In an interview he did with Vogue over the summer Calvin Klein said, “I really always thought about the American woman. And times had changed. There was a freedom that women were experiencing.” Veronica Leoni’s remit at Calvin Klein encompasses men’s as well as women’s, but Klein’s words apply across genders. Her task is wrapping her head around that very American notion of freedom, and injecting it into her collections for the brand.
Staged at the Brant Foundation in the East Village, Leoni’s sophomore outing suggested that she’s been studying the locals and their early morning bodega and coffee runs. Models carried keychains in their hands and a few of the bags they toted had been pre-scuffed around the edges. A guy wore Calvin Klein branded boxers under his oversize blazer (they matched the striped shirt and tie they accompanied) and a girl sported long-johns with built-in Y-front briefs, in a nod to Klein’s famously provocative underwear ads and a wink at the contemporary fixation with yoga leggings. The striped terry robe that Mariacarla Boscono padded out in was actually made from finely laser-cut leather, and felt like a dream.
Some of the looks caught that sense of offhanded chic in more straightforward ways. The models in the brown double-collar trench over boots and jeans and the paper-thin leather bomber teamed with chinos really did look like East Village girls. The “broken” suits with mismatched jackets and pants were convincing too.
Leoni said, “I tried to split the season in two different exercises. One of course is my lens for it, and the other one is to try to get a bit more practice with the icons and try to own it my own way.” She’s a thoughtful designer, heady even, but overintellectualizing is not the Calvin way. The papery crinkled coat and dress looked overly arty, the pompoms seemed superfluous and sort of silly, and a sculpted evening dress woven from underwear waistbands may have been a technical feat, but would a woman wear it? Klein was always stripping excesses away in his efforts to land on something that looked modern. There’s rigor in that, but also a kind of relaxation.
As Leoni digs in for season three, it could be productive to ask: What does she want to pull on in the morning? What do her friends like? Klein said it well himself in his Vogue interview: “If a design is good, if the shape is good, it doesn’t need a lot of extra stuff to make a person feel better.”
