PicoBlog

Today, I’m doing a deep dive on the rare DKNY/NYC book from 1994 that has captured my heart. This piece includes an interview with Trey Laird who was the creative director of the book and the executive vice president and corporate director of Donna Karan International until 2002, as well as one of the lucky owners of the book, Geoff Snack. The book, photographed by Peter Lindbergh, is as entertaining as it is an essential lesson in brand building. Also, stay tuned for a new episode of NEVERWORNS coming soon.

I first saw glimmers of the DKNY/NYC spiral book from 1994 on an Instagram account. I was hooked after only a few slides without even flipping through an actual page. The cover shows “DKNY” bleeding into a herd of searing yellow taxis. (The good boxy ’90s kind). The next slide is a detail shot of untied boots on the pavement, lazily cuffed to reveal a blazing red lining. (Incredible contrast). Finally, a sharp image of a young model in a three-piece suit amid a Sex and the City crowd behind her. (Original main character energy). Underneath the photograph is a quote by Liza Minnelli: “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” 

It’s a beautiful book that can transform taking the subway into the most majestic form of transportation; that can make wading in morning rush hour seem like a transcendental experience. The shots range from model, to product, to simply a blurred city scene. A stunning woman sitting on her stoop in an undone wool coat with a cup of coffee; a backseat cab shot of a rain splattered windshield; a hunk walking down the street, clutching himself in a leather jacket with fingerless gloves; a tier of fire escapes. The brand bible is an Old Testament of fashion that captures ‘90s New York as a fantasy land, dressed in the everyday aspirational designs of Donna Karan’s fun and young DKNY. It’s a pre-cellphone, cab-hailing utopia. The good, bad, and ugly of New York is seen as a plexus of limitless possibilities where a Manhattan studio is only $700 a month. This rare book gets any reader to this universe. You’d be lucky to get your hands on it, and if you do, it will set you back $250 and up. 

The Instagram post I saw was by Geoff Snack, a strategy director and instructor at OCAD University in Ontario. He is also the founder of the store Wrong Answer where he sells rare fashion books and ephemera, like old club invitations and signed Interview stationery. (@gettyimagesfanclub, who knows I love all-things Donna Karan, tagged me in Snack’s post of the book. At the time, his edition was sold-out so I found my own copy.) Like me, Snack was struck by how DKNY/NYC captures a shock-to-the-system charge that is synonymous with New York. “There’s so much energy on every single page,” Snack tells me. “I think this is as close as any fashion book is going to get to doing a great job of world-building around a brand, and also attaching a brand to a larger lifestyle.” The book is a campaign in disguise in which there are really beautiful photographs of New York City but most everyone just so happens—and not overtly—to be wearing DKNY.

While the book is an exhilarating, transportive page-turner, it has a more solemn genesis. Profits from the DKNY/NYC book went to benefit the CFDA-Vogue Initiative and NYC AIDS Fund as the HIV/AIDS crisis was still ravaging New York City, obliterating the fashion industry. Karan had always been vocal about the HIV/AIDS crisis. In 1990, alongside Ralph Lauren, she launched Seventh on Sale, a four-day shopping extravaganza at the Lexington Avenue Armory to raise money for HIV/AIDS research. The DKNY/NYC book was another chapter in Karan’s advocacy. “She [Donna] was at the forefront of all that, and it was important to keep that conversation forefront,” says Trey Laird of the creative agency Laird+Partners, who was the creative director of the book. “So it [the book] was a cheeky way to talk about it and a DKNY way to do it.” The DKNY way to get the message out was with some cheek, or as Laird tells me, “It was like a little wink.” 

Those very winks are what sets the DKNY/NYC book apart from the coffee table tome pack. It’s full of tchotchke-laden, interactive components: There is the aforementioned condom (a push for safe sex), a crossword puzzle (what New Yorker doesn’t do it?), a CD from the DKNY fall 1994 show (chic), and branded postcards (tell everyone back home you made it to the Big Apple!). There is the New York Numbers phone directory with area code-less numbers for Transportation, AIDS/Healthcare Info, and Only In New York, which included institutions that, well, were only in New York, ranging from Magic Belly-Dancer-Gram to The Strand. Curious about how tall The Statue of Liberty is? How long a Donna Karan show runs for? How many potholes were filled in 1993? The Facts of Life page, littered with numerical data of all-things city, will tell you: Lady Liberty is 150 feet tall–and oh, she has a size 107 sandal. A Donna Karan show lasts 30 to 45 minutes. 520,222 potholes were filled.

“We wanted to do something disruptive that felt younger and fresher. That’s why we did it as a spiral and put all those fun little attachments,” says Laird, adding, “Trying to make something interactive at that point through print and through publishing, just trying to be as innovative as possible, given the mediums that were being used at the time.” 

An example of incredible “wink” marketing was the brand’s inclusion of the once-detested MetroCard, which showed just how much DKNY was dialed into city conversation. There is the original blue MetroCard from 1995 glued to a plastic page on top of an image of model Beri Smither hugging the subway pole in a great leather jacket. At the time–with much controversy–the MTA began to phase out the transit token and introduce the swipeable MetroCards. The $700 million project was deeply annoying for New Yorkers who couldn’t shake the traditional token and hated fishing out a card that was riddled with “please swipe again” errors at the turnstile. Nevertheless, DKNY not only embraced the change, but also inserted itself into the change. “How can you not have the token? Because at that point, everything was through tokens. This new card was coming out and nobody had even really had it,” says Laird. “So, we did a deal with the city, which was kind of influencer seeding at that point, to have some of the first MetroCards included in this book.”

