At Calvin Klein, designer Raf Simons helps an American brand find its way
Raf Simons’ show for Calvin Klein at New York Fashion Week – his first since leaving Dior – touches on American politics and pop culture
Calvin Klein is renewed. The nearly 50-year-old American brand famous for jeans and underwear looks youthful – but not immature – sharp and relevant.
Raf Simons, the brand’s new chief creative officer, has situated the label in the centre of a cultural conversation – not simply one focused on fashion but one that includes the arts, politics and national identity.
So much can bubble up when an outsider takes a look at America – its reality, the cliches and the mythology – and allows all of those contradictory and complimentary notions to churn through his imagination. That’s what Simons did for his debut men’s and women’s collections at Calvin Klein. And the result was a captivating presentation that avoided rehashing the corrosive political anger of the day and instead explored the melancholy our politics has stirred up.
Artful, contemplative and pointed, Simons’s collection for fall 2017 used fashion – Western shirts, heirloom quilts, sharp tailoring, blue jeans – as a rich vocabulary for nuanced storytelling. For unwinding a narrative about America as an ideal, rather than a place.
But Simons also excelled at a designer’s most fundamental – most difficult – job: He created desirable, inventive clothes.
His reputation as a minimalist with an affinity for street culture and a love for the visual arts seemed a perfect fit at an American brand, founded in 1968, that transformed blue jeans and underwear into sexual foreplay, stirred outrage from shopping malls to Capitol Hill when it sexualised youth culture and delighted the eye with its red carpet creations.
Simons’ Friday morning show was set in the heart of the Garment District, where the grit and grime are reminders of the gruelling reality of fashion.