by Brenda Polan
He dropped out, spent three asthmatic, hospitalised weeks in the US Army, was discharged, moved to California to stay with an aunt in the movie business and took a temporary job in the display department of I Magnin in Los Angeles. ‘I didn’t leave the South,’ he said in 1995. ‘I fled. I’m still fleeing.’ In 1947 he moved to New York to the Traphagen School of Fashion, to study the theory and practice of design, before taking a course at L’Académie Julien in Paris and apprenticing himself to a tailor who had worked for Molyneux. Tailoring is at the heart of his technique, and his love affair with geometry, especially triangles, probably had is origins here. ‘My life began there,’ he told Cullerton. ‘It began the moment people understood what I wanted to do.’ In 1951, he returned to the Seventh Avenue garment trade and worked anonymously for several houses before being fired by stylistically conservative Harmay Fashions for a collection considered dangerously avant-garde in that it featured a chemise dress. He joined Teal Traina in 1954, where he was given the freedom to do original designs rather than following Paris at a year’s remove, staying until 1963 when, with backing from two partners, he launched his own label.
The company was successful from the start and Beene won his first three Coty Awards in his first five years in business. His first collection was already confidently Beene. The Dallas Times Herald reported, ‘There was gingham, like a tablecloth, embroidered with the surprise of henna sequins …’ And later in the same article, ‘Here within the framework of a lean, supple streak of a dress, he has created real fashion excitement because, when he couldn’t find a fabric he wanted, he invented it himself.’ He became known for dresses that were lightly detailed but firmly structured—pretty body armour, such as the wedding dress for President Lyndon Johnson’s daughter Lynda Bird in 1968. They sold well and were much copied (he resented imitation and worried about it endlessly). Some critics instinctively disliked what they saw as an archaic insistence on structure—a tailored formality just like the Paris-inspired crispness of the little suits and dresses worn by Jackie Kennedy. Beene’s were criticised, notably by Kennedy Fraser, who described them in The New Yorker in 1972 as ‘concrete’.
Beene himself was later to dismiss these pieces from his early period as ‘uptight little dresses which hid all my misgivings’. In the catalogue to his retrospective 25 Years in Fashion exhibition in 1988, he called them ‘Superstructures’, adding, ‘They were so stiff they could stand up by themselves.’ They were, he reckoned, a last sentimental tribute to all he had learned of French couture in Paris. He entered a period of experimentation, exploring techniques to enable cloth to move over and with the body—curved and industrial-weight zippers, spiral seams in none of the usual places, inserts of lace and chiffon, lingerie straps, and the use of synthetics, including the strangely popular faux suede. He protested, ‘They work; they don’t wrinkle; they take less care.’
The revised Beene style—’clean, clear and strong’ as his late-1960s assistant, Issey Miyake, described it—was never a mass-market hit; his customers were women who had the sophisticated understanding to match his own—Paloma Picasso, Jacqueline Kennedy. The daring work was subsidised by a cheaper line, Beene Bag, introduced in 1974, and by royalties from discreet licensing deals for men’s shirts and colognes. He never aspired to be a big brand, admitting, ‘I’m not a driven businessman, but a driven artist, I never think about money—beautiful things make money.’
In 1976 he showed his collection in Milan and in 1978 in Paris. It took every cent he had but he explained, ‘I thought if they didn’t understand me at home, maybe they would on another continent.’ But possibly he was offended by the European press’s assumptions that New York designers at that time showed a month after Paris so they would have time to copy the trends. Certainly no one in Paris was pre-empting Beene’s inspired melanges of materials—sequins on mohair, diamonds on plastic jewellery, horsehair and gazar, rubies and hessian, mattress ticking and paillettes, silk tulle and straw, lace and leather, men’s shirting and chiffon and industrial zips on diaphanous chiffon. No one yet was making evening frocks in denim or T-shirt jersey or formal outfits in sportswear styles. He had a skilled technician’s pride in unique effects and a revolutionary’s delight in overthrowing anything resembling a status quo. He called it, ‘Alchemy. In elevating the humblest fabrics, in making them as luxurious and as desirable as the richest, I create a new context for both. I remove the stigmas attached to them.’
Kennedy Fraser of The New Yorker wrote in 1997, ‘Other designers showed flashy furs and metallic fabrics that throbbed like Times Square neon with information about their cost. But when Beene showed a luxurious-looking coat with deep sable cuffs, the coat itself was made of a relatively humble chocolate-coloured corduroy.’
