DKNY Shapewear & Intimates

DKNY Shapewear & Intimates is the bra, underwear and shaping side of DKNY, the younger and cheaper New York label that designer Donna Karan created in 1988 as a companion to her main Donna Karan New York collection. The DKNY brand passed from the founders to LVMH in 2001 and then to G-III Apparel Group of New York in 2016, for $650 million. In the shops, DKNY intimates are sold under the brand's city-inflected name: bras, briefs, bodysuits and smoothing pieces with the clean, urban look the label has always traded on.

The bodysuit at the root of it

DKNY's link to underwear goes back to the founding idea of the Donna Karan business. In 1984 Karan left Anne Klein, where she had been head designer since 1974, and started her own company with her then husband Stephan Weiss and the Japanese firm Takihyo Corporation. Her first women's collection, shown in 1985, was built around what she called "seven easy pieces," a set of garments that all mixed and matched. English Wikipedia describes the system as centered on the bodysuit.

That is unusual in fashion history. A garment closer to lingerie than to outerwear sat at the center of a ready-to-wear wardrobe for working women, worn under a wrap skirt or a tailored jacket instead of a blouse. The bodysuit gave a smooth line with no tucked shirt bunching at the waist. It is the clearest ancestor of what DKNY later sold as shapewear: pieces that sit close to the body and make the clothes on top look better.

DKNY, 1988: the downtown label

Karan created DKNY in 1988 as a more affordable line for younger customers, according to her Wikipedia biography. DKNY Jeans followed in 1990 and menswear in 1992. The initials did much of the marketing on their own. They read as New York, city streets, yellow cabs and offices, and they turned a designer's name into an easy, wearable brand.

The DKNY Wikipedia article lists the brand's sub-lines as including Jeans, Active, Underwear, Kids and Men. Underwear was therefore part of the family well before the current owner, one of several categories the brand extended into as it grew from a single collection into a lifestyle name.

LVMH years and the G-III sale

LVMH, the Paris luxury group, bought the business in 2001. Karan stepped down as chief executive in 1997 but stayed on as chair and designer, and she left the company in 2015 to concentrate on Urban Zen, the lifestyle label she founded in 2007.

In 2016 LVMH sold Donna Karan International, the parent of both Donna Karan and DKNY, to G-III Apparel Group for $650 million. G-III was founded in New York's garment district in 1956 by Aron Goldfarb, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor, and started out making leather outerwear under the name G&N Sportswear. It now describes itself as a maker and distributor of clothing under owned brands, licensed brands and private labels, and it licenses its own brands to partners for other product categories. Intimates are a classic licensed category, because bras need specialist fit and factories that most fashion houses do not have.

We could not confirm from any source we read which company currently makes DKNY intimates and shapewear under license, so we do not name one. Neither the DKNY website's main navigation nor the brand list of Wacoal America, a likely candidate given its size in the US bra market, showed the line when we checked.

What DKNY intimates and shapewear look like

No brand source we could read describes the intimates range piece by piece, so we keep this general. A line sold as shapewear and intimates under a city-casual fashion name is normally built from smooth-knit T-shirt bras, bodysuits and light-control garments in the vein of the control brief, in neutral colors that disappear under clothes. That fits the DKNY idea of underwear as the base layer of an outfit, the same role Karan gave the bodysuit in 1985, and it is a different starting point from the lace-first approach of many European houses.

Within American shapewear, DKNY sits in a different place from Spanx. Spanx began as a shapewear specialist and built outward; DKNY is a fashion brand whose shaping pieces are one category among many. The appeal is the name and the look rather than extreme compression.

The 2025 ambassador

The brand's most recent public move recorded by Wikipedia is the appointment of Hailey Bieber as DKNY's global ambassador in 2025. Forty years after a bodysuit anchored Karan's first collection, the brand she created is owned by a garment-district company that started out making leather coats.

Last updated October 7, 2026