American fashion may be about to experience its biggest redefinition in decades.
On Tuesday, in yet another example of the upheaval in the fashion world (Hedi out at YSL! Dior still without a designer! Men’s wear in turmoil!) Calvin Klein announced that its men’s and women’s wear creative directors of more than a decade, Italo Zucchelli and Francisco Costa, were leaving the company, to facilitate a “new global creative strategy.”
Both lines, as well as all the other categories of the business — presumably including jeans, underwear, fragrance and others — would be united under one “vision,” with said visionary to be named “in due course.”
The company declined to say what that course would be, though it did say that the men’s collection in June and the women’s in September would be done by the in-house creative team, and that they would not be shown on the runway.
The Calvin reorganization had been rumored since the end of last year, along with the now-much-repeated-as-fact speculation that Raf Simons, the former artistic director of Dior, was in line for the job.
Mr. Simons, not surprisingly, did not return emails for comment. He was traveling, and, in any case, he has a noncompete with Dior that extends through the summer.
Whether or not he gets the job, however, the news creates the potential for Calvin Klein, a brand that has largely stepped back from the fashion conversation since its founder sold the company to the current owner PVH in 2003 and retired, to start shaping the industry again. Indeed, it’s not exaggerating to say that if the fashion house picks the right person for the job (and Mr. Simons is a good idea) and supports that person, it could radically redesign New York fashion.
Someone needs to.
After all, since the 1980s advent of the Big Three (Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan), the designers that burst onto the international stage and made sportswear a global phenomenon, American fashion has stayed pretty much the same.
As those brands have matured and gradually lost their stranglehold on the national aesthetic, however, whether through retirement (Ms. Karan) or simple repetition, other names have not risen to take their place. The next generation — Marc Jacobs, Narciso Rodriguez, Michael Kors — got distracted by jobs in Europe, and then globalization. The group after that (Proenza Schouler, Rodarte, Altuzarra), though artistically adventurous, is still too small to have much global impact.
But with sales of $8.2 billion in 2015, Calvin Klein could.
That it has not thus far is a function largely of the fact that PVH, which also owns brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Izod, Warner’s and Speedo, has clearly been more focused on the broad appeal and financial possibilities of the accessible end of the market. Even though Mr. Costa and Mr. Zucchelli were generally applauded for their collections, with Mr. Costa twice winning the CFDA women’s wear designer of the year award and Mr. Zucchelli’s winning men’s wear once, they were siloed and had little impact on the broader Calvin business.
There was the sense that the clothes appeared on the catwalk and were rarely seen again. The red carpet business — and Mr. Costa usually snagged one to two big names per awards show, the most recent being Saoirse Ronan at the Oscars in a bottle-green sequined slip dress — seemed to have little relation to the more intriguing runway.
Indeed, sales of men’s and women’s collections combined accounted for less than 5 percent of the label’s total business. Three years ago, I did a video interview with Tom Murry, then chief executive, for The Financial Times, and he told me, on camera, that the collection lines were classified as a “marketing expense” on the balance sheet. The better to sell perfume, you know.
Ask anyone what Calvin Klein ads they remembered and odds are they would name the Justin Bieber/Kendall Jenner jeans campaign. Collection? Huh? What’s that?
Opportunity: To fill the hole in New York fashion and make an aesthetic statement strong enough, coherent enough and loud enough to echo not only through the city but also beyond.
If Calvin Klein does so, it will signal a real break not only from the last 12 years, but from anything PVH has done.
It’s probably not an accident that this decision to change the creative structure of the company coincided with the advent of a new chief executive. In 2014, Steve Shiffman, the former president of the brand, took the helm from Mr. Murry. New leadership is a chance for new beginnings, especially if Mr. Shiffman finds a design partner whose ambitions go beyond simply the stated desire to increase global retail sales to $10 billion to making a broader aesthetic statement about how we live now.
For all of our sakes, I hope he does.
In the meantime, the talented Mr. Costa and Mr. Zucchelli are back on the job market. Someone should snap them up soon.
Written By Vanessa Friedman
Source: New York Times
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