Last October, Frances Stein ran into her old friend and boss Calvin Klein in Paris. It had been years since she had seen the designer, who was in the process of selling his company to Phillips-Van Heusen. The next day, they went to see the ''Matisse Picasso'' exhibit at the Grand Palais and afterward went to lunch at a cafe that Stein knew on the Rue de Verneuil. A woman of mercurial chic, who has spent the last 22 years designing accessories for Chanel, Stein first met Klein in the early 1970's when she was an editor at Vogue under Diana Vreeland. Almost a decade earlier, Vreeland, with her usual farsightedness, pushed Stein toward Halston, then a milliner at Bergdorf Goodman. ''Get to know him,'' she said. And Stein did, becoming part of one of fashion's most glamorous circles. Surrounded by his court of Halstonettes, and catering to a new breed of socialite who hung out with rock stars and Pop artists, Halston cultivated an air of superiority that set him apart from the rag-trade ethos of Seventh Avenue, where Klein started out in 1968 as a coat designer. Though friendly with Klein, Halston was privately dismissive of the younger man's talent, once saying, ''I wouldn't know a Calvin Klein from a load of coal.''
In 1976, though, Stein left Vogue to work for Klein. Even then the boyish Klein was a man for the masses. Here was a designer who, when he got on TV to talk about his clothes, didn't try to sound posh or even articulate. He sounded like a guy from the Bronx cruising a girl. ''I like when some girl comes out on the runway,'' he said on a 1979 tape, ''and she looks really sensational, and guys just sit there and die ovvuh huh. Because of the way she looks, because her body, and the way she looks in the clothes. I mean, that really gets me crazy.'' Klein was ''Saturday Night Fever'' without the polyester and the shaking ilium.
Though he may have lacked Halston's fierce talent, and his chops for decadence, Klein had no trouble getting what he wanted from people. ''There's nobody in the whole world more seductive than Calvin when he wants to be seductive,'' Stein says. She spent three years in Klein's studio, with two other design assistants, Zack Carr and John Calcagno, a period both Stein and Calcagno describe as remarkably free and open, when the sensuality that would define Klein's style fully emerged. In fact, it never hit me until now just how good his clothes were in the 70's -- how very nearly a linen skirt or a blouse left casually untied at the neck not only evoked the era's sexual freedom but also transcended the limitations of design.
Given this rich legacy, and the $438 million payoff he was about to receive from Phillips-Van Heusen, Klein must have felt shortchanged by the reaction he got when he and Stein arrived at the cafe and Stein introduced him to the wife of the proprietor as ''my friend Calvin Klein.''
The woman beamed with recognition. ''I wear your underwear, and my son wears your jeans!'' she exclaimed. ''Oh, I know you.''
Stein says: ''Calvin just went green. You know, he is very reserved, but I think he would have preferred that she had said, 'I wear your evening gowns.'''
Klein's fame and his influence on the popular imagination -- from, yes, his underwear and jeans to his Modernist designs and groundbreaking advertisements -- loom large this week as one of the great names in fashion formally steps off the runway. This Tuesday, when the Calvin Klein company presents its spring 2004 collection, Klein will be there, along with Bruce Klatsky, the chief executive of Phillips-Van Heusen, who has already had to live through one embarrassment -- Klein's interruption of a Knicks game in March and his subsequent admission of substance-abuse problems. Though Klein will continue to be involved in the company, Tuesday's kisses and kudos will be showered on the new women's designer at Calvin Klein, 32-year-old Francisco Costa.
In the same way that great ballplayers are remembered hardest for their last trip to bat, the history of fashion is written on the exits. Saint Laurent, whose retirement two years ago provoked front-page tributes and a rush of orders from desolate clients eager to snag a smoking before his couture house closed for good, is said to still go regularly to his office, as if summoned by ghosts. Balenciaga simply closed his doors one day and returned home to Spain, saying nothing. Dior, at least, as the writer Holly Brubach has pointed out, had the good fortune to die while still in his prime, thus sparing himself the fuss but also the prospect of living beyond his time. Klein's exit feels bigger somehow: more reconfiguring, more uncomfortably borne.
