Calvin to the Core

The playing with fabrics and their erotic possibilities that was so critical to the ready-to-wear fashion also cropped up in the marketing of the jeans—Klein’s first masterstroke of many as an advertiser. “The first thing we did were those Brooke Shields commercials,” he says, “and they caught on like crazy.” I’ll say. It’s difficult to think of another series of ads that kicked up as big a brouhaha as did Richard Avedon’s 1980 TV commercial featuring a 15-year-old Shields looking directly into the camera and asking, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” Nearly 30 years later it’s not difficult to understand why this ad—in which Shields was dressed in a loose charmeuse shirt, which Klein describes as “the color of liquid,” and a pair of his jeans—created such a kerfuffle. This was an early iteration of the fashion world’s now perennial theme of the girl-woman, both innocent and sexual. (The fact that Shields had played a pre-pubescent prostitute in Louis Malle’s film Pretty Baby a couple of years earlier surely added fuel to the fire.) The other commercials in the series continued to pivot on double entendres—in one, Shields recites a monologue about genes; in another, she defines what it means to be “Calvinized.” All of that imagery became “indelible,” as Shields herself says. “There was an iconic tone to it,” the actress notes. “I don’t think you can really know that at the time, because it feels like that type of vision is after the fact. But [the response] was immediate. It was me and the jeans. We were inseparable. I didn’t do a television show without that being in my bio. I didn’t go on the street without somebody saying, ‘Got your Calvins on?’ People still come up to me and mention it.”

The images and the surrounding controversies got both actress and designer on the cover of People magazine in 1982; the designer took her for a celebration party at Studio 54. She remembers him being very protective of her.

He was less careful about himself in those years. While Klein walked away from the Studio era a much more famous, wealthy man, he also walked away with a taste for more than H2O. These days he is comfortable talking about how that period has a role in the etiology of his history with addiction. Klein remembers, “I was experimenting during that time. I didn’t think it was bad. I didn’t know I was doing something that could really be damaging. We would tell each other, ‘In South America they always do cocaine’—silly things like that.” During another of our conversations Klein returned to the theme of his carefree youth. “I burned the candle at both ends. When you’re young you can do that to a certain degree. I learned that I could not do it. I learned the hard way, and I paid a price. It was all new. I just didn’t know any better.” He pauses, then offers a kind of explanation, both for himself and for his set. “The thing is we were successful. We managed to be very high-functioning people. So that was a source of denial.”

When he says he was high-functioning, he isn’t kidding. No matter the chemical alterations to his system, he remained fully in charge at the company. “The thing that really connected me to Calvin is I knew how much he loved his work,” says Bruce Weber, the photographer who has shot so many of the label’s most memorable ads. “He could be out all night and might not go home, but he was in that office, on time, ready to go. That made me want to have that same drive for his work.” Klein’s ability to motivate people created not just a pride in the company—in the fashion, the campaigns, the new product lines—but an atmosphere of seductive excitement surrounding the designer himself. “We were all in love with Calvin,” says Calcagno, “as were all the editors. He was the most seductive person. You wanted to please him. Men, women, everyone.”

Klein certainly made good use of his charms. “He was one of the first designers to be treated as a movie star,” says Weber. “We used to hear all these stories about him. He’d be dating one of the girls and then some guy he met. He was really open about himself. He didn’t hide things. And that’s likable.” Indeed, this sexual ambiguity shows up loud and clear in the erotically charged imagery that Klein and Weber created together—which is what made the pictures reverberate so much with the times. Klein says, “You can see a photograph that Bruce Weber did which said a lot about my life. It was in 1985 for the fragrance Obsession, and [the model] Josie Borain was in it. I was obsessed with her. She was such an interesting woman and not an obvious sexpot, androgynous in a certain way but so fine and classy. In the ads there are arms and hands and all of these body parts all over her. You didn’t know if they were men or women. You didn’t know how many of them there were. But it got your mind going. That was a period of time when sex was everywhere, as were drugs. Not for everyone, of course. I’ve experienced—and I’ve said it before—a lot of my fantasies. I’ve experienced sex with men, with women. I’ve fallen in love with women. I’ve married women. And I have a family. I have experienced lots of things that have influenced my world. I am for good or bad a real example of whatever I’ve put out there. [The imagery] really is a part of me. And it happened because I was either observing or living in a certain way, or desiring to. It’s not something where we tried to say, Well, let’s outdo the other people and see if we can be more outrageous. It was real.”

