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Fashion Designer: Calvin Klein
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Calvin Klein graduated from
the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1962 at the age of twenty and
then worked five years for the Seventh Avenue manufacturer Dan
Misstein.
When he started his own business in 1968, he concentrated at first on
coats, and by 1969 had landed one cover of Vogue. As of 1971
he had began to experiment with sportswear, designing coatdresses, often
in knits, hot-pants turnouts, jumpsuits, and classic blazer pantsuits
that all shared certain constants of man-tailoring, notably in the way
shirts, jackets, and pants were cut and in the use of topstitching.
He did not neglect coats; these were available in a range from very
casual, made in poplin lined with gingham, to dressier, in tweeds, to
almost formal, in suede trimmed with fox.
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In 1973, the year he won the
first three consecutive Coty awards, Calvin Klein emerged as a top designer
who had his finger on the pulse of American women. Having learned, while
touring the country, that women were becoming more name-concious and
wanted to be able to buy all their clothes from a single designer, he
worked with the concept of a wardrobe of interrelated pieces. One such
grouping, all in the favorite 1970s beige, was composed of silk evening
pants, tank top, shirt jacket, daytime trousers, cardigan sweater, polo
shirt, and coat. With various combinations of these items a woman could
be dressed for any occasion.
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Although Klein designed dresses,
like his 1973 strapless tube of black matte jersey, most of his evening
looks reamined fairly casual. Two-piece dresses were made in silk charmeuse
in lustrous pale tones of beige and burgundy or navy and brown. Often
these dresses featured wrapped blouses, who decolletage the wearer could
adjust to suit her preference. The pieces that wrapped were held in
place by a soft suede belt edged with brass beading or by wider cummerbunds
of woven webbing.
By 1975 Calvin Klein had become a celebrity, and he changed his somewhat
homespun earlier image (a 1973 advertisement quoted him as saying about
his new collection, "I made a lot of things that go with things.")
for a more glamorous one. His advertisements began to feature photographs
by Chris Von Wangenheim, Deborah Turbeville, and Guy Bourdin, who shot a
1976 ad that showed a Calvin Klein silk blouse on a wire hanger, with label
visible at the back of the neck, hanging next to a mirror in which a nude
woman was reflected. More and more, Calvin Klein was trading on the idea
that the appeal of his clothes, simple as they were, lay in the attitude
of the wearer, who affected their look by how far she unbuttoned her shirt,
or what she wore--or didn't wear-- underneath her silk slide of a dress
or her Calvin Klein jeans (his 1980 television ads starring Brooke Shields
would be notorious).
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