Klein's celebrity these last 30 years has not been that of a folk hero, and it's certainly not that of a designer, although he is one. Klein is a pop star. And here is how you can tell. Take that scene in the Paris cafe and transfer it to a mall in Iowa or a hipster pod in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, and the reaction will always be the same: Oh, I know you. By putting his name on two formerly mundane products, underwear and jeans, and surrounding them with an iconography of sex and sensation, Klein blasted out of the small-frame category of fashion. Picking up on the way rappers dressed, he made it cool for white kids to drop their pants. He made it cool for guys to pump up and wax (and long before ''Queer Eye''). And by concentrating all his visual powers on youth, in whatever fix or state of undress it was in, he made America seem cool to the rest of the world.
Paradoxically, Klein -- so good at foreshadowing the power of image and marketing in our time -- did not create an indelible fashion mark, in the way that Giorgio Armani and Saint Laurent did, or even a host of lesser-known talents like Norman Norell and Bonnie Cashin did. To call his clothes ''elegantly modern'' is to describe the style of at least a dozen other designers. But in a way, it wasn't about the clothes. You may not remember the cut of a Calvin Klein jacket, but you will remember Brooke Shields rolling up on her back to talk about her ''Calvins,'' or Kate Moss reclining naked on a sofa in the Obsession ads, or Marky Mark in a crotch grab. In the simplest terms, Klein's genius was to shift the conversation from being one purely about fashion (what I wear) to attitude (how I look). And in doing that, he changed the whole game.
Klein will be 61 in November, and the effects of aging have begun to show. Shortly after the Knicks incident, when a disheveled Klein tried to engage Latrell Sprewell in conversation as Sprewell inbounded the ball, a securities analyst, assessing the damage, told me almost jauntily that a little scandal might be good for Klein's image -- after all, hasn't he been selling controversy in his ads for years? It's true that Klein's ads have sometimes appeared to mock middle-class tastes by presenting images of wasted youth -- none more so than his 1995 ads showing models in compromising positions, which led to accusations of teenage pornography. And it's true that in the 70's Klein built a reputation for sexual adventure that served, if not surpassed, his reputation as a designer. Klein's public record on this subject is not vast, but what he did say, in a 1984 interview in Playboy, is revealing of a young man who sought to test the era's sexual boundaries. ''I stopped at nothing,'' he said. ''I would do anything. I stayed up all night, carried on, lived out fantasies, anything. . . . Anyone I've wanted to be with, I've had.''
But in reality, there is a difference between the liberal, hypercool attitudes expressed in Klein's ads and his own fairly middle-class beliefs. Because Klein is inevitably linked with Halston and Saint Laurent in the social history of the 70's, I asked the writer Bob Colacello, who knew all three, what he remembered about Klein in that period. He says: ''I first met Calvin in the early 70's, when he was married to his first wife, Jayne. They were this cute young couple from Forest Hills. I don't think his personality has changed. Because he hasn't changed, because he's kept up this kind of middle-class core, Calvin has a greater sense of self-survival than either Halston or Yves did. Yves and Halston saw decadence as a good thing. Yves sits and reads Proust all day. And that's not Calvin. Calvin still has those bourgeois values, and they have saved him.''
I would venture that for many people, Klein will also be remembered longer than Saint Laurent or Halston, simply because he is the first designer who entered into their lives in a real way. He was the first American designer to become household-name famous. I don't mean the kind of fame that the older generation of designers, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta, found in the 60's by putting their names on sheets and turning up the baronial charm at the auto show. I mean the kind of name-fame, just three syllables, that rolls around in the brain like a marble in the overhead and instantly clicks with millions of people: CAL-vin KLEIN. He was to experience a celebrity not previously enjoyed by designers -- when your name becomes a verb (''Calvinize'') and a cultural tag line (the joke stitched into Michael J. Fox's underwear in the 1985 movie ''Back to the Future''). Abroad, only Giorgio Armani has achieved that kind of status. In this country, there is also Ralph Lauren. But I would argue that Lauren, while building a bigger business than Klein's (twice the size, in fact), does not have Klein's popular reach, because his style is based on a nostalgic ideal of the Establishment -- Newport, the Adirondack camp, the little polo player -- rather than on democratic tastes. Klein's great strength (and also his weakness) is that for the last 35 years, through every social change and gyration, he has been focused on What's New. It has kept him on the edge and on the mental screens of millions of people.
