KAREN WALKER Fashion designer 1969
Internationally acclaimed fashion designer
Karen Walker's direct gaze – when not shadowed in her distinctive large-framed sunglasses – is a challenge to the average Kiwi tendency to let the work do the talking. With a clear vision of how she wants her label to be seen, her public persona and her brand building have always been inextricably linked. She refers to the "Karen Walker girl" as a member of a tribe, her tribe.
Without doubt the New Zealand designer with the highest profile overseas, Walker was born in 1969. She launched her label in 1988 and made up her own rules about what could be achieved out of Auckland. As she found wider success, she wasn't afraid to tell us about it - from the black trousers Madonna wore to the MTV awards in 1998, to the continuing cast of celebrities spotted in her shades. She has fronted Karen Walker campaigns herself, but although both her face and her thematic fashion collections (with their mix of bold original fabric designs, skew-whiff colour combinations and boxy tailoring) are recognisable, it is her brand ethos that truly drives the business.
Cool, quirky, classic with a twist, are the sort of descriptions regularly applied to the output overseen by Walker and her husband Mikhail Gherman. They met while she was a teenager at private fashion design college, selling to boutiques while studying. Five years later they opened their first store in Newmarket. After being selected to show as part of the "New Zealand Four" in London in 1999, she soon went back solo, before switching to the runways of New York for a decade.
