DKNY Creating an Icon with Peter Arnell.
Peter Arnell, co-creator of Donna Karan’s iconic DKNY brand discusses the inspiration and strategic approach to the development of the DKNY brand and communications.
We thought it would be great to celebrate New York since we were inspired by it, we were driven by it, the name was in our name, and it’s the root and beginning of Donna’s birth and the company’s birth. We had god knows how many conversations; New York City is black and white, there is no color in New York City. Even if I took a color photograph it ended up looking black and white. I shot this photograph, if you look very carefully, the Statue of Liberty is back there but it’s just minuscule and I thought, if you could bring it forward, you know, the vertical power of that letter k was dying to invite in the Statue of Liberty it was about “so much”. So we decided that “so much” needed a big place to live and Houston Street was perfect, you had a great viewing distance and the way they did it was exactly how painters used to paint landscapes.
They basically grid the photograph on a piece of a nap by 11 paper and they only look at the little section of the grid and then they scale it up. These guys with different shades of gray on little palettes, spent six weeks and painted it all in and then it went up and everyone like, what the hell is this? you know. The exact thing you want someone to think about when you present something.
We never showed clothes, we never had models, we never said what it was like clothing company, or you know, where it was located. We just pose all the right curiosities to make people drive their imagination and their interest to check out what it is we’re doing.
It achieved what it set out to achieve, which is to give back to the city a celebration of from what we were taking from the city, that’s basically the story of how we got to this.
