Date: born 1945

Biography: Norma Kamali studied Fashion Illustration at FIT before taking a job at Northwest Orient Airlines. From 1964 to 1968, she was able to travel to Britain every weekend, where she immersed herself in the culture of 1960s London. In 1967, she and her husband opened a boutique in NYC and filled it with items purchased in London. She supplemented her stock with her own designs and eventually began to focus primarily on her original creations. In 1978, after a divorce, she started a new business called OMO Norma Kamali, with OMO an acronym for On My Own.