New York doesn’t often have the kind of debuts it saw today. In fact, the last time a room buzzed like 205 West 39th Street did this afternoon was when Raf Simons got his own big chance at Calvin Klein back in 2017. Such is the brand’s mystique. It’s a rare American fashion company that transcends popular culture—that has actually become popular culture—but Calvin Klein is one of them. And with the 82-year-old designer himself in the building, kissing Kate Moss and Christy Turlington hello and greeting reporters and stylists, some of whom hadn’t seen him in the two decades since he retired, there was a heightened sense of anticipation about the label’s return to the runway after a six-year gap.
Enter Veronica Leoni, an Italian 41-year-old with a string of behind-the-scenes gigs at Jil Sander, Phoebe Philo’s Celine, and The Row, brands that occupy the minimalist, tailoring-focused space that Klein shaped and defined in his heyday. She also had a label of her own, Quira, which she put on hold for a chance to creative direct for the first time, becoming the first woman to helm the brand in the process.
Klein’s presence at the show suggested what Leoni’s approach might be: respectful and true to the founder’s legacy. Archives are usually the big story in brand renovations like these, but the single item Leoni pulled from Calvin Klein’s back catalog was a slingback ballerina flat. She said she wanted to design more on instinct.
“I really tried to connect with his original energy and we really tried to explore a 24/7 wardrobe, to give it a cinematic and a real reality,” she said at a preview. She opened with tailoring that glanced back at the 1990s, like a dove gray collarless jacket and matching pencil skirt cut to the knee, and worked her way through essentials for both women and men—sturdy mackintoshes and trenches, a neat little crewneck and button-down tucked into skinny pants, and relaxed denim—before concluding with voluminous drapey jersey dresses and a wrap-front tuxedo for evening.
What previous interpreters of the brand’s legacy have tended to miss is the sensuality of Calvin Klein’s minimalism. Costa’s was dry, Simons’s wasn’t really minimal at all. Leoni’s previous experience might’ve suggested that she too would struggle with the hotter side of Calvin’s pure/provocative dynamic. In the business, acolytes of Jil Sander, #oldCeline, and The Row are called fashion nuns for a reason. If the collection never quite reached the level of sexy, it certainly raised the pulse. What elevated this debut, and gave it its potential, was the carefully considered shift in silhouette Leoni maneuvered.
“The skinny silhouette—it was very interesting for me, and quite refreshing compared to what I was coming from, and we will mix a little bit of that with a cropped knee-length, very sharp silhouette,” said Leoni. The mark of a great designer, like Leoni’s onetime boss Phoebe Philo, say, is the ability to define a new proportion and change the way we think about getting dressed. There was an inkling of that here. And a knack for a cult object; the CK One bottle-shaped evening bags were a clever idea.
At that preview, Leoni was wearing a pair of antique gold embroidery scissors tied around her neck with kitchen string. They were no vestigial accessory judging by the make of the clothes, which on close-up inspection looked thoughtful and exacting. The real measure, of course, will be taken in the stores, but Klein himself weighed in with his take. Speaking to a fellow reporter after the show, he said, “For a start, it’s pretty extraordinary.”