Just as his name was starting to sink in, Klein blitzed the world with his advertising. Beginning in 1980, with his jeans ads featuring a 15-year-old Shields purring the come-on ''Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing,'' Klein created some of the most exciting, enduring and sexually explicit ads the public has seen. At one time or another, he has managed to offend Women Against Pornography, the American Family Association, Gloria Steinem and Bill Clinton (who had some issues of his own, but never mind). He has touched on, if not promoted, promiscuity and heroin chic -- while working, as I say, in the ethos of Seventh Avenue, at 205 West 39th Street, where the only concern is making sure that Bloomingdale's gets its stink water and underpants on time. And by hiring and giving creative freedom to photographers like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Bruce Weber, Guy Bourdin, Herb Ritts and Steven Meisel, Klein has done more than any other fashion designer, living or dead, to contribute to the canon of photography.
''He just had a hunger, and I always thought that hunger was his great talent,'' Weber says. Weber, whose image of the Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus in a pair of Y-front Calvin briefs set off a wave of outrage and grins when it appeared in 1983 on a billboard above Times Square, tells a story that says a great deal about how Klein thinks. In the early 80's, Weber got a call from Klein's office asking him to come and see him. When Weber got there, Klein introduced him to a model named Romeo. ''Calvin said, 'And if you don't like him, you won't get the job,''' Weber recalls with a laugh. Fortunately this was no problem: Romeo looked like James Dean. But, as Weber says, ''it was kind of a new way of talking to people -- it was very intimate.''
Klein's ads (thanks in no small part to Avedon's images) spoke with a frankness that thrilled young people and agitated adults. (The three major network affiliates in New York banned some of the ads as sociologists and feminists picked them apart for signs of cultural rot. There was none, of course: only a bottomless pit of money.) Sam Shahid, who was Klein's advertising director in the 80's, recalls some advice the advertising legend Jay Chiat gave Klein: ''He said to Calvin, 'Ralph owns romance. You own sex. Never lose it.'''
Klein has also done a lot to further a minimalist aesthetic in America through his clothes, but even more so through his homes and his Madison Avenue store, which was designed by the British architect John Pawson. (Klein has been working for a couple of years on a new apartment in the Richard Meier building on Perry Street in Manhattan and recently bought a 60-room pile in Southampton.) But he has never approached design with much intellectual depth or gravitas. He grew up with a brother and a sister in the Mosholu Parkway section of the Bronx, a middle-class, predominantly Jewish neighborhood, where his father ran a grocery store. Klein's business partner, Barry Schwartz, was his best friend then and is still his best friend. But while Klein received plenty of encouragement from his parents, and went on frequent trips to Loehmann's, there is little evidence in the record that suggests he read books or went to museums or even, like his neighbor Ralph Lauren, cared about the movies. Early in his career, Klein sought out mentors whose taste he admired and whose approval he needed. One was Nicolas de Gunzburg, who, far more significant (to a hungry young designer) than being an editor at Vogue and the son of a Russian aristocrat, always wore the same style of dark suit, black tie, white shirt and black shoes -- a modern uniform.
In a sense, Klein has been both sponge and squeegee -- absorbing what he needs and scraping off the excess. But it's always a surface accomplishment. John Calcagno told me that for one collection in the 70's they mixed together blueberries and yogurt to get the right color. ''I always remember Calvin saying, 'We've got to have fun,''' Calcagno says, adding: ''I think he loved coming to work every day and looking at beautiful things. He'd say, 'Oh, my God, I've never seen anything so beautiful.''' And, in another story from the 80's, Weber recalled a car trip he and Klein made to visit the reclusive painter Georgia O'Keeffe at her ranch in New Mexico. Klein didn't seem especially moved, Weber says, when he pointed out the place where Ansel Adams made his famous photograph ''Moonrise Over Hernandez,'' but at the ranch Klein connected with O'Keeffe. ''Calvin said to her: 'You're no dummy. You knew it was all right to wear the same thing with the Calder pin,''' Weber says. ''She just laughed. Nobody had ever talked to her that intimately.''
