FASHION FORWARD?
CALVIN KLEIN DIRECTOR COULD BE KEY
NEW YORK — In a nondescript office building on West 39th Street, behind key-card-locked doors and a stack of nondisclosure agreements, Raf Simons is at work, rebuilding the house of Calvin Klein.
Calvin Klein’s is a name so famous as to have earned pride of place on underwear bands the world over. Maybe yours. Klein was, in the words of The New York Times, a “pop star” and “the first American designer to become householdname famous.” That name is synonymous with American fashion design in the 20th century, part of a small, onename pantheon that includes Ralph (Lauren), Donna (Karan) and Oscar (de la Renta).
His forte was sportswear: easy, effortless clothes, later expanded to include blockbuster underwear and jeans. But you knew that. It w more than 30 years ago when a young Brooke Shields cooed that nothing comes between her and her Calvins. She did not need to specify which Calvin.
Simons, although by no means unknown, is not Calvin. His name, Raf (rhymes with “laugh,” with a rolled Flemish R), is invoked with adoration in high-fashion circles. But even after a successful stint as the artistic director of Christian Dior, he has arrived in New York with less name recognition among the public. His task is to bring energy and excitement back to Calvin Klein — and back, by extension, to New York fashion.
“I think it’s very exciting for New York to have someon of his caliber come here,” said Grace Coddington, the creative director at large of Vogue, who first came to the United States as a design director for Calvin Klein in the 1980s.
In recent years, New York fashion and especially New York Fashion Week have been dogged by a reputation for spotlighting both too much and not enough. The city’s relatively democratic show schedule packed a couple of hundred runway shows and presentations into a “week” stretching to eight days or more, but much of it has not been considered on par with what is shown in Milan or Paris. “The New York shows have often felt slightly odd to the Europeans, I think,” said Gert Jonkers, a founder of the magazines “Fantastic Man” and “The Gentlewoman,” who has not attended New York shows in several years. “It’s a busy schedule, but with a lot of things that don’t speak to us. I won’t fly trans-Atlantic for one or two seven-minute shows. I know there are other shows in New York, but I just don’t feel the urgency.” Simons, 49, considered one of the great designers of his eneration, is well positioned to ratchet up that urgency. From the obscure perch of is own Raf Simons menswear abel, he won over critics in aris in the late 1990s and early ughts. Cathy Horyn, then the ashion critic of The Times and ne of Simons’ most enduring upporters, wrote in 2004 that n all her years reporting on ashion, she had “stood up from only a handful of shows with a conviction that everything had been transformed.” Simons’ was one. Yet he maintained such a low profile that when he was named the creative director of Jil Sander in 2005, many in the industry hardly knew who he was. Simons breathed new life into Jil Sander, and after six years there, as Sander returned, he joined Dior, ascending to one of the highest mounts of Parisian ready-to-wear and haute couture. He stabilized Dior, ocked by L’Affaire Galliano — John Galliano, its previous esigner, went on a drunken, nti-Semitic public tirade that cost him his job and tarnished Dior’s image — and won the support of consumers (sales rose 60 percent under his tenure), the press and Hollywood. (It was one of Simons’ Dior gowns that tripped Jennifer Lawrence on her way to accept her Oscar.)
He left Dior in 2015, citing the breakneck pace required to keep up with so many collections and shows each year.
Yet the pace is only likely to quicken for Simons, who has relocated from Antwerp, Belgium, a city small enough that its fledgling designers count seeing him at the supermarket as a celebrity sighting, to Manhattan, with a mandate to revivify Calvin Klein. He has been given complete creative control, of a type not seen since Klein and his partner, Barry Schwartz, sold the company to the Phillips-Van Heusen Corp. in 2002; Klein stepped down from design the next year.
Simons has oversight of all of the many categories and varieties of products that bear the brand name, from the highend Calvin Klein Collection and the lower-priced apparel and accessories carried at malls and Macy’s, to underwear, jeans and fragrances (both for men and women), as well as home goods.
hasAs if importedthis were his namesake Raf not enough, he and SimonsCalvin keeps Klein menswear collectiona studio for it in theheadquarters.
After showing in Paris for some 20 years, Simons presented the collection last week during the menswear shows in New York, where he was received as a conquering hero.
“I never really thought it over from the point of view that I would possibly be the activator for New York: Men’s or the savior for New York: Men’s,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “But I would be more than
happy if I could be a help.”
Simons was indeed a help, and his addition to the men’s fashion schedule increased registration and attendance, said Steven Kolb, the chief executive of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which organizes the New York shows.
“We’re all incredibly excited to see what he does for that brand,” said Glenda Bailey, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar. “It is a real highlight on our calendar, and I know that several of the international editors are coming in, wanting to get here for Calvin.”
The draw could hardly come at a better time. New York Fashion Week has lately been subject to high-level defections of homegrown talent. Several companies, including Tommy Hilfiger, opted to show in Los Angeles rather than in New York this season, and three of New York Fashion Week’s most respected labels are moving their shows to Paris — Rodarte and Hood by Air as of this season, and Proenza Schouler as of next.
“New York definitely needs some excitement,” said Jennifer Sunwoo, the executive vice president and general merchandise manager for womenswear at Barneys New York.
Simons is, in a se unusual person to p is serious, intense an spoken, more discu less known by many fashion establishmet than his more bombastic peers. He keeps close, near cloistered company, inner circle that he h imported with him Calvin Klein.
That includes devoted staff, including Pieter Mulier, his longtime No. 2 and now the creative director of Calvin Klein; Mulier’s boyfriend, Matthieu Blazy, the design director of women’s readyto-wear; and Simons’ boyfriend, Jean-Georges d’Orazio, now a senior director of “brand experience.” He is also continuin to collaborate with like Sterling Ruby, who once worked with Simons on a collection and has been spotted at the Calvin Klein studios, and photographer/stylist duo Willy Vanderperre and Olivier Rizzo, friends from their days at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, who have worked with him on Calvin Klein’s new advertising campaigns.
Advertising may seem an ephemeral marker of change, but few were as aware of its power and potential as Klein himself. Many of the ads the fashion world considers iconic were manufactured at Klein’s in-house CRK Advertising studio: Kate Moss, nude, at her heroin chicest; Mark Wahlberg, then known as Marky Mark, grabbing his groin through boxer briefs.
The new ad campaign, appearing now, features models in their underpants, just as many of Klein’s most provocative did. But Simons runs cool where Klein ran hot. In one shot, photographed at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, they gaze, backs to the camera, at a canvas by Ruby. Klein’s models were barely contained by their Calvins, courting scandal and the occasional recall; Simons’ are gawky in the European high-fashion style and barely fill theirs out. Another campaign, for Calvin Klein By Appointment, offsets dresses made to order — a sort of American sportswear version of couture — with flat shots of a pair of classic white Calvin Klein briefs. “I thought it was interesting they put the underwear in every other photograph — the iconic thing he’s known for,” said Sam Shahid, the veteran art director who ran CRK Advertising during the ‘80s and early ‘90s. “But I’m not sure it’s Calvin. It doesn’t have the same sensuality or sexuality. It doesn’t have the physicality Calvin always had. It’s more like Raf Simons.” Of course, more like Raf Simons is, in part, exactly what ein’s parent s. Simons has e keys to the he hope that rate a brand 2 billion in sales n by many as o diffuse. g for luxury rs to believe in t is another the general nsumer, who may not be aware f him. Calvin Klein Collection has historically eceived the k of press verage and the spotlight offered runway shows t accounts for a all percentage of company’s sales. We used to that that whole ness was smoke mirrors,” said a r employee, who to speak on the iting continuing relationships.