Amidst all of the fun, there are powerhouse names like Peter Lindbergh—who better than to capture models, passersby, grit, and grime than a photographer obsessed with the simple act of walking?—and the rising model star Mark Vanderloo. There are also hundreds of quotes from New Yorkers, some native to transplants, including Barbra Streisand, Katie Couric, former Mayor Ed Koch, Vanessa Williams, and Kevyn Aucoin. According to Laird, some of the quotes were public domain, while others were faxed in from fellow designers and personalities. On one page, a taxi driver quips “Traffic signals are really just rough guidelines” while New York Post-style graphics show a snappy RuPaul quote that reads, “The thing I love most about NYC-in a word- ‘taxi!!’ The ability to exit any situation at the flip of a wrist.” The range of quotes democratizes New York City, and makes the reader believe that anyone can make it there–or fail, maybe dressed in DKNY.

Laird and Lindbergh’s team used a double-decker bus to photograph the city. “We would drive all through New York, and Peter [Lindbergh] would just shoot everything and anything,” says Laird. “Buildings, textures, lights, signs, cops, traffic, everything.” The chronicling of the city went beyond its composition, and tackled what was making headlines. There is a shot of Vanderloo rollerblading through New York with a briefcase, which was a nod to the late tabloid-beloved JFK Jr. “He [JFK Jr.] would rollerblade through traffic down to take his law exams, and The New York Post and all the paparazzi would cover him,” says Laird. Take note: These unworried images of a late JFK Jr. living his life are the same images that we still see perpetually being dug up by Instagram archive accounts. There’s something to be said about appearing to be living in the moment in New York City while wearing good clothes that demand action, which still holds up to its allure. 

The book, like much of the photography from the early to late ’90s, triggers gut reactions. J. Crew made us yearn for an eternal Christmas by showing hot couples in wool sweaters in the great snowy outdoors; Banana Republic had us wanting love, giving us people embracing on a beach, swaddled in cashmere; DKNY made us want to move to New York by bottling the feeling of longing through a women looking out from the Brooklyn Bridge in a really good trench. This is lifestyle brand work done best. It’s world-building propelled by the emotions that we all want a slice of: love, excitement, a rush. 

Of course, world-building is seemingly easy to do in a place like New York that has an endless energy. But to achieve such a sensation as DKNY did, the clothes have to genuinely be in-sync with the environment. In other words, you can’t put lipstick on a pig—you can’t just photograph a stale garment in front of a subway stop and suddenly pretend that the cloth has a story or a spirit. A lifestyle brand can’t just use the city once and forget about it.

Karan had always done real-deal storytelling to appeal to women on the go who wanted polish and room for passion in their clothes; always including a scene to go with the garb. This shows. Every morsel of the city is woven into the book as well as in DKNY’s earlier campaigns. Half the time, the clothes aren’t even visible; it’s a fuzzy stoplight or a hazy crosswalk sign. The book is an example of how to achieve style nirvana not through a product but by creating an essence around the product. This is why we don’t blink an eye as we flip through this book and stumble upon a CD for the DKNY fall 1994 show. It’s not outrageous that in the New York Numbers insert, above the digits for FAO Schwartz, there is the hotline for DKNY Info. These brand injections don’t feel like advertising, and instead, this feels natural because DKNY, which stands for Donna Karan New York, is New York and vice versa.

That kind of New York City world-building never went away; it’s simply different and at times, more fleeting. It’s there in slivers when J. Crew shoots a massive shopping bag in action on the shoulder of a person crossing a New York City street on Instagram. It exists when Christopher John Rogers posts a friend hailing a cab in a megawatt look. Or when Luar’s Raul Lopez, a Williamsburg native, totes along one of his Ana bags around the metropolis. The city looks fun, as do the clothes. We have to play with our environment genuinely and show how the clothes interact with our surroundings. We want images that will make us want to move here, and the clothes to go with it. We want to see images that make us believe and ultimately, buy. 

Years later, the DKNY/NYC book is still a treasure to flip through. From the beginning, Laird made sure it would stand the test of time. “We wanted to have something that lasted, that was collectible and special, that you didn’t just throw away that issue and onto the next month,” he says, adding, “It really became the kind of brand bible for DKNY for the next couple of decades when it was in its heyday. Everybody internally would call it the ‘taxi book.’ And so Donna would inevitably be in a meeting with some new license or some new designer, and she’d say, ‘Bring me a taxi book!’” A few months ago, Snack sold a copy of the DKNY/NYC book at Colbo to a couple from Texas who had recently moved to New York City. “They were like, ‘This really captures a lot of how we feel about moving to New York too, and the energy that we see here,’” says Snack.

Karan managed to communicate a skyscraper, a subway ride, and a jaywalk through a leather coat or a pair of pantyhose; great clothes that could look good while withstanding grit. Those fundamentals are all freakishly felt in the DKNY/NYC book in which garment and city seamlessly blend together. The concoction is electric; it feels real and yet, just out of reach. Perhaps this is because the Queens-born Karan, who once commuted from Long Island to Parsons School of Design, and later to Anne Klein, was truly living a slice of the universe that we see in this book. The designer understood exactly what she wanted in clothes when she went out into the world. Karan’s world just happened to be New York and a collared bodysuit. 

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