Rediscovering Norma Kamali, Again

NEW YORK — Tina Craig, a high-profile blogger, made a beeline for Norma Kamali on Tuesday night, warmly clasping her hand as she told the designer: “I wanted to show you this dress. I just wore it in Hawaii.”

She had placed her own stamp on Kamali’s wrap-and-tie jersey, twisting and tweaking it to suit her shape. “I’ve been buying Kamali since my teens,” Craig, 47, said.

She was one in a crowd of Kamali enthusiasts, women of varying ages and shapes, draped from shoulder to shinbone in the designer’s golden oldies. Showing off Kamali’s much-mythologized sleeping bag coats, ruched parachute dresses or fringed-and-feathered evening clothes, they had gathered at What Goes Around Comes Around, the fancy secondhand shop on West Broadway in SoHo, to commemorate the designer’s half-century in business.

Kamali, 72, took the commotion around her in stride. She is still selling vintage items on her website, but thought she had exhausted the lot when she stumbled on a cache of some 70 pieces, many dating from the ‘70s, in some long forgotten bins.

She turned them over promptly to Seth Weisser and Gerard Maione, the founders and owners What Goes Around Comes Around, who will be selling the pieces, which they’ve called “vintage for the future,” at nosebleed prices in coming weeks. Prices range from $750 to $7,500, with most falling between $750 and $3,500.

“We see these as collectible art,” Maione said. “We’ve already had interest from celebrities, young influencers and mature collectors.”

There were standouts like a turkey-feathered peach and orange evening ensemble (1990s); a soutache-trimmed Victorian style coat (1990s); a tan parachute jumpsuit (1980s); and an effusively draped silk jersey waterfall blouse (1970s).

Kamali regarded them a bit coolly. “I’m not connected to anything here,” she said.

Rarely one to excavate her past, she has looked on, apparently impassive, as scores of younger competitors rushed to knock off her designs. Other people might have been incensed.

Not Kamali, though she conceded, “There are times when you own your own business and other people are influenced by something you’re doing, and they have more money and more advertising power to sell it, and you’re still trying to figure out how to pay the rent.

“Times like that were a bit difficult,” she said. “I’d go home and cry, worrying that I may not be able to buy fabrics.”

As for those who still insist on pinching her ideas, “You can have them,” Kamali said to no one in particular. “I’m on to the next thing.”