Stephan Weiss, Donna Karan's husband and business partner, died over the weekend in New York. He was 62. Cause of death was lung cancer.
Weiss married Karan, a design associate at Anne Klein, in 1983, the year before she opened her own fashion business, working out of their Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan. As the company surged on its stunning ascent of success, Weiss was brought in, ostensibly to provide a lower-key, more businesslike balance to what was seen as his wife's artistic temperament. His role was to help negotiate licensing agreements and to structure the rapidly growing firm's various new departments.
In reality, Weiss – a trained artist and sculptor – was no more inclined toward business matters than was Karan. The result was an enterprise of such stunning, high-profile success throughout the 1980s and into the 90s that the lack of sound financial-management controls went largely unnoticed. Not until the company went public, via a successful 1996 IPO, did it become common knowledge that costs were often out of control and that Weiss and Karan paid themselves salaries that did not always reflect the company's market performance. Earlier this year, LVMH-Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the European conglomerate of luxury fashion brands, bought Gabrielle Studio – the company that owns the Donna Karan trademarks — for $450 million. LVMH also has a bid pending for about $240 million to purchase Donna Karan International.
New York-born Weiss attended Pratt Institute and initially worked for his father's company, I. Weiss & Sons, making theater sets and draperies. Later in his life, he developed a career independent from his wife as an artist and sculptor working out of a Greenwich Village studio.