Donna Karan Woman

Donna Karan has built a reputation—and a multi-million dollar international fashion brand that’s thrived for more than 25 years—based on her dichotomous vision of women as beings of both inherent power and sensuality.

Consider the designer’s sculptural jewellery, her body-hugging jersey in sexy jet-black, her finely crafting tailoring that borrows from menswear but is expertly tweaked to flatter female curves.

Karan’s new perfume, Donna Karan Woman, embodies this same duality. With veteran perfumer Anne Flipo (known for her Giorgio Armani Acqua di Gioia, Yves Saint Laurent L’Homme and La Nuit de L’Homme, and Alexander McQueen MyQueen creations among many, many others), Karan takes notes synonymous with masculine fragrances—sandalwood and Haitian vetiver—and whips them together with the feminine, creamy white floral essence of orange flower. It’s a great scent for a woman who has just as many men’s toilettes as women’s on her dressing table.

The sexy scent smells like a classic in the making. It certainly looks the part.

The Woman bottle was designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, in a sculptural translucent black-glass flacon that is an evolution of the creative vision begun in 1994 when Karan launched her now-classic Cashmere Mist—a bottle crafted by her late sculptor husband Stephen Weiss.

Karan declares the new scent “A Creative Collaboration for Women. By Women.” In that bent, she signed on models renowned for their commitment to global issues of women’s health and child welfare—Christy Turlington-Burns, Karolina Kurkvova, Liya Kebede—for the advertising campaign.  Shot by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, it aims to celebrate women “and the collective vision they share: freedom, sensuality and intuition.”

Available as of August 2012.

Donna Karan Woman EDP, $135 (100 ml)/$105 (50 ml)
Donna Karan Woman Body Lotion, $65 (200 ml)
Donna Karan Woman Body Cleansing Lotion, $55 (200 ml)
www.donnakaran.com, www.holtrenfrew.com