Klein’s way of discussing his personal life—and entwining it with his work life—is emblematic of him. He’s not someone who kisses and tells; he’ll talk about the gist but not the details. As he told Playboy in 1984, “I think it’s more fun if you have the reputation and people don’t know everything—a little mystery isn’t so bad.” I believe there’s more to this, and it has to do with an incident that reinforced Klein’s fundamentally discreet nature. Thirty years later he still describes the day in 1978 that Marci, then 11, was kidnapped as the worst day of his life. The actual event sounds like something out of a frightening movie: Marci tricked off a school bus by a former babysitter, who had set up the scam with two accomplices; Calvin dropping off the $100,000 ransom, then going to rescue his child from the apartment where she’d been held (and, before it was over, being mistaken for one of the kidnappers by a huge F.B.I. squad). Marci remembers: “All of a sudden I hear him screaming my name. I hear him banging, banging, banging on all these doors.” Klein was in the hallway of the building where Marci had been left, but the kidnappers had given him the wrong apartment number. “I ran out and I saw him and I jumped into his arms. I’ve never felt so safe in my life.” Marci says they didn’t talk about what happened for years, and when they finally discussed it her father welled up with tears. For his part, Klein remembers, “That was a nightmare that changed our lives a great deal.” It certainly made him hyperconscious of the pitfalls of being a public person and having one’s life on display. “Let’s face it,” says Marci. “This is a guy from the Bronx. This was not what he thought was going to happen in his life, which has something to do with the way he is.”

By 1981 a new arrival had been added to the team. Kelly Rector would become an integral part of Klein’s life as his partner, wife, and, now, intimate friend, but she started out as an assistant who’d been very aware of him as a nighttime glamour-puss as well as a happening designer. Rector, then 21, had received her training in the design studio of Ralph Lauren and had observed Klein out and about at various hot spots, including Studio 54. She had interviewed with Klein a few months previously but didn’t get the position. Then they’d run into each other at Studio 54 and he’d called her at seven the following morning with a start date: the next day.

Eventually their professional and personal lives would merge, and out of that came new creative and business ideas. Kelly, for instance, is the one who came up with the idea of appropriating the men’s underwear for women. She remembers saying, “There’s something sexy about wearing your boyfriend’s underwear.” There was a gold mine in this offhand thought: $70 million worth in 1984 sales alone. More significantly, Kelly became the ne plus ultra of the designer’s “muses,” the basis for what we think of as the Calvin Klein woman—the woman who will go out in a perfect-looking thin-cashmere T-shirt evening dress, not the one who’s all glittered up in a va-va-va-voom number. In hindsight it’s hard to believe that their relationship was ever doubted. But, boy, were there a lot of raised eyebrows when their hookup went public in the early 80s. I remember when they married, in Rome in 1986 (and went fabric-hunting the next day). I wasn’t personally acquainted with either of them; at the time I barely knew anything about the fashion world. But I sure heard the gossip that the union was some kind of marketing-driven “marriage of convenience.” Because of the open way that Calvin had displayed his attractions to and relationships with men, it was assumed he was strictly gay (his earlier marriage being seen as some kind of aberration). Maybe none of us is immune from a desire to define people narrowly, and in the area of sexuality it’s a virtual reflex. “That person’s straight.” “This person’s gay.” “This is normal.” “That isn’t.” But life doesn’t come in neat slots; it is full of surprises, if one is lucky. Kelly says, “When you fall in love with someone, all the rumors that you hear fall away. My whole life changed with Calvin.” Their romance happened on the job. She remembers, “He would walk into the room, and it was just like the lights went on. The movie started every single day. I was so much more special when he came into the room.”

