Norma Kamali Resort 2024

Norma Kamali is all about the feel-good power that fashion can bring. Coming into the resort season, she was thinking a lot about the idea within the state of the fashion industry. 

“We have too much merchandise, we have sustainability issues — there’s a list of issues. They’re real, they’re not fictitious, but I think we’ve lost sight of what our job is right now. We’re not supposed to be playing to each other, we’re supposed to be thinking about the purpose of why we do a collection,” she said. With all of the factors that go into creating a collection, Kamali wondered how much time is spent focusing on the consumer’s joyous experience. 

Kamali’s resort collection was designed to address these ideas in a palette of mostly black, gray and white, as well as bold red and reflective silver. These were fashions built for dancing, working, traveling, etc., in. i.e., real wardrobing, for all ages. 

“There’s me in my 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s,” she said, pointing out youthful — and sexy — body-con party dresses and flirty little matching sets, as well as suiting, shirting and lots of great black patent vegan leather layers.

Her younger clientele will surely eat up resort’s mesh bodysuits with strategically placed black dot and dash appliqués on the busts or ruched, ruffled and draped frocks (many came with bestselling built-in pickleball bodysuits). For the avid collector, Kamali brought back her archival handkerchief sleeve peasant goddess dress and added an ombré effect to signature quilted and sleeping bag numbers. And for consumers looking to show a little leg, while still feeling covered, there was a variety of opaque leggings with darker boot-cut and thigh-high “footsies.”

“The whole idea is, there is a way to see joy, happiness, power and feeling good through clothes. We’ve talked about it through different collections, but if I think about it in the frame of where we are in the fashion industry and everything we talk about and hear about, it’s so much about all of the problems we have,” Kamali said. “But maybe we need to concentrate on what makes people want to buy clothes and keep them because they’re doing their job. They’re making you feel good — you don’t throw away something that’s doing its job.”