Norma Kamali
speaker
117 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Norma Kamali’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I landed in London and somebody at the airline said, they have boarding houses you could stay at for $6 a night in this place called Chelsea. And they gave me the name of a place, so I made a reservation. And Chelsea, at the time, was the very beginning of what would be an incredible area.
It was an artist area that then had these amazing shops that opened and everybody in music and film and everybody would be in Chelsea. And so I found myself by fate in the right place at the right time. And when I walked down the King's Road to see what was going on, it was basically very gray.
very tweed gray, very gray everything, except for this one store that was painted big outside colors, colors, colors, and this music was blaring out of the store. And I believe it was, all you need is love. And that's all I heard. I was like a moth to the light. I was like, oh my God, what's there? And I just was boom, right in there. And I became friends with the people in that place.
And they said, there's this great club we go to on Margaret Street. You have to come with us. I went to the club and it was a place where all of these musicians that were just becoming were there. And it was everybody you could think of that was a British musician or group on the rise. And it started this beautiful adventure for four years. And then the reason I stopped the airline job is because
my business started to really take off. And the airlines saw I was getting press. I had a picture in time.
Yeah, it wasn't a conscious plan. I'm going to do this. What I would do was one of the things you learned at the airlines was was how to pack efficiently. And one of the things, one of the tricks is you take let's say a dress, a little Biba dress, and you fold it and then you roll it really tight and you put rubber bands around it.
So you have like a little Frankfurter, but there's this dress in it. And so I would roll all of these things, put rubber bands around them, get a garment bag and just fill the garment bag, this thick, right? And fill it up and then walk through, walk through customs with my garment bag. And then I would bring them home and open them up, steam them out. And friends were all asking me for things.
And then finally, I thought, I think I should see if I can find them. a place to sell these things because I know now how to get more of them. I have a relationship with all of these people in London. They're my friends and they were excited that I was doing this too. And so I found a store, $285 and I was like, Thank you very much.
Of course, it was a little basement store that you had to go down into. But I was in a group of buildings that were all painted lots of colors now because now we were more into this period where the painted colors on everything not was just in that one store in London, but now it was everywhere. And it was very successful. It did really well. I decorated it with furniture from the Salvation Army.
I found snakeskin wallpaper, fabulous, at the Salvation Army. And I painted a pattern on the floor. I remember painting it while I was wearing high heels, of course. And I didn't have a dressing room. The way I had a dressing room is if the door was open, we had a dressing room because it made a spot behind it. If it was closed, we didn't.
But nobody cared about taking their clothes off at that point anyway. It wasn't a time for being a prude or shy. So it did really well. And... Then I started making some things because I had ideas that I didn't see anywhere that I thought would be really good. And those things started to get press.
Coincidentally, there were some editors that happened to live on 53rd Street who would come down into my little basement hall and just really give me lots of press. I mean, I had two full pages, one in Vogue and one in Harper's Bazaar in the first six months that I was in business. I mean, which is unheard of. And so there was a picture of me and Eddie in Time Magazine wearing snakeskin.
And this buzzer went off at the airline. This is a big room where everybody's sitting with things on. And if you did something wrong on a call, a buzzer and a red light would go on and you'd have to go up to the front. And so all of a sudden this buzzer and a red light is going and they call out my name. I thought, I'm doing a good job. What's the problem here?
And so they had the magazine and they called me into this room and they said, what is this? And I said, oh, oh, that. And they said, We can't have this. You can't be doing this. You have to make a choice. And I said, I understand and I fully respect your wishes, but I think I'm fully engaged in this and it would be hard for me to give it up. And so I had to leave.
Of course, it was a different time. But it was $80 a week. But the benefit was the travel. But at this point, I had already hired some people to help me make the clothes. We had already progressed to having a sample room. And so the truth is, it was time. It really was time. And I was not wanting to give up the travel, to be honest. But I was working till 2 and 3 in the morning to do both jobs.
So it was definitely a lot of hours. It was a gift. It was a lot of hours. But I am forever grateful to the experience, the UNIVAC computer, the lessons I learned about service. The teaching and the training at airlines even today is extraordinary. And then it was beyond extraordinary. I learned a lot about how to run an office, which I never would have known.
I learned so much from that experience. And most people would say, well, if you're an artist, that's not what I'm going to do. I'm not going to sit in an office. That four years was a school. That was another college for me of learning about business, learning about technology, and learning about travel. Not only did I go to London, but I would go to Paris. There was a Trident plane.
The Tridents used to go up and then down. And you could go from London to Paris in a short time. So I would shop in Paris as well. And then I met people there and I would go to clubs in Paris and then go back to London and go back home. And then I traveled. I went to Iran. I went to Greece. I went all over Europe traveling.
So it really was a very fruitful four years and very well worth the time and my age and the experience.
So, Eddie Kamali, actually, Mohamed Hossein Kamali is Iranian, and his spoken name was Mansour. He was gorgeous. He was six feet one, a great dancer, a very sweet dancer. human being who grew up in boarding schools. He was born to a family that was very close to the Shah. He was sent to boarding school at 11 years of age, and on his own, basically, away from his family.
Showing 41–60 of 117 · page 3 of 6
← Previous
Next →