Mr. Calvin Klein!

0:05This is The Run Through, and I'm Nicole Phelps. Today, we have a very special guest. I had the rare opportunity to sit down for a long-form conversation with the one and only Mr. Calvin Klein, a designer who dressed America and the world in his designer jeans and logo underwear, a designer who broke all the rules of luxury advertising and in the process became a household name, whether it was Brooke Shields asking, you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing. or a topless Marky Mark and Kate Moss circling each other for lensman Stephen Mizell. And a designer whose streamlined slip dresses and sleek suits, even after over 20 years of retirement, still define American minimalism, providing a template for young designers of today.

0:48Calvin Klein, who is now 82, came to the Condé Nast Studios to talk about his early days in the Bronx, where he lived not far from a young Ralph Lauren, who he likes to point out is indeed older than him, his design legacy, his quest for perfection, and the keys to his unparalleled success. Two words, confidence and drive. I grew up on Calvin Klein ads. I wore Obsession and then I wore Eternity. He didn't just shape what I thought of as beautiful. His work propelled me into the world of magazines and fashion. So this is a truly thrilling interview for me. Welcome, Calvin Klein.

1:26it is such a thrill to have you on the run through thank you it's really fun for me to do this kind of thing early in the morning but exciting to be able to talk about my work everything that I've done and how we did it and you know and so you go ahead and just ask me anything you feel like I'm going to. I was at the show in February, the Calvin Klein show. It was Veronica Leone's debut. And you were in the front row. And it was the first time that many of us had seen you since you retired. And I wanted to hear from you what it felt like to be back in 205 West 39th Street. Well, not strange at all.

2:17It was interesting. I did go to a couple of shows years ago when I first stepped away, but I never sat in the front row. I always stood with the people. Watching in the back? Yes. I mean, not in the back. I stood out front where the photographers would be. So it was a little odd sitting there and sitting next to Anna and Kelly and Kevin and everyone. And exciting to see clothes that were in the feeling of what the brand stands for, but yet taken another step in a newer direction. So that was it. I couldn't wait to see the next outfit come out. So I was totally into the show and into Veronica's work.

3:17She's very good. She's very talented. And I'm sure it's going to do extremely well. Well, we will see in September. She'll be back with a second collection, which I always say is sometimes harder to do than the first, you know, to follow up. I always thought each one was hard to do because you're always, you know, in the fashion business, things change so quickly that you don't think of what you already did, or at least I didn't. I always thought about what was next or what was right now. And that's what clothes are all about. It changes so quickly. I tended not to look back. My attitude was always, what can we do next that we haven't done?

4:09Or what can we do better? And this is the advice that I give students when I speak at schools, which I do quite a bit. I try to encourage people to take risk and take a chance and believe in yourself, have confidence, because you need all of that. You need all of that to keep doing whatever it is you do. I find fashion is always looking back, though. How do you balance the need to drive forward with fashion's sort of obsession with the past? I was not. I was obsessed, but not with the past. I was obsessed with all kinds of things. But I did not look back. There were always influences, but mostly of one period, the 30s, that kind of lingerie dressing.

5:11but the collections weren't retrospective because we kept thinking of I thought about the modern woman and what she needs and the idea of reproducing clothes that reminded me of a particular decade just seemed really old-fashioned and limiting in terms of who's going to wear the clothes. And I really always thought about the American woman, thinking she's ahead of so many women around the world. Well, I was wrong, because what we did here was successful all over the world. Times had changed, and there was a freedom that women experienced when I started working. And so I was very fortunate to be designing at a time and starting a business at a time when it opened up for American designers.

6:25Let's go back a little bit earlier to your American childhood. You grew up in the Bronx. Did you know from a very young age that you were interested in fashion? And clothes? Yes. I knew. I don't know how I knew. But possibly because my mother was very interested in clothes. She spent all my dad's money on clothes. She was really good about that. My grandmother made clothes for people. She would do special things for people. She had a little shop, and I was very close to my grandmother. So I was around the idea of fashion, of sewing, of garment construction from a very early age. And as long as I can remember, I was always interested.

