Can Calvin Klein reinvent ‘sexy’?

NEW YORK – Veronica Leoni,

the new creative director of Calvin Klein Collection

, has been thinking a lot about sex recently. Or not sex, exactly, but the attitude of being comfortable with sex and your own sexuality. What she calls “sexitude”.

A few weeks before her debut show, which happened to be the most anticipated of the recently concluded New York Fashion Week, she was standing at a table in the Calvin Klein archive in Long Island City.

The 5,000-plus sq ft storage unit contains nearly every Calvin Klein runway garment ever created from the first show until now, as well as relics such as the namesake American designer’s 1996 Barbie doll and his original Rolodex.

It also contains notes on his famous clients and what discount they each received, and all the outtakes of his old advertising campaigns.

Leoni was flipping through some photos from the first CK One advertisement campaign, shot by Steven Meisel in 1994 – the one with a gang of disaffected girls and boys, including models Stella Tennant, Jenny Shimizu and Kate Moss, in various states of grungy undress: topless, dropping trou, otherwise exposed.

The images, Leoni said, had sexitude. So did a slithery slip dress from around the same era, hanging on a rack.

That was the era when Calvin Klein, which Klein founded in 1968, turned into a global juggernaut, built on the foundation of a hedonistic minimalism.

His clothes were stripped down because, they suggested, that made it easier to strip down. No one else was as good at turning sportswear into provocation.

Jeans and underwear may have been the popular extensions of that idea, the pulse-raising ad campaigns its overt expression, but neither offered anything near as subtle a come-on as the clothes. It made a seat at his show, well, the hottest ticket in New York.

It is that sexitude, as far as Leoni is concerned, that has been missing from the New York runways for a while now. And not just because Calvin Klein has been missing from the New York runways for more than six years, when Belgium’s Raf Simons, the previous creative director, was fired and the company announced it was abandoning the high-end collection to focus on jeans and influencers.

Rather, it is missing because since 2002, when Klein sold his company to PVH and retired, the sense of unapologetic hunger that suffused his provocative ad campaigns as thoroughly as it did a tailored coat, had faded away.

The designers who designed for the brand after him focused on a more minimalist elegance (Francisco Costa and Italo Zucchelli, 2004 until 2016) and a dark mirror take on the American dream (Simons).

The lust was left to the traffic-stopping underwear billboards.

Leoni, who will be the first woman to lead Calvin Klein, wants to see that sense of libido in a sensuous pair of trousers or a pencil skirt.

To do that, she wants to take it back to the source. To “glue myself to Calvin’s last day of work”, she said, but then to “flip the perspective”.

“Most of the time, we see women as objects of desire,” she said. “But what if they become the people who desire?”

Leoni, who is Italian, 41 and about 1.62m tall, and looks like a sprite with a penchant for rockabilly on her way to an architecture convention, was not the obvious choice to be the new mastermind of Calvin Klein.

Though she had stints at Jil Sander (under Jil Sander), Celine (under Phoebe Philo), Moncler and The Row, started her own brand Quira in 2021 and was a finalist for the LVMH Prize in 2023, she had never run a major international house.

Outside the fashion world, she is relatively unknown. And though she had impeccable minimalist credentials, she had not exactly demonstrated a fluency with the racier side of dress.

“It was my biggest reservation,” said Ms Karen Harvey, founder of a namesake consulting firm and the headhunter who had recommended Leoni for the job.

“Could she bring that sexuality? Because we couldn’t leave that out. And I came to think she would actually reinvent it. So, she was a risk, but Calvin was known for being bold.”

Leoni understood the hesitation. “A European project would have been a more obvious match,” she said, “but this is more twisted.”

She likes twisted. Besides, she is a child of the 1990s, which means she identifies as a child of Calvin Klein. “In a sense, Calvin was always with me,” she said. “I’m the CK One generation.”

As a girl, she said: “I really felt that Calvin Klein, especially from the European point of view, was this major fantasy of a faraway world where everybody was cool and, you know, so Calvin.”

Even though Calvin Klein’s management has somewhat hedged its bets – Leoni is in charge only of Collection, the high-end, runway part of the business, rather than the Jeremy Allen White jeans part of the business – and even though she has to produce only two collections a year, for spring and autumn, she is beginning to feel the pressure.

The idea, said Ms Eva Serrano, global brand president of Calvin Klein, is to have Leoni’s work trickle down to set the pace and direction for everything else.

“The chance to have my vision of life on such a huge platform is actually thrilling,” Leoni said. “I want to own the black turtleneck business.”

She showed both menswear and womenswear at New York Fashion Week, but the collection is not unisex. “I really feel that unisex is just sloppy fitting,” she said. “Bodies are different.”

It also does not involve street style or oversize silhouettes.

“It’s very scary to strip back,” she said, “because the king is naked when it’s just about clothes. You really have to have confidence to let people hear the noise of the fabric when they walk, and see the inside of a jacket.”

But it also creates the sense of intimacy she wants, the bit of implicit peekaboo. Corsets and push-ups and visible packages are not the only things that suggest physical hunger.

“It is more about finding a certain posture, a certain body attitude,” Leoni said. “There are no shoulder pads. Sometimes, tailoring shapes the body, but I wanted the body to shape the tailoring.”

She is comfortable expressing her wants.

For example, clothes that seemed easy for anyone to shrug on and off. Like a pencil skirt with no side seams, so it can be wiggled into; a sheer spaghetti-strap top with straps that are mere filaments, so it almost seems suspended on the torso. She wanted material that felt good sliding around on the skin, like “silk that is smooth and super peachy”.

Above all, she said, she wanted “Calvin to be the magnet the conversation revolves around”.

“I want it to become an adjective,” she said. “‘It’s very Calvin.’ That’s the goal.” NYTIMES