“Everyone who knows me would ask what happened at that moment,” remarks John Calcagno. “It was some kind of magic. He fell in love with her and she madly with him. They didn’t care who was around. They showed it, kissing and holding each other and having fun and cuddling.”

Klein’s personal income in 1981 was said to be around $8.5 million; the following year independent retailers and Calvin Klein boutiques pushed $750 million worth of product out the door. By the mid-80s, Klein ruled American fashion, along with Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan. Each of “the big three” had a distinct voice, but each was also inherently American. For Klein, there were occasional misses, such as when the women’s ready-to-wear line got uncomfortably close to what Yves Saint Laurent was doing. But Klein’s clarity and directness, his emphasis on trick-free fashion and natural fibers—he once said, “That damn polyester killed the whole country”—won him a devoted following. The house had a reputation in particular for turning out some of the best pants in the business, and its trench coats became a must-have item.

Not enough credit has been given to how on point Klein’s fashion was in the 80s, because the subject of his brilliant marketing seems to have eclipsed all else. He has struck gold often in his advertising campaigns, and with a lineup of photographers that would make any museum—that knew what it was doing—envious. Call it commerce or call it art, it doesn’t matter: the list, with only a few exceptions, reads like a Who’s Who of 20th-century fashion photography: Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Steven Klein, Mario Sorrenti, Juergen Teller, and more.

It used to be that if one was a “real” photographer one wouldn’t sully one’s “integrity” or “art” shooting fashion campaigns. Klein is one of a handful of designers who helped change that. He gave photographers such a visible forum for their work—shot in the spirit of his universe, of course—that it became prestigious to shill for him. There were Avedon’s taboo-busters with Shields, and unforgettable images by Penn of models draped in opulent mixes of fabrics that made them look like members of some kind of new, ultra-stylish tribe. But the photographer who captured (and helped define) the combination of polymorphous sexuality and physical wholesomeness that was such a big part of Klein’s imagery was Weber. (His ability to serve successfully as the photographic messenger for both Klein and Ralph Lauren—two fundamentally different designers—throughout the 80s is a subject worthy of its own article.) Weber’s big break came when he got the call from Klein’s people to come up to the office to discuss a jeans campaign. On his first assignment in 1981, with a model named Romeo—who’d been discovered by Calvin pushing a clothing cart on the street, just as the designer himself had once done—he created an instant pin-up. The money shot, the one that was chosen for a billboard in Times Square, as well as for magazine ads, presents a figure who is part Adonis, part toughie. With the sleeves of his T-shirt rolled up, biceps rippling, one arm raised, cradling his head the way a Roman or Greek marble sculpture of a god might be posed, and the other arm grazing his abdomen, fingers just under the waistband, Romeo looks like the progeny of a marriage between James Dean and Elvis Presley, before the fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. (According to others who were around at the time, Romeo’s charms were not lost on Klein.) I asked Weber if he’d realized he had a hit with the picture. With a laugh, he said, “There was so much yelling. Frances was screaming at Romeo because he kept eating pizza and was wiping his hands on his pressed white T-shirt.”

One of the subsequent Weber shoots, a 10-day affair in 1982 on the Greek island of Santorini that would produce images for an array of Klein products, was one of the wildest in advertising history, which is saying something. Twenty-six years later the people who were there still talk about it. The group included the label’s creative director, Rochelle Udell; her assistant Sam Shahid (who would eventually become Klein’s creative director); Zack Carr; John Calcagno; models galore (Iman and Christy Turlington among them); Nan Bush (who has been Bruce Weber’s partner for 30 years); and Klein himself. Even the accommodations were memorable: a hotel where the rooms were literally caves—“very cold caves, which is why people kept getting in bed together, to warm up,” says Weber with a laugh.

