“It’s an obsessive, almost thrilling and dangerous quest for beauty”: Veronica Leoni gets sexy at Calvin Klein Collection
“We started the season asking what is the stereotype of Calvin that everybody knows and wants to live again,” said Veronica Leoni of a spring/summer 26 collection inspired by the late 1970s and early ‘80s.
Veronica Leoni has been tasked with reviving Calvin Klein Collection, the guiding star of this fashion bastion of American culture. Going to her shows, you hear different opinions of her work based on different expectations of what Calvin Klein “should be.” Like with other brands that characterised the 1990s – Maison Margiela, Helmut Lang, Marc Jacobs – you often come across the idea that the “right thing” to do is to return it to its roots: give us the good stuff we grew up wearing; the spirit that made it cool in the first place. It’s a funny attitude that isn’t very good for creativity, and one that Leoni thankfully seems to defy in stride.
On Friday afternoon in a cube-like glass structure called The Shed, Leoni stuck by the approach she has implemented since restarting the premium line a year ago: honouring the source material but exploring it from new perspectives. This season, she zoned in on the sexiness that was always such an important component of Calvin Klein’s minimalism. “The cult of the body is extremely Calvin, and we wanted to push that narcissistic kind of kink further in the collection,” she said after the show. “Really pushing power dressing to be about the body itself: making it become extremely powerful. In that self-indulgence, there’s a moment of obsession and intimacy that comes through.”
Leoni’s studies generated a fetichised minimalism with the body as its focal point, revealing – under clinical layers, or through seedy transparency, or provocative cutting – a statuesque physique. The sensibility was heightened by silhouettes amplified with constructions and accessories that broadened the shoulders, tailoring that strengthened the body, and evening proposals that played peekaboo with the bodily attributes. “We wanted the body to emerge in a provocative way. It’s an obsessive, almost thrilling and dangerous quest for beauty,” Leoni explained, adding that many of her ideas had come from Calvin Klein’s work in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.
“We started the season asking what is the stereotype of Calvin that everybody knows and wants to live again,” she said, acknowledging the desire some have for the brand to live up to their memory of it. “I tried to see what Calvin was before that stereotype.” While we all love and cherish the Corinne Day gaze of this brand’s heyday, surely the point of fashion isn’t to create pastiches but to interpret codes for today and the future. Nostalgia is what carry-over and essentials collections are for. After a year in the job, Leoni is emerging as the kind of designer whose work will take time to evolve and flourish. We should let her do her thing.
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