7:25And you started sketching quite young, right? I was an art student. Yes, very young. And I went to a school that was very progressive, public school in the neighborhood. And my parents encouraged me always to do whatever made me happy, made me feel good and pursue what I was interested in. They never got in the way. Talk about the outside influences on you. I've heard or heard you say that James Dean was an icon. What were the movies you were watching? What were the magazines you were looking at that was sort of shaping your early vision of what was cool? I was reading newspapers. I was reading newspapers more than I was looking at magazines.

8:24And there were iconic people, James Dean being one of them, in film. And at that time, in the 50s and 60s, we had a wonderful period in film and a wonderful period for people like Rock Hudson, James Dean. I mean, there's so many of them. And the way they dressed, but often the way they dressed in films. So costume designers had an influence. We were very close to what was happening in Hollywood, as was the world. Seemed to look to movie stars and Hollywood. And even though there wasn't this Hollywood glamour that I would associate my work with, I would always think about New York. So you were very self-directed.

9:33You went to high school and then you went to FIT to study design. Is that correct? I did. I studied design in high school too. I went to a school that's in New York. It's called Art and Design.

9:53And that's where I began studying fashion, actually. New York's a wonderful place to grow up. I mean, I know so many people who have come here, but being born here, you are immersed in a language and a culture that exists nowhere else. And even in schools, we started thinking about the future very early on. What do they say about New York that once you live here, everywhere else is a joke? It's not serious compared to New York. No, I don't know about that, but I always love coming back and I've traveled a lot, mostly for work. But this city was a wonderful place to come back to. And for me, because like the work we did, it changed all the time.

10:57And I notice it now. There's building everywhere. It's constantly getting better as the city gets older. So at FIT, you took some time off. You worked at Women's Wear Daily. I did. You were a page boy, a copy boy. What does a copy boy do? Page boy, I think, is in the theater. Copy boy delivers the mail. It's as simple as that. But you're surrounded by people in the business you want to be in. So it's just you just soak it up. It was a wonderful experience. I mean, I worked with, at a time when they were really exciting people, John Fairchild, who was the son of the man who started Fairchild Publications, which owned at that time Women's Wear Daily.

12:03John was a real influence. He was—people wanted to know what he was interested in, what restaurants he went to for lunch, where he would go on vacation. Women's Wear Daily, while it's just a trade newspaper, had a lot of influence on very sophisticated people in this country. It's where I got my start in fashion. I was Etta Froyo's assistant, and I remember my early days in fashion and feeling it was the most glamorous place in the world because the W Magazine staff was right, you know, smashed up with us on that newsroom on 34th Street. And I remember very well, we used to call you the big three, you, Ralph, and Donna.

13:01Donna. Yeah. That was a fun place to work. And I worked there when Etta was there. I mean, she was there forever. And she was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Then I went back to school, took a really nice break, one of the few breaks ever, and back to school. And then started working on 7th Avenue. It was interesting because in my time, a lot of people that I went to school with wanted to work in Paris. That was the thing, to live in Paris, to work in Paris, which oddly enough never interested me. I like going there. I love visiting. I have great admiration and always have for what French designers did and do today.

14:07But I was influenced by American women. And it seemed to me this was the place to be. I've heard you say that Claire McArdle, an American designer who was active after World War II, was an early inspiration on you. Well, her work was sportswear, which was new because out of Europe, there were dresses, coats. It was more grown-up clothing. Sportswear was kind of an American thing. It was more relaxed, casual clothes for women who lived a certain way. In design school in Europe, you learn to design back then for women above the table, it was called, because women sat and had lunch or dinner, didn't do much else.

