It felt good on Friday afternoon to be back at 205 West 39th Street, hallowed fashion ground, where Calvin Klein built his empire in the heady days of American sportswear as one of New York’s Big Three. And it was quite a coup for the brand’s current corporate owner PVH Corp. to get Calvin himself to sit front row for the dawn of the latest chapter under new creative director Veronica Leoni.
All smiles at New York Fashion Week’s most eagerly anticipated event, Klein posed for photos with his muses Kate Moss and Christy Turlington, and with Hollywood hunk Cooper Koch before taking his seat to take it all in.
Out of the collection business for six years, PVH has charged Leoni with restoring fashion luster to the Calvin Klein label to build on the recent success of the underwear category, which it has invested mightily in with star power.
The men’s and women’s ready-to-wear collection that walked the runway was a start, but will need more heat to live up to Jeremy Allen White in his skivvies. And more obvious innovation and energy, because the field for modern minimalism is already crowded with terrific American and non-American brands alike, from The Row, Jil Sander and Khaite at the top end to Toteme in the middle and Cos at the bottom — not to mention we’re going into our third year of the look and the pendulum may soon be swinging.
Leoni brings an impressive CV, including The Row, Jil Sander, and Celine and her own niche luxury label Quira, which had some beautiful tailoring with artisanal details. However, Calvin in this iteration is not luxury but “premium fashion,” as PVH is calling it, and in some of the fabrications and finishing, it showed. (Outerwear starts at $1,300, dresses at $950 and jeans at $450.)
Leoni was determined not to make it an archival project, she said during a preview, while acknowledging that the aesthetic of Calvin Klein was more a part of her growing up in the 1990s in Rome than she probably even knew. The skinny jeans she’d wear to school with an oversized shirt stolen from her dad, for example, was a look straight out of the iconic CK fragrance ad.
It was that quintessential everyday American wardrobe she wanted to bring up to date, alongside Klein’s tailoring, lightening construction without sacrificing the neat and sharp look.
She played with the workaday knee-length silhouette as seen on Eleanor in “Severance” that can read sexy/subversive, but did not necessarily here. Tailoring hopscotched from lean and narrow with stovepipe pants, to roomy and elongated to pajama-style ease, some pieces offset by soft layers.
Sportswear cribbed from American archetypes like the taxi driver in a flannel check button-down shirt with an extended collar, and deep, dark black Japanese brushed denim, or the bombshell in a red off-the-shoulder sweetheart dress paired with Western booties. Classical draped jersey and jingly gray enamel sequin embroidered dresses captured the tension between the past and future in eveningwear, and the CK One bottle-shaped clutches were a nice touch.
But outerwear was where Leoni really hit her stride, with the kind of enveloping double-face wool coats Calvin was known for, which looked expensive; crispy trenches, and the showpiece, a cocooning “fur” made from strips of organza sliding off the shoulders in a moment of provocation.
Klein himself agreed, and was quite pleased overall, telling WWD after the show, “I loved it. I loved the coats. I started in coats, and I thought they were so dramatic and inventive and architectural. The tailoring was beautiful. The fabrics are quite wonderful. I loved the dresses too. For a start, it was quite extraordinary.”
