Karen Walker Eyewear

Karen Walker is a New Zealand-born fashion designer with a reputation for her original, effortless and unpretentious style.

Since 2002 Karen has been working closely with stylist Heathermary Jackson on all her collections.Karen Walker receives fantastic editorial coverage including regular pages in American and British magazines such as i-D, Vogue, Teen Vogue, Elle, W and Nylon.

Phaidon have included her in their recent book Sample which curates the 100 most influential designers to emerge in the last 6 years, and Taschen have also included her in their recent book Fashion Now 2 which highlights the world’s most important 160 designers as selected by i-D magazine.

Karen was awarded the 2007 Prix de Marie Claire award for best creative talent.

Karen’s collections are high casual with one foot in tailoring and the other in street wear. The recurring theme is taking extremes and pushing them together - masculine and feminine, tailored and street, luxury and non-luxury, dark and super-cute. Overall the label has a feeling of effortlessness and has been described by the UK’s Independent newspaper as being “The kind of look that provides a means of appearing cool but not trying-too-hard, cute but not saccharine, alternative but not self consciously so. The fact that these clothes appear to be so totally not ‘fashion’ is what makes them so now”.

The collections all have the outsider as their inspiration. Karen Walker’s work celebrates the anti-‘it-girl’ - characters like Ally Sheedy’s heavy fringed weirdo in The Breakfast Club, orphan Annie, the juvenile delinquent prom queen who climbs out the window after curfew to run with the bad crowd, Woody Allen’s persistently dissatisfied Annie Hall, an Amelia Earhart inspired adventuress who, after crash-landing in the jungle, turns her back on civilisation in preference of tribal life, or 1930s comic book super-heroines leading double lives.

In addition to her main womenswear collections Karen also designs Karen Walker Jewellery, selling in exclusive boutiques and department stores in New Zealand, Australia, Japan and the United States; Karen Walker Eyewear sold through exclusive boutiques, eyewear stores and department stores in Australia, Japan, the UK, USA and New Zealand; and Karen Walker Paints, a selection of paint colours sold through Resene paint stores throughout New Zealand and Australia.

Recent collaborative ventures include a pop-up store in New York’s East Village concept store The Den, a makeup project with Boots 17 in the UK and a t-shirt collaboration with the UK’s hippest poet / fashion designer House of Holland.Celebrities such as Björk, Sienna Miller, Jennifer Lopez, Claire Danes, Cate Blanchett, Liv Tyler, Mandi Moore, Shirley Manson, Kate Hudson, Kelly Osbourne, Claudia Schiffer, Drew Barrymore and Madonna all favour her work with four pieces from the Dust collection featuring on Kate Winslet in Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s legendary Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Karen Walker is stocked in over 250 stores throughout the world in cities including New York, London, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Sydney and Tokyo. There are also three Karen Walker flagship stores in New Zealand and one flagship store in Taipei.

Available now at selective stockist in Singapore.