On the first Friday in February, New York’s garment-district studios felt suspended in time. At the headquarters of Calvin Klein, which hadn’t held a fashion show since 2018, an audience made up of Kate Moss, Christy Turlington and Calvin Klein himself gathered in what felt like a signal of reinauguration.
Into this tableau came Veronica Leoni: a designer fluent in minimalism, her pedigree shaped by Jil Sander, Phoebe Philo’s Céline and The Row. Her debut as the house’s first female creative director avoided overt homage in favour of something more nuanced: a memory-trace of American fashion. Not the America of denim dominance or billboard sensuality, but one glimpsed through the glossy fictions of cinema and television — cool, composed and softly mythologised.
Rather than reanimating the muscle of Calvin Klein’s 1990s bravado, Leoni leaned into subtlety. “My goal is to define an ultimate and definitive expression of monumental minimalism and pureness through shape and craft,” Leoni explained. The result was a tension between structure and skin, fabric and feeling. A long grey coat skimmed the body like flannel. Strapless dresses fell to the floor in clean liquid lines. A relaxed henley nodded to the house’s underwear legacy, where comfort meets sensuality. In Leoni’s world, minimalism isn’t synonymous with subtraction; it’s most potent in concentration.
Tailoring, especially, embodied this sense of restraint. Suits came contoured and close, or relaxed and gently boxy. Elsewhere, volume was tempered by discipline: mohair capes were anchored by square-cut shoulders while dry gabardine coats curved subtly outward at the hem. Colour remained tethered to the brand’s archival codes — porcelain, off-white, fudge, granite — offset by brief, calculated departures: a crimson gown; a span of olive-green. Accessories, too, spoke in understatement.
A square-shaped crossbody, pumps with architectural heft, even the CK One bottle made a cameo, reimagined as a sleek, metallic evening bag. Their lineage was implied, and every element felt considered; restraint in service of clarity.
If Calvin Klein once stood as a monument to American dominance — youthful, sun-bleached, body-conscious — Leoni offers something quieter, but no less powerful. Clothes that trace memory instead of mimic legacy. And in an industry still reckoning with its past, her vision suggests a different kind of future: one built not on reinvention, but refinement.
Calvin Klein Fall 2025 Highlights