Of all the pictures that were taken it was the series of photos of Tom Hintnaus, a Brazilian-born Olympic pole-vaulter, that struck Klein as the images. Weber’s shots of Hintnaus arching his naked torso against a white wall in Calvin Klein underwear—his “package” competing for its own gold medal—were chosen for billboards and bus-shelter posters. I was on a crosstown bus in Manhattan early one morning right after they’d been put up. When we passed a shelter almost everyone on my side of the bus swiveled his or her head to get a better look at the image, which was basically shoving the man’s physicality down the audience’s throat. I was so curious about it that I got off the bus so I could see it properly. I must admit I was wary. Was this some newfangled version of what Leni Riefenstahl had done for Hitler with her so-called perfect Aryan images? In retrospect, Weber and Klein’s prescience about the cult of the body, which would start to sweep across our culture a few years later, was the real story.

Unfortunately, a big part of that story was aids. With the fashion world, as with the art world, one cannot recount this period without dividing it in two: before and after the virus. Once the crisis started, the list of the fallen grew long with lightning speed. Now there were voids where before there had been excitement and competition in the industry, carefree days replaced by fear of the next piece of bad news. The impact of aids on fashion itself can’t be measured in a literal way, but it clearly affected creativity as well as business. The fear of the disease and the reality of loss after loss, of course, impacted everyone who was touched by this modern plague. Sometimes it set up the old witch-hunting dynamic. There was a dramatic moment in Klein’s Playboy interview where he insisted that the tape recorder be turned off, because the writer asked him about the rumors going around that he had aids. (The interview eventually resumed.)

One could see the disease’s impact on the culture at large in the mid-80s advent of the gym lifestyle, replete with newly bulked-up physiques. Klein’s own physique went from slim to pumped. It was as if people’s bodies had become a kind of metaphor for the time. The collective subconscious: Let’s fight! And in the mid- to late 80s, Klein’s collections—like those of many other designers—accommodated the new silhouette, with bigger shoulders. Some, though not Klein, trafficked in a kind of Amazonian proportion. No wonder the supermodels were warrior-scale. They were yet another example of the decade’s bigger-is-better psyche—bigger offices, bigger houses, bigger paintings, bigger art galleries—which flourished before the flush 80s economy imploded.

The most momentous development in Klein’s personal life during this period, aside from his second marriage, was his decision to go into rehab. “There came a certain point when I knew that this was no longer fun,” he says, “and I couldn’t stop drinking or using recreational drugs. Then I had to do something about it.” He entered the Hazelden clinic in 1988. When I asked Klein if he was worried about the impact that undergoing treatment and the attendant publicity might have on the business, he said, “Betty Ford had changed all of that. She was the most courageous woman, and for her to do what she did at that time was really a breakthrough. That was a turning point. I was never concerned about Barry not understanding. I thought, If I don’t deal with this, we will really have serious problems with the business. I just won’t be able to work. So I had to do this. It wasn’t an option.”

“We were an established company,” Schwartz says. “There were people who could fill in until he got himself straightened out. It was strictly a case of protecting him, because there are a lot of nasty, vicious people out there.”

Klein had another advocate on his side, of course—Kelly. And it was during this period, as his personal life stabilized, that she had her greatest effect on Klein’s vision and marketing, tempering the label’s hothouse sensuality with a new classicism. Kelly’s main surrogate in the shows and in the ad campaigns was Christy Turlington, the most genteel of the era’s supermodels, who became the face of the Eternity fragrance when it launched, in 1988. The choice was most purposeful. “I always felt her intelligence came through in photographs,” Klein says. “At the time there was a lot of vulgarity and that didn’t interest me. It’s easy to go there. People respond to it. But I was looking for something more. And Christy is that person.” For her part Turlington understood the personal semiotics. “Calvin and Kelly were sort of this American royal couple,” she says. “I think that’s what I was fulfilling for them. I was stepping in as the Kelly character. The Eternity fragrance was about this ladylike setting. ‘Puritanical’ wouldn’t quite be the right word, but very serene. It was a new life for Calvin.” Their Camelot was their classic shingle-style “cottage” on Georgica Pond, in East Hampton.