15:13And the design was noticed from above the table. I think we call those going out tops now. Well, in New York, there were women who lunched, but the women who really impressed me and influenced me were the ones who were busy working. Donna Karan made her whole career on that, the working woman thing. And I think American designers were influenced by American women and still are. So let's talk about that early collection of yours. You have a day job on 7th Avenue. As you said, maybe you didn't like it that much. You really had an itch to try something of your own. And you created this collection of samples of coats and dresses, I believe.

16:17Yes. And there is a story that Bonwit Teller's Mildred Custon was drawn to it by somebody else at that department store. And she sort of went crazy for it. She said what impressed me most was the purity of his line and the simplicity of his design. So take us back to 1968. What was different about what you were doing than other things on 7th Avenue? I'm not sure what was different. I could tell you later on as I expanded into fragrance and other businesses, I would look at what the whole market was doing. But in the very beginning, I just had a desire to do my own thing. and the only way I could do it was befriending a pattern maker who when I gave him the sketch, he would drape fabric and make a pattern from that.

17:24From that pattern, we made a sample. I had a sample tailor who lived in Brooklyn and I worked with him one time and I told him I was going to do this. Would he make my samples? He said yes. And every night he would go to his sewing machine in his daughter's bedroom, and he'd be sewing up the samples. I had a cutter who cut the sample for him to sew, and he lived in Queens. And I used to go from Queens to Long Island to Manhattan, all over the place. And he lived in Queens and he would cut the fabric on his kitchen table in Queens. Finally, I ended up with the samples and I told two stores that I was going to do this while I was on a job.

18:24But it wasn't anything that I thought competed with the people I was working for at the time. But maybe it was not the most honest thing to do. Um, so, um, the two buyers promised that they would see the work and, and, um, we would see what happens from there. And I took a little room, a showroom, not much bigger than this little studio space, in a hotel on 7th Avenue. And to keep the clothes there and show to whoever wanted to see the clothes. The room was opposite the elevator. Convenient. And purely by accident, the elevator door opens. A man steps out and into my showroom and introduces himself.

19:17My name is Donald O 'Brien, and I'm the general merchandise manager of Bonwit Teller. And I thought, well, what a nice surprise. I showed him my few samples, and this was on, I think, a Tuesday or a Wednesday. He said, I will have the buyer come down and see the clothes on Thursday. He says, on Friday, you will have been discovered by Mildred Custon, the president of Bonwetella. And that's exactly what happened. I was afraid of creasing the clothes. So I got a rack, and I wheeled the rack up from 7th Avenue and 37th Street to 5th Avenue and 56th or 7th Street. One of the wheels broke. I mean, everything that could happen happened.

20:21and sure enough I get to Bonwitz whisked up to her office and then so help me, every word of this is exactly the way it happened on the phone they said, Ms. Custin's on her way up and so she said hello she sat behind her desk I presented everything to her and I told her the prices. She said, never a smile. She said, Mr. Klein, I will pay you such and such, which was double the cost of what I was asking for. She says, just make the clothes look like this, and I want them exclusive. I said, I can't do that. Where did you get the nerve to say no? it was the right thing. I gave my word. It didn't occur to me that it required nerve.

21:20It just seemed like this is the right thing to do. And I knew she would understand. And she did. She didn't like it, but she did. And then afterward, I said to Don O 'Brien, I said, well, she wasn't exactly very friendly. He said, well, she didn't have her hair done yet. It's early. She was a great supporter. In those days, stores really supported and backed new designers. I think things shifted and the stores wanted the people who designed the clothes to pay for the advertising, to pay for the space they got in the store. In my time, they gave it to us. They were thrilled to be able to present something new or different, and they supported design.

22:24And then she gave me I don't know how many Sunday Times ads, which was a huge big deal that first year. But we worked together so well. I've always believed that this is a woman's business. Women buy the clothes, they wear the clothes, and they understand how to run the business, whether it be the retail business or manufacturing, making clothes. And that day, Mildred Custon, as well as other presidents of stores, women, just did great. And from the beginning, the aesthetic was already taking shape. There was a sense of streamlinedness. I read an article that quoted you, and you called them architectural and bulletproof.

