Calvin Klein

Calvin Klein and his childhood friend Barry Schwartz founded their company in 1968 with a small line of coats, made in a room at the York Hotel in Manhattan. A buyer from the department store Bonwit Teller, it is said, came upon the samples by chance and placed a large order, and the business took off. Klein designed; Schwartz, who put up the money, ran the company.

Through the 1970s Klein developed the clean, spare, sensual style that became synonymous with American fashion: neutral colours, fluid fabrics and simple shapes. He won the Coty Award three years running from 1973. In the late 1970s he put his name on the back pocket of jeans, helping to create the designer-denim craze, and in 1980 a television campaign in which a fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields declared that nothing came between her and her Calvins made the brand famous and controversial in equal measure. Provocative advertising became a house habit.

In 1982 the company turned men's underwear from a functional purchase into a fashion item, with briefs bearing the designer's name on the waistband and a towering Times Square billboard of the athlete Tom Hintnaus. Fragrances followed: Obsession in 1985, Eternity in 1988 and, in 1994, CK One, a unisex scent that captured the decade. The 1990s campaigns with Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg, many photographed by Herb Ritts, Steven Meisel and Patrick Demarchelier, defined the stripped-back, grunge-tinged mood of the era.

The business nearly collapsed under debt in the early 1990s before recovering on the strength of underwear and jeans. In 2003 Klein and Schwartz sold the company to Phillips-Van Heusen, now PVH Corp., and Klein retired. Francisco Costa designed the women's Collection and Italo Zucchelli the men's until 2016, when the Belgian designer Raf Simons was appointed chief creative officer. His collections were acclaimed but commercially disappointing; he left at the end of 2018 and the high-end Collection line was paused.

Today Calvin Klein is above all a global underwear, jeans and lifestyle brand, sold in well over 100 countries. In May 2024 PVH appointed the Italian designer Veronica Leoni, formerly of Jil Sander, Céline and The Row, as creative director of a revived Calvin Klein Collection. Her debut in February 2025, the brand's first runway show in more than six years and its first designed by a woman, returned to the precise, sensual minimalism on which the founder built his name.