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Movie-going teens in 1985 catching the summer blockbuster Back to the Future walked out of theaters sure of two things: the possibility of time travel and the coolness of Calvin Klein underwear. Of all the futuristic wonders Marty McFly could bring back to 1955, his purple Calvin Kleins were the ultimate.

Calvin Klein got his start in spring of 1968, when he wheeled a rack of samples to a meeting with the head of Bonwit Teller & Co. By fall, the promising young designer had full run of the store’s Fifth Avenue windows, and by Christmas he and his business partner, Barry K. Schwartz, were toasting $1 million in sales.

Within five years, Klein had won his first Coty in 1973 for creating a new category of clean, modern sportswear. But it was his move into the fledgling designer jeans market that put his name on the lips of the entire nation. When Richard Avedon’s innuendo-laced TV spots—featuring an adolescent Brooke Shields poured into Calvin Klein jeans (“The tighter they are, the better they sell,” noted a company spokesman)—aired in 1980, sales hit 2 million pairs a month.

With the blockbuster fragrance Obsession, in 1985, Klein furthered his reach. The smash scent was followed by 1988’s Eternity, with ads starring the ethereal beauty Christy Turlington, and, later, by CK One, a unisex fragrance released to complement Klein’s casual CK sportswear line. And his campaigns continued to stir up as much controversy as the Avedon/Shields spots.

Millions were spent on print and TV ads for Klein’s multitude of brands, many starring the scorching-hot Brit model Kate Moss. The powder to Moss’s keg was the rapper Marky Mark, known for “dropping trou” onstage—what better way to show off your Calvins?

In 2003, shortly after Klein and Schwartz sold their company to the shirt giant Phillips-Van Heusen, the designer handed the women’s ready-to-wear reins to Francisco Costa, a Brazilian who had learned the ropes at Oscar de la Renta. Costa carried on Klein’s minimalist ethos while branding the house with his own arty signatures until April 2016. In August 2016, Belgian designer Raf Simons was named the company’s chief creative officer, overseeing creative for the entire brand including women’s, men’s, jeanswear, underwear, and fragrance.