Karen Walker is a New Zealand born fashion designer with a reputation for her original, effortless and unpretentious style.

Walker has shown her collections each season as part of London Fashion Week for the past 8 seasons and from September 2006 will be showing at New York Fashion Week.

Karen’s collections are high casual with one foot in tailoring and the other in street wear. The reoccurring theme is taking extremes and pushing them together – masculine and feminine, tailored and street, luxury and non luxury, dark and super cute. Overall the lavel has a feeling of effortlessness and has been described by the U.K.’s independent newspaper as being “The kind of look that provides a means of appearing cool but not trying to hard, cute but not saccharine, alternative but not self consciously so. The fact that these clothes appear to be so totally not ‘fashion’ is what makes them so now.”

The collections all have the outsider as their inspiration. Karen Walker’s work celebrates the anti - ‘it girl” – characters like Ally Sheedy’s heavy fringed weirdo in ‘The Breakfast Club”, orphan Annie, the juvenile delinquent prom queen who climbs out the window after curfew to run with the bad crowd.

Karen lives and works in New Zealand with her husband Mikhail, their dog and two cats.