Veronica Leoni Re-tunes the House to a Lower, Richer Frequency
Most comeback stories open with fanfare. Calvin Klein did the opposite. In the brand’s own West 39th Street headquarters, no cavernous warehouse, no LED theatrics, creative director Veronica Leoni offered a runway that felt like an exhale after a long hold. Her message was clear: minimalism can be monumental without raising its voice.
Leoni’s silhouettes told the story first. Three families of cut, knife-lean tailoring, cropped ease, and cocooned drape were engineered with hollowed interiors, giving volume without weight. The workmanship is stealth: you don’t notice the construction until you try to imagine how it hangs so lightly.
Fabric carried equal weight. Dense wool and gabardine brushed shoulders with satin and airy cashmere, creating a push-pull between structure and slip. The palette stayed close to the city, ink, granite, bone, with rare flickers of barolo and citron to keep the eye from settling. Every look seemed to ask: how much can we subtract and still feel complete?
There were playful nods to the house archive, a CK One bottle recast as a clutch, a whisper of 1990s underwear logic beneath a sheer tank, but Leoni resisted easy nostalgia. Her restraint is deliberate, almost studious, and if some critics longed for a louder statement, the designer’s counter-argument was simple: tension lives in the pause, not the crescendo.
Where does this leave the new Calvin Klein? On steady legs. The collection doesn’t rewrite the codes so much as tune them, sanding off the gloss and letting texture, proportion, and negative space do the talking. It’s a promising first sentence, one that suggests the next chapters could, and should, risk a sharper turn of phrase.
images and video courtesy of ©calvin klein
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