Klein's boyish good looks and his affecting modesty -- qualities that were not commonly associated with the arrogant world of fashion -- endeared him to the mostly female ranks of fashion journalists, who, despite his penchant for copying other designers, were to be helpful to him at the beginning of his career. ''Sometimes people look at a coat I made and scream, 'It's great!' and I wonder, What can be great about designing fashion?'' Klein said in a 1969 interview, as he played on the floor of his Queens apartment with his daughter, Marci, then 2. ''Being a doctor, now that's great.'' The illustrator Joe Eula recalls complaining to Vreeland while she was still at Vogue that Klein was just a copy artist, and why did he have to sketch his clothes for the magazine? ''You've got to go to the backbone!'' Vreeland is said to have bellowed. ''He's America!'' And in a sense, she was right. Klein gave American women what they wanted, just as Blass, who could modify a Givenchy coat with the best of them, had done.
Also in the early 70's, a lot of clothing was cheap and badly made and littered with stuff, like the beach at Coney Island rammed by a garbage scow. So a pretty cotton dress suddenly looked like the height of chic. It wasn't as if Klein was the first designer to do simple clothes in subtle colors, of course; Jacques Tiffeau, John Anthony and Claire McCardell come to mind. But Klein, I think, did something that set him apart, at least in the 70's. He focused on the attitude of the woman -- the way she wore her clothes and what little gesture might tell a man she was interested or to get lost. Today this notion has reached a kind of cynical crescendo in the age of Tom Ford and John Galliano -- everybody's got attitude! -- but at the dawn of disco and women's lib, it was a new thing, and Klein captured its first glimmer, in mist-gray pajama pants with a keyhole top winking open over a mahogany-brown bra. Then, to back everything up, he hired print models for his shows rather than the usual runway creepers -- new girls like Patti Hansen and Lisa Taylor, who were already becoming stars because of the photographers.
But if there is a ding in Klein's career, a hollowness, it is that in focusing relentlessly on the new, and often using other designers' work as a graft, he has left few distinguishing marks of his own. One quality of a great designer (and even a few mediocre designers) is that you can apprehend in a second what they stand for: Dior (belle époque romance), Saint Laurent (a sharp shoulder), Armani (the unconstructed jacket), Norell (sequined mermaids). But with Klein, you can't do that. There are only tracery adjectives: ''pure,'' ''clean,'' ''unfussy.''
Critics in the 90's often complained that Klein's clothes looked derivative, first of Armani, then Helmut Lang and Miuccia Prada. Former assistants told me of racks of clothes, by Armani and others, being brought into the studio for sampling, and a former associate, who worked with Klein on his men's wear license, described an episode in which Klein, facing a deadline and apparently at a loss for ideas, sent an assistant out to Banana Republic to buy a pair of cargo pants. Klein's need to be relevant and, at the same time, to run a business built largely on jeans and underwear, no doubt put him under extreme pressure. But it also led to almost comical situations. One day, while walking down Fifth Avenue across from Bergdorf Goodman, Armani noticed that the store had given him the windows. Surprised that he hadn't been informed of this honor, he bobbed over for a closer look. The clothes were Klein's.
A retailing chief who has followed Klein's career for 20 years told me: ''He's the guy who created something with the jeans, who exploded the business among a generation of people. But there's a sense of 'Who's Calvin?' When you boil down what he's done, it's the lowest common denominator -- jeans, fragrance and underwear. But above that, everything's boiled away.''
Really? It seems to me that if Saint Laurent is the battlefield upon which a generation of great fashion was born, Klein is the sky arching over it. It is a bigger view, modern in its expansiveness, and not as complicated or bloody. For what Klein perceived, consciously or not, was that people would be satisfied with the vapor -- a trail of sex, a bit of glamour -- while they found their own way through fashion. In that, there is permanence enough.
Below are CK comercials from the 1990s to 2011. Based on what you have read and what you are about to watch, Klein have a reputation and look he is known for. 1. It is casual, sophisticated, couture? 2. Identify the focus of Klein's campaigns? 3. Overall, summarize what has inspired Klein in his design: his background, where he grew up and some of the prominent garments, ads and personality flaws he is not only known for but have made him a household name in fashion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wB0LK8ro0c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZxbHkt4mog
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyAMJ-QvuUU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK2VZgJ4AoM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_1QLYxiDj4&feature=related