The peace wouldn’t last. This is fashion, after all, and the pressure to evolve, to remain on the cutting edge, is a never-ending spur. That Klein managed to keep pushing his clothes forward, while also pushing the envelope with his advertising, fragrances, and other products, is testimony to his fierce focus. The pressure to grow the business was a parallel challenge, and Klein and Schwartz would face having to dig themselves out of a financial hole in 1992, when the 80s culture of financial excess came back to haunt the company. The partners had gotten themselves tied up in junk bonds, and when the jeans market plunged they were stuck with enormous interest payments on their debt. The troubles ballooned, and the company found itself facing a serious cash crunch. “I took my daughter for a walk on the beach in the Hamptons,” Klein remembers, “and said, ‘I really think we might have to sell everything.’ It was a terrifying moment.” Instead, the designer’s buddy David Geffen bought $62 million of the company’s outstanding debt at a sizable discount and told Klein and Schwartz to pay him back when they could. (They did, a year later.) As Klein says, “David helped us out with the financial part of it until we could straighten it out with the banks, which we were able to do in a short period of time. But the work was that I had to fix what was wrong with the company, with either the marketing divisions or management or design. I may have gotten complacent. We think things are good and all of a sudden you turn around and it falls apart. So that was a hard lesson. I didn’t think of selling at that moment. I thought, I’ve got to fix it and I will fix it. I knew I could do it, or I’d die trying.”

The 90s backlash against vulgarity and big everything suited him just fine, and soon another muse entered the picture: Kate Moss, whose English schoolgirl look (not the fancy boarding-school variety) was the absolute antithesis of the glamazon look that had been representing beauty in the fashion business in the 80s. Despite the storm that erupted over Kate Moss’s thin and “unshapely” physique, which some critics called borderline anorexic—complex issue, wrong target—she found a champion in Klein. He went one better than simply hiring her for a new Obsession campaign; he gave the photography gig to Mario Sorrenti, then a young unknown who was Moss’s boyfriend. The couple went off to a desert island, alone with a camera. The resulting campaign, with its intimate and emotional imagery, took the concept of personal in advertising to a new level. Making Moss the symbol of his company was a radical move even in a business known for skinny malinks, but, to put it squarely, she moved product. “With advertising, people respond very quickly, and you can measure it very easily,” says Klein. “We just saw the sales take off. They were sick of fake boobs.” As a counterbalance to Moss’s grace, Klein chose her opposite for the men’s side of things—Mark Wahlberg, then a cocky rapper beauty of a man-child.

All together the 90s played out for Klein as a breathtaking renaissance, including the invention, in 1993, of an entirely new business: CK, the lower-priced, youth-oriented line, inspired by Marci, who was about to take her first job out of college, at Saturday Night Live, and told her dad that his clothes were too expensive and not on-message enough for either herself or her generation. With the economy coming out of a recession, CK was such an instant hit that the late Amy Spindler, a normally acerbic critic for The New York Times, said “it looked like an incubator for everything exciting in street-level fashion.”

The company had very few creative bombs in the 90s, but one, a series of ads from 1995 shot by Steven Meisel for CK, blew up big-time. The TV spots, with an offscreen interlocutor putting questions to young models sitting against a wall of knotty pine paneling, were meant to be a humorous simulacrum of an open casting call, but the grungy rawness of the spots and their insinuating edge suggested to some viewers a porno shoot with under-age models. Not only was there a media firestorm, but the Clinton White House got involved. In a fund-raising speech Bill called the ads “outrageous,” and Hillary wrote that they “push[ed] the envelope of gratuitous sex and exploitation of children.” The Justice Department even launched an investigation to see if child-pornography laws had been violated. (Adweek has since listed the campaign as one of “the lowest moments in advertising.”) Klein pulled the ads—a first—after three weeks. He wasn’t about to stand on a freedom-of-speech soapbox. The company was opening its first store in New York, a John Pawson renovation of a Greek Revival building on Madison Avenue, and the last thing anyone wanted was a picket line.