Norma Kamali

Norma Kamali (born 1945 in New York City) has been a fixture of American fashion for over five decades — inventor of the sleeping bag coat, pioneer of swimwear as fashion (including Farrah Fawcett’s iconic red suit), and an independent designer who has run her own house since 1967.

Back to school at MIT

Thinking about her brand’s longevity, Kamali enrolled in MIT Professional Education’s online course “Applied Generative AI for Digital Transformation,” completing it in 2023. Her insight was succession-planning by algorithm: just as Karl Lagerfeld reinterpreted the Chanel archive after its founder, an AI trained solely on her own 57 years of work could keep the Kamali design language alive and evolving.

Working with AI studio Maison Meta, she built a closed-loop proprietary model trained exclusively on her archive — sidestepping the scraped-data controversies that dog most generative fashion tools. Prompting it with her signature studded black garments produced results she called “magic,” and even the model’s hallucinations became design inspiration. She showed the work publicly in a 2024 installation called Fashion Hallucinations at her Greenwich Street headquarters.

Kamali, who has said sewing talent is getting harder to find and that designers need new tools to adapt, plans to keep studying: “AI is evolving so fast, I know I’ll need to go back. MIT gave me the foundation, but this is just the beginning.”