23:22You said, I thought American women needed to be more streamlined. They moved faster. They were working. They were raising kids. It was a time when the rules were changing. And it sounds like the clothes that you were making responded to that. The idea of bulletproof, the fabrics were, they were strong. They were stiff. It was a period when they were architectural. And they would stand up sometimes by themselves, especially some of the coats. And I always had a feeling for tailored clothes anyway. And because they were streamlined. And if you'd start decorating tailored clothes, something weird about that.

24:11I'm with you. I hate a superfluous sequin. Yeah, but the idea of them being modern is the absence of decoration. If the design is good and the shape is good and the silhouette, it doesn't need a lot of extra stuff to make a person feel better. So I've just always believed in stripping it. Well, as you're saying here, I read something recently that said that you weren't trying to please Vogue magazine. I was more interested in the client. But, of course, Vogue recognized you right away. In fact, I think it was just a year later that you had your first, you know, it's 1969 when you had your first Vogue cover.

25:01Do you remember what that meant to you at the time? Well, the editor at that time, not the editor-in-chief, that was Diana Vreeland, but my editor was the Baron Nicholas de Gansburg. He influenced Bill Glass a lot and me, and we became great friends. And I would always preview what I was doing for Nikki. And then sometimes he would say, now tell me what's going on in your life that's not right. He said, I don't like what I'm seeing. I mean, he would tell me. He was honest. Oh, totally. He would tell me. I mean, it was a total different time. And interesting how, I mean, Cy Newhouse was there all the time, but it was just a change in the way business was done that affected the fashion world as well as every other part of the business world.

26:08And Nicky was a great, wonderful influence on my work, my life. We had a deal every time we went to a restaurant. And he introduced me to the best. we'd go to Le Grenouille for lunch and the deal was the first time we go Vogue pays after that I pay but he had a great sense of humor everything was fun for him but what a talented man Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford Senior Awards Correspondent at Vanity Fair and co-host of Little Gold Men Oscar season is upon us. Little Gold Men takes you behind the scenes of the race for the biggest prize in Hollywood. There's a hundred wrestlers in the room, but only one can be Oscar nominated.

27:08Whether you're a movie lover or an industry buff, Little Gold Men from Vanity Fair has everything you need to know about this year's Oscar race. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.

27:29We should talk about another man who was very influential in your career, and that's your partner, Barry Schwartz. Barry and you were friends from a really young age, and you decided to go into business together. You're in your 20s. We always had a dream when we were children of having a pet store together. We were going to go into the pet business. Well, we touched it with furs, but that was about it. An unfortunate thing happened. Barry was in the military. He worked with his father, and his father was killed in his store. He was a grocery store owner, right? Yes. Both families were in the grocery business, food business.

28:22And so he came out of the military and he just said to me, what do you want to do? I had just started maybe my first job. And I said, I'm doing what I want to do. The only difference is I want to start my own company. And he said, well, I have some money. And we started making those samples and he started paying for them. So the business partnership began right from day one with the company that we owned until not long ago, actually. He never thought he'd really be in it. He thought he would invest in it. But then he came to spend time after his father no longer had the business. He spent time with me, and he grew into it, and we had this friendship and partnership forever.

29:21It's so interesting that both you and Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan are all New Yorkers by birth and by childhood. In fact, you and Ralph Lauren lived pretty close to each other in the Bronx. I remember seeing him when I was in school because he was a bit older than me. And he always dressed funny. I mean, he dressed the part that he played all these years and still does. Yeah. I was dressing like James Dean. What is it about the crucible of New York that turned you all into these hugely influential American designers but also global designers? What was in the water? You know, you should ask my daughter that.

