At 78, Norma Kamali isn’t ready to retire

At 78, Norma Kamali isn’t ready to retire. But the celebrated New York designer is starting to think about how the company she built from scratch and has run for more than 50 years will carry on when she eventually steps back.

Typically, this kind of succession planning entails preparing the right leadership to take creative oversight of the business and carry it forward. Kamali’s plan is to develop an AI version of herself to support them.

For months, she has been working with the AI-focused agency Maison Meta to build a custom tool that can generate new designs based on her creative DNA from text prompts. They’ve been feeding thousands of images from the brand’s archive into the model, teaching it the essence of her style.