According to the slightly scurrilous but entirely fabulous 1994 book Obsession: The Lives and Times of Calvin Klein, back in the 1980s, 205 West 39th Street – the historic home of Calvin Klein Inc – was whitewashed every weekend, and perpetually smelled of paint. That spoke to Calvin Klein’s fastidiousness, his precision and perfectionism – and his love of a blank canvas. Which is exactly what Veronica Leoni inherited as the new creative director of Calvin Klein Collection, and she ushered in her time at the label with a show venue within that historic HQ stripped back to white.
All the better to focus the eye. First of all, on the attendees – not the usual roster of celebrities, but figures like Christy Turlington and Kate Moss – both famous ‘faces’ of Calvin Klein’s perfumes – and the 82-year-old Klein himself, alongside his ex-wife Kelly Rector. But then, it also served to razor attention on the clothes.
They count. The last Calvin Klein fashion show was in 2018, and although there have been attention-grabbing unclad advertising campaigns in the interim (and very much in the Klein tradition) its fashion identity has remained hazy. Except, of course, it isn’t. Everyone kind of knows what Calvin Klein means, in a fashion way – minimalism, stripping away. Which leads to stripping down. Which leads to sex. So Leoni had both a clean slate and a heavily loaded plate, given the cultural resonance of the name and its meaning – a meaning so coded it’s habitually referred to by only his Christian name, Calvin, like an old friend. How to tackle that?
Backstage, Leoni spoke as quietly as she did on the catwalk. She has a pedigree that spans stints at Jil Sander, Céline-when-it-had-the-accent, and The Row. So she knows how to make a very simple, very expensive coat very, very well. She also launched her own line Quira, focused on tailoring. After her CK debut, she talked about “reducing canvas to the minimum” – she was talking about tailoring, in a specific and geeky way that reflects her obsession (no pun), but it also stood as a wider comment. Especially, when she followed it up with “emptying the weight” – because ‘Calvin’ is a weighty legacy.
Leoni handled it lightly. Taking the vast panorama of the label, from sexed-up jeans ads to … well, sexed-up perfume ads and that whole architecture of 90s minimalism he helped invent, she reduced her canvas down, focussing on Calvin Klein as a tailoring house. Remember, also, that this label’s actual name is Calvin Klein Collection – it is, kind of, the ‘couture’ of Klein, its highest-end line while, en masse, we’ll get jeans and underwear, the bricks with which Klein built a multi-billion dollar fashion behemoth.
So the looks were refined, pared-back but with an intriguing complexity. Tailoring, Leon said, had layers removed – that reduced canvas – to give it a new sensuality. It skimmed, rather than gripped the body, and moved fluidly. There were glances back to Klein in the late 70s and early 80s, when he – like Leoni – was a new-ish kid on the block. Leoni had spent time in the archive, not only examining those clothes but, also, imagery around the house – unpublished Meisel images of the CK One advertising campaign, for instance. So she drew inspiration from the Calvin attitude, as well as the Calvin clothes, and the idea of different characters, specifically American ones. “Sexy worker, taxi driver, Jessica Rabbit, Clark Kent.” You could see all of them, in a Pendleton-check lumberjack shirt, chunky-soled lug-boots, easy denim overskirts, strapless evening dresses, sharp tailoring with swishy caped scarves.
But most consistently, Leoni mentioned the words ‘sexiness’ and ‘sexy’ again and again, repeating them until they became like a mantra. And that made you look again at her clothes, and perceive, perhaps, the hint of underwear, the sense of the skin beneath forms. Fabrics were tactile – they made you want to stroke them, maybe pull them off a little. Rather than showing skin (this is a winter collection, after all), there was the sense of clothes to pull away, with flying panels to unwrap, buttons to unfasten. Anticipation and expectation.
It’s an unlikely slant on the perennially sexed-up CK. But Leoni is also canny and keyed into culture. She proposed evening bags and necklaces dangling in the shape of CK One bottles that sparked a grin of recognition – and made you realise how few houses could do that with a perfume silhouette. And there was a men’s look, a jumpsuit comprised of a white shirt sewn into low-riding stone-washed blue jeans that gave Marky Mark at his pants-dropping finest. These pieces had messages that will reverberate wide.
What did Mr Calvin Klein think, then, of this Calvin Klein Collection collection? “He was happy that he found a new coat to buy,” Leon said, backstage. Hey, what greater praise could there be?
