Karen Walker (designer)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the Will & Grace character, see Karen Walker (Will & Grace).
Karen Walker is a noted New Zealand fashion designer, whose customers include Madonna and Kelly Osbourne. She left school, after attending Epsom Girls Grammar School in 1988 to begin her fashion training, graduating in 1990. She has said that she started with NZ$100, which she used for material for a shirt. By 1995, she had opened two stores. In 1998, she began selling to Barneys New York.
She showed her first runway collection in 1998 and is regarded as one of New Zealand's highest profile and most international design talents. She has three stores in New Zealand, two of which are in Auckland and one in Wellington but her clothes are sold all over the world.
Walker is married to Mikhail Gherman, a well known advertising creative director. He designs many of the prints for her iconic fabrics. They live in the Waitakere Ranges near Auckland, New Zealand.
Her fashion collections are considered to be effortless and original and include names such as "Young, Willing and Eager", "Karen to the Rescue", "Victory Garden", "Queenie Was a Dog", "Karen in TV Land", "Liberal and Miserable", "Dough and Dynamite" and "Living with Cannibals and Other Adventures".
Her clothes have been seen on many celebrities including Björk, Sienna Miller, Liv Tyler, Claire Danes, Jennifer Lopez and many more. Four pieces from one of Karen's original collections "Dust" appeared on Kate Winslet in the Charlie Kaufman film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Theodora Richards has also modelled in Karen Walker runway shows and posed in the March 2005 issue of Evening Standard UK magazine in Karen Walker outfits. Tyra banks also recently wore a Karen walker dress on her talkshow
Karen Walker has recently expanded her designs from her own clothing ranges to sunglasses, a twice yearly range for the iconic New Zealand brand Swanndri, a range of paints for Resene, cosmetics and jewellery.
Walker has also been a writer for Australian fashion magazine, Russh.
