little collection of her own under the Anne Klein marque. 'But the owners, who were by then a Japanese group, said, "Donna, you couldn't do anything small if you tried."' Then they fired her. Again. On the plus side, they backed her own label, testament, perhaps, to her evangelical sales patter - and talent. This was 1985. Things were looking up. She and Mark had split up, and she was now with her wild, pony-tailed sculptor ('even though he lived in a hovel and talked about quantum physics and all this stuff I couldn't understand'). The funny thing is, she says, that everyone thought Weiss was her bohemian indulgence, but he was the one who strategised the business. He also designed the perfume bottles. 'Business, numbers, negotiations, all that stuff I wouldn't go near. And he shared my vision... he was brilliant,' she says. Weiss helped her launch menswear and DKNY, her hugely successful bridge line. Things moved so fast that inevitably they wobbled and shares dived. By this point Weiss was seriously ill. It was he who urged her to sign the LVMH deal. 'He said he couldn't leave me in a mess.' Karan with Stephan Weiss and her daughter Gabby, in New York, 1996. Photo: Getty. Karan still talks about him all the time, and last year produced a book dedicated to him entitled Stephan Weiss: Connecting the Dots , 'because that's what he did - from science to sculpture to jewellery. He was brilliant. Her daughter, Gabby, and her two stepchildren from Weiss have provided her with seven grandchildren. 'I tell them if one of you makes me a great-grandmother any time soon we're not talking,' she says. The 'children', now aged from 39 to late 50s, would like to see her with another man, she says. She thinks Stephan would, too. But it would be hard to find one who could keep up. Even breaking both knees in a skiing accident didn't slow her down. 'I've been down that runway in a wheelchair more times than I care to think,' she says. In the absence of a husband there are her causes and her visions. The latter come to her in such complete form, she says, that 'not acting on them is not an option.' One of the earliest visions, in 1990, was 7th on Sale, an annual designer sale that she initiated with American Vogue to raise money for Aids research in the days when it was still quite taboo. Sticking with causes long after the spotlight on them has dimmed is her stock-in-trade. She still travels back and forth to Haiti, supervising the artefacts she sells in her stores, 'because truth to tell, in the beginning, the stuff they were making was never going to sell. But they have such resilience and such dignity there. It's where all the causes I espouse at Urban Zen come together.' Karan with Oprah Winfrey (centre) and Magalie Dresse of the workshop Caribbean Craft in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, December 2011. It is when you discover that she has raised tens of millions over the years that you realise her pat line about being where 'philanthropy and commerce meet' may not be so pat after all. I wonder, given her many trips to the White House (she first went there when Reagan was in charge), whether she wasn't tempted to go into politics - the New York Times once described her as Ed Koch in a black stretchy dress. But she's not remotely tempted. 'The minute you're voted in you're compromised. You can get much more achieved outside politics,' she says. As for that missing soul mate, I reckon the position is already filled and has been ever since Karan met Patti Cohen at a tennis match on Long Island when they were both in their 20s. The two have been inseparable - as friends, sounding-boards and business allies - ever since. These days Cohen is Karan's publicist, but also a Titian-tressed doppelganger who often answers for Karan. 'I know what she's going to say before she says it,' Cohen says. When I listen back to the interview, I can hear them answering in stereo, often contradicting one another on chronology, but never on the emotions. Cara Delevingne in the current DKNY campaign. When the three of us visit the newly redecorated DKNY store on Bond Street, where some faces-about-town are sitting at a large white table painting hearts for Haiti, to be hung around the store, Cohen and Karan are as one about the refurbishment. 'I thought it would look terrible without the juice bar...' Karan says, '...which they took out from the front...' Cohen adds. 'But it doesn't,' they chorus. I'm surprised Karan didn't have right of veto over her juice bar, but part of the LVMH deal was that it would run Donna Karan and DKNY and she would look after Urban Zen. She's on royalties from the first two - and a discount card, which is why she and Cohen, after peering at the price tags, decide not to buy anything from the London branch. 'We get a bigger discount in New York,' they explain. 'It's cute, though,' Karan says, caressing a black cashmere turtleneck. 'We love black,' Cohen coos. 'We'll probably be wearing it when we're 100.' Only once did Karan ever truly deviate from black - when she designed an all-green collection at Anne Klein. It was horrible, but I was really into fields and meadows at the time. I still am. I still love green...' Because here's another irony about a woman who so lacked confidence that when she launched her own label she attached New York on to the end of her name: these days she spends most of her time in the Hamptons. 'I love New York,' she says. But to tell the truth, it can be a little intense.