Calvin Klein’s First Coffee-Table Book Is R-Rated History – The New York Times

It’s hard to talk about sex and fashion these days, or sex and modeling, or sex and ad campaigns, without a post-Weinstein lens on it all. Every discussion, every photo, looks different — potentially suspect. Yet sex has been a fundamental tool in the selling of fashion for years.

And no one wielded it more effectively than Calvin Klein. In a pre-internet world, he built a global brand on the power of astonishingly provocative imagery. Before there was such a thing as going viral, his ad campaigns did it anyway, born on tides of outrage and, well, obsessive looking. Grappling with that is part of understanding of how we got to here.

Why is clear in a new coffee-table book, a 9½-pound, 463-page $150 tome, the first written and compiled by Mr. Klein. Three years in the making, it was whittled down from 40,000 images created over a career that lasted more than 30 years.

It’s an eye-opening statement from a man who has been relatively mum on both the subject of his own career and the fashion world in general since he retired in 2004. At age 60, he sold his company to PVH, later cutting his ties with the brand that bears his name (now designed by Raf Simons). The book is a series of reminders not just of the clothes Mr. Klein made, and the debt today’s fashion minimalists owe him, but also of the disruption he caused and the way it shaped our attitudes and expectations.