Love Quote by Donna Karan

Karan is quietly redrawing the borders of what a “fashion designer” is allowed to want. By admitting she loves architecture and furniture “probably more than fashion,” she punctures the industry’s mythology of total devotion to the runway. It’s a provocative confession because it suggests fashion, for all its glamour, can feel abstracted from lived reality: seasonal, image-driven, filtered through editors and shoppers. Architecture, by contrast, answers to gravity, bodies moving through rooms, sunlight, and time.

The key word is “tactile.” Karan isn’t only talking about texture; she’s talking about consequence. Clothing is intimate, but it’s also transient and endlessly replaced by the next drop. Built space has friction: you have to negotiate materials, scale, budgets, and other people’s needs. That constraint is the appeal. It makes “development” feel like craft rather than churn.

Her line about sharing “with other people” lands as both generosity and critique. Fashion is shared too, but often as spectacle - seen, judged, consumed. A room or a chair is communal in a more literal way: it holds gatherings, routines, fatigue, joy. Coming from a designer who helped define American power dressing, the subtext is striking: after decades of designing for the self presented to the world, she’s drawn to designing the world itself.

Context matters. Late-career designers often pivot toward home, wellness, hospitality - arenas where their aesthetic becomes an environment. Karan frames that pivot not as brand expansion but as an urge toward permanence, utility, and a different kind of intimacy: not the silhouette, but the shelter.