Calvin Klein’s designer is picking up where its founder left off

At the Cannes Film Festival in May, Pedro Pascal stepped out in a sleeveless knit tunic, wide-leg trousers and silver-spiked shoes, all in black. The ensemble was refined but edgy, its clean lines lending the Eddington actor an elegant, somewhat feminine silhouette that sparked rave reviews on menswear forums.

The designer responsible for the look? That would be Veronica Leoni, who was thrust into the spotlight last year when she was named creative director of Calvin Klein, a US$3.86 billion (S$5.01billion)-revenue brand that, nearly six decades after its founding, continues to loom large in popular culture. Known today primarily for its fragrances, jeans and pulse-thumping underwear campaigns, in its ’90s heyday it was also synonymous with sinuous, luxurious minimalism, as modelled by former Calvin Klein publicist Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.

Leoni is working to revive that part of the brand’s heritage, starting with a reboot of the high-end Collection line, which she debuted at New York Fashion Week in February 2025 — the brand’s first show in seven years. The tailoring-focused collection was spare and architectural, offering a convincing runway image for Calvin Klein and a gentle recalibration of the broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped silhouette that has lately taken hold in Paris (Leoni’s version came with cropped or elongated sleeves, and no shoulder pads).

It also marked the return of the brand’s 82-year-old founder, who made a rare appearance, alongside his ex-wife Kelly. It was the first time Klein had attended a show for his eponymous brand since he sold the company more than two decades ago, and is the thing Leoni, an alumna of Phoebe Philo’s Celine and The Row, says she is most proud of since joining the company.

“We didn’t meet until the day before the show and the sense of trust that he put into me, and the project, was extremely generous and extremely moving,” she says in a video interview from her atelier in Rome. Her goal with the debut, she said, was to “pick up where Calvin left off” when he retired in 2003.

It is common for designers at major houses to borrow heavily from the house archives, typically their USP. And though a grey collarless skirt suit felt it could have been designed by Klein circa 1991, outside of a single ballet flat, Leoni steered clear of reproductions for the first collection. “I didn’t want to be nostalgic,” she says. “I didn’t want to rip off the pattern of a jacket because I liked it; the proportions, colours and fabrics needed to stay contemporary, I needed to stay close to myself in that way.” 

While Leoni has made a promising start, broader challenges remain. Calvin Klein’s turnover has declined since Stefan Larsson, CEO of parent company PVH Corp, unveiled a turnaround plan in 2022. The brand has ceded market share to emerging intimates brands and to mass apparel rivals such as Ralph Lauren, according to John Kernan, managing director at TD Cowen. Shares in PVH, which also owns Tommy Hilfiger, have fallen by a quarter over the past 12 months.

By rebooting the Collection, Larsson hopes to “build the brand to its full potential”, he says in a video interview from New York. Its role is to “create a halo” that will lift the brand’s mainline categories — underwear, fragrance, jeans — and boost Calvin Klein’s visibility on the red carpet. “Calvin Klein should be part of creating the future of American fashion,” he says. “That’s what Calvin did, and what Calvin should do. And why I was so excited when we met Veronica.”

Leoni, 42, was born and raised in a now-gentrified neighbourhood on the outskirts of Rome, where her parents ran a bar. Dressed in her customary black with a badger streak running through her short hair, she says she “knew forever that fashion was going to be my job and future”, but instead of pursuing a design degree she studied English Literature at university. It gave her an understanding of storytelling that continues to inform how she works: a collection is “more about building up a cinematic vision . . . not just a series of images”, she says.

It was after university that she got serious about “learning the craft”, and after taking an entry-level role at a small Italian fashion company, where she focused on wovens, she met Jil Sander, whose well-honed minimalist fashion had made her a household name a decade earlier. “She was after a head of design for knitwear,” recalls Leoni, who signed her contract with the designer the day they met. “But I would have taken any job with Mrs Sander.”

Sander remains a lasting influence. “She was really a master from another time,” Leoni says. “Before marketing became wild. [Her company was] based on designing the best clothes, the best design, the most considered shape . . . for a customer who would come back to her. It was an approach to fashion that was really human.”

Sander was the first of four women designers Leoni would come to work for. At Celine, Leoni led pre-collections, and later consulted on womenswear and menswear for Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen of The Row. “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve seen female leadership at the highest levels,” she says. “They are all very different from each other, but the four of them never acted as a woman in power that pretended to be a man.”

Female creative directors are a rare breed — Leoni is one of just four, out of 17, to be appointed to the role at a major brand since mid-2024. “I am sad [about it],” she says. “There should be more women. I keep that in my mind strongly, and try to shine a light on the women with me.”

Since leaving Celine at the end of 2017, Leoni has been based in Rome, working out of a “tiny office” where she led womenswear design for Moncler. That was also where she launched Quira, a pared-back tailoring-focused label that Leoni once described to Vogue as a “sharp point of view on femininity with an edge” and which was a finalist for the 2023 LVMH Prize. “It was a moment for me to own a bit better my private life,” she says of the move. “My wife has been here since forever. She never planned to move anywhere else.”

Since taking the role at Calvin Klein last year, Leoni has split her time between Rome and New York — a division that is workable for her personal life and strategic for the company. “If there is one thing we have learnt, it’s that good product comes when the connection with the factories is very tight.”

Her team is also divided along those geographical lines, with some designers in Italy and others at Calvin Klein’s “internal atelier” in New York, some of whom have been there since Klein’s time. She describes them as “masters of flou” (flowing garments) and the “super thin spaghetti-strap type dress” that was one of Klein’s signatures. “They are able to do the smallest binding and stitch inside with an invisible stitch on the outside . . . it brings a vocabulary of finishing that is very Calvin.”

She is also adopting the American approach to tailoring: “That’s what we nailed in that first collection — a sharp silhouette that doesn’t come with the weight of canvas shoulder construction. There is no one like the Americans for that.”

Leoni will soon be wrapping up the next collection she will show at New York Fashion Week in September, allocating colours and fabrics to designs that the baking Roman summer has inspired her to “keep light”. She hints that more underwear and denim will be incorporated into the line-up to “connect [more] of the dots” between the runway and the products Calvin Klein is known for.

It ties into her broader ambitions for the Collection, and her own role at the company. “The ‘halo effect’ is part of it,” she says. “I don’t want to do runway just for the sake of image. I want the clothes to affect the street and have a customer base.”

Lauren Indvik © 2025 The Financial Times.