Of her third runway show for Calvin Klein, Veronica Leoni said, “this season was a deep dive into what Calvin was… We wanted to go back to the late ’70s, early ’80s when he was starting to build up the foundation of the Calvin Klein collection. I think he was so unapologetic and so radical at the time, and I felt there was a lot to say and explore about it.”
Her moodboard was pinned with dozens of photographs from those years. Klein was a prolific imagemaker and brand builder, putting his name on and promoting hosiery, furs, and swimwear in addition to the denim, underwear, and fragrances we still know today. The pictures are decades old, but they still resonate powerfully in 2026 for their clean modernity and for their subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, eroticism.
Leoni’s remit is rebuilding Collection, the highest end of the Calvin Klein brand pyramid, which was paused in the years after Raf Simons’s exit. It hasn’t been the smoothest of entries as she feels her way into the sensual minimalism Klein was known for. Leoni has leaned conceptual where Calvin was clean, and she has a proclivity for layering while the house founder was a believer in reduction.
The reinvention of a pair of circa 1976 jeans with a leather patch on the back pocket featuring a cursive version of the logo was a promising development. Daily pieces that are identifiable enough to be desirable are the building blocks of any brand, and denim, the most everyday of materials, is a good place to start. The cursive logo became a recurring refrain, most charmingly on a leather bomber worn over a sharp black satin tux that showed off Leoni’s skills as a tailor.
The everyday Calvin Klein aesthetic of a slightly more recent era, the 1990s, is newly on view in “Love Story,” the Ryan Murphy-produced series exploring JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s romance. Bessette Kennedy was a Calvin Klein publicist, and a de facto ambassador for the brand, in the simplest of button-downs, pencil skirts or kick flare pants, and strapless sheaths. CBK, as she’s come to be known in internet parlance, is an icon to the young generations who grew up on photographs of her. The winning formula for the brand just might be right there on the TV.