30:13She's the one who said – because there aren't too many young Donna, Ralph, or Calvin coming up. and it's something about New York. It's something about being competitive. It's something about being Jewish. All of those aspects and talent. But you have to have confidence. Well, your trajectories really do align with what you were talking about before, the emergence of sportswear. And I think that for young people today who live in leggings and jog bras, they don't really understand how big a deal sportswear was. This idea that you don't need to be corseted or buttoned up, that there was this new looseness that you really represented as the 70s came along.

31:13But, you know, you go back to Chanel. She understood how to let women be comfortable in what they were wearing. And, you know, it's interesting for me because after I stopped working in the business, I started making my clothes in London. But actually I was making clothes in London for myself earlier in the 70s. And today I'm making clothes for myself in Naples. Naples, this jacket is from Naples. Italy. Italy, yes. It's so soft and so comfortable. The English jacket is bulletproof. It's like wearing iron. It's stiff. It doesn't move. you know, it's uncomfortable to wear, but it looks kind of great.

32:15So given the choice, men still dress comfortably, but they dress up too. Women, I think when they had the choice, they wanted to be comfortable. Whether it was day, night, whatever, sportswear, tailored clothes, it all, it has to feel good. I was digging through the Vogue archive and found this quote. It said, if you were around 100 years from now and wanted—this is from 1975, by the way—if you were around 100 years from now and wanted a definitive picture of the American look in 1975, you'd study Calvin Klein. So it's not 100 years later, but it's 50 years later. And it's true, Calvin Klein in American fashion.

33:04Hand in hand. It's interesting because I don't know if that was from, we had six or seven models in one series, which was kind of great. And we were getting a lot of publicity at that time. But I rarely do what we're doing right now. I don't sit and talk about how I did whatever we managed to do. I just do it. And so hearing quotes back 50 years ago is like wild. I mean, it's kind of incredible. But when I look back, as much as things change, a lot doesn't change. And I get that from people who are still in the fashion business who will tell me they just came back from Paris or Milan and this you used to do and that you used to do.

34:07And there's a certain amount of what they've become almost classics. You know, and that's great. Well, here's a classic, the Calvin Klein logo tee. But somebody had to come up with it. And I was reading Jeffrey Banks, who worked for you, told a story that it was the early 70s and there was a show and they put your name, your logo on T-shirts and the women who were sort of seating people at the fashion show wore them. Is that how you remember the first Calvin Klein T-shirt? No, it isn't. But I love hearing Jeffrey would know. And it sounds very plausible that we would have done something like that.

34:57But I've forgotten how that happened. I mean, we take it for granted now, the idea that brands put logos on T-shirts. But somebody did it first. Well, I always liked the idea of having the name associated with products that are not expensive. I mean, that's why I started doing jeans. Because I loved them. I used to live in them myself. and I like the idea that they were not that expensive. And so we could say something to that woman. Well, it turns out every woman was interested in denim and T-shirts. And it's the mid-70s, 1976, and the jeans came around at the right moment. It was the dawn of the disco era.

35:54Everybody was wearing a little polo shirt and a tight pair of Calvin Klein jeans. I think there's a certain amount of luck involved because the timing, although you get it when you're in the fashion world, you're very aware of the timing of what's in the air, of what's trending. So it's not such a great surprise. But then often it takes just one designer in fashion to start something. And then everyone – that happened with underwear too. Before we get to underwear, which I definitely want to talk about, let's talk about the jeans advertising because that shaped people's perceptions of the actual garments but also the brand.

36:44You have said that the only way to sell is by not focusing on the product. That wouldn't be the only way to sell. It's one way to sell. You don't have to focus on the garment itself. But we knew exactly what we were doing with Brooke. This is Brooke Shields in the famous Calvin Klein jeans ads. Yeah, I mean, that started, it always started with the writing, and that's where Duna Arbus came in. and Dick Avedon being the director. And Dick and Dune and I would sit and we would discuss who should be the voice, what the look should be, the clothes that work with the denim. I mean, every detail was mapped out.