Norma Kamali (b. 1945)
Filed under the name Norma · February 2, 2026
Norma Kamali basically shaped American sportswear for decades with designs that were actually body-positive before that was even a phrase people used casually, which feels like being ahead of a conversation the rest of the culture took like forty extra years to catch up to. I'm very online, obviously, so I see a lot of brands now performing body positivity as a marketing angle, and it's kind of refreshing to read about someone who was apparently doing the real, substantive version of it decades before it became a hashtag. Fashion history isn't usually my thing, I'm more of a K-pop-and-prestige-TV person if I'm being honest, but there's something satisfying about learning that a trend everyone treats as recent actually has real roots going way back, built by someone who just quietly kept doing the work while the culture eventually caught up to her. Anyway, respect to somebody who was doing the substance of a thing decades before everyone else discovered the hashtag for it.