Beene claimed: ‘I love standards but I don’t mind breaking rules.’ Through the late 1980s and 1990s, the clothes appeared ever simpler, the fabrics ever richer and, as he crowed happily, ‘Uncopyable!’ There was a delicious lightness to everything he made, whether a simple sequin-covered sheath dress, crew-necked, long-sleeved and bearing a neck-to-hem Matisse design or a satin embossed and appliquéd evening bolero made to stand away from the body to frame the simple black slip dress beneath. ‘The more you learn about clothing,’ he said, ‘the more you realise what must be taken away. Simplification becomes a very complicated process.’
He won eight Coty Fashion Critics Awards and four awards from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Louisiana has an annual Beene day. His retrospective exhibitions were at New York City’s National Academy of Design (1988), and the Fashion Institute of Technology (1990).
Further reading: Brenda Cullerton’s Geoffrey Beene (1995) is the most informative and thoughtful, although Kim Hastreiter’s recent monograph, Geoffrey Beene: Fashion Rebel (2008), is full of interesting gleanings.
33 CALVIN KLEIN (1942–)
In the 1980s when Michael Douglas’s febrile film character in Wall Street, Gordon Gekko, could declare, ‘Greed is good’ and have it become the mantra of a generation which was pleased to label itself ‘yuppie’, three American designers reached out from Seventh Avenue to become the world’s biggest fashion brands. Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan and Calvin Klein have quite similar back stories, but they are very different designers. Although Lauren may have dressed Diane Keaton in menswear styles in Annie Hall in 1977, it is Klein who represents the lurch towards androgyny that occurred in the following decade. Nicholas Coleridge, writing in 1988, described a visit to Klein’s office. The designer showed him photographs of the model José Borain in a man’s white shirt, doeskin flannel trousers and a greatcoat. Klein asked him:
Do you like these pictures? I find these a very sexy way to look. It’s like she has thrown on her boyfriend’s shirt, man’s pants, her friend’s trenchcoat. It’s a kind of sexiness quite different from hookers’ clothes. If I mix tweed with a fabric like silk chamois so you can see the woman’s body, and her blouse just rips, that for me is as sexy as anything. A woman in cavalry twill pants and no adornment.
As the monstrous shoulder pads of the time illustrate, the physical ideal for both men and women was gym-pumped, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, flat-stomached and flaunting boy-sized buttocks. This was the lean and athletic, cool and laid-back all-American achiever Calvin Klein chose to dress. In 1979–1980 Klein launched his designer jeans, the first of their ilk, with six television commercials directed by Richard Avedon and starring Brooke Shields, the fifteen-year-old who had played a child prostitute in Louis Malle’s 1978 film, Pretty Baby. In the most provocative of the ads Shields asked, ‘Want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.’ The response was predictable with television stations banning the ads amid welters of publicity. On a TV talk show, basking in the controversy, Klein asserted, ‘The tighter they are, the better they sell.’
That goes some way towards defining the paradox at the heart of Calvin Klein’s approach to design—and, probably, to life. Rather like that other icon of Amer
ican style, that other Jewish boy raised in the Bronx, Ralph Lauren, Klein has an instinctive understanding of how to dress a woman or a man to make them look old-money rich, gently raised in a world of good taste and restrained luxury. He knows the associations of class that silk, glove-soft suede and leather, cashmere tweeds and gabardine bring with them. And he knows the look is a turn-on. He can take the credit for refining the American designer sportswear genre for the body-con generation. Yet at the same time he liked to strip down and get dirty with the most vulgar of transgressive imagery. As Michael Gross wrote, ‘In Calvin’s world, polymorphic perversity is par for the course. Quaint morality is banished.’
With the exception of Gianni Versace a decade later, no other up-market designer has used sex to sell in quite such an up-front (and up-front more than describes his ads for men’s underpants) way. Until he finally eschewed drink, drugs, promiscuity and the whole Studio 54 lifestyle in favour of a second marriage to a classy younger woman and the all-American domestic dream in 1986, even his perfume ads had a pornographic, distinctly homoerotic edge to them. But as the first casualties to Aids in his circle began to die, Calvin Klein reinvented himself, becoming Calvin Clean, avatar of middle-class family values. He told Women’s Wear Daily, ‘Love … marriage … commitment. I think it is a feeling that is happening all over the country.’ He sold his houses in the gay resorts of Fire Island and Key West and bought an East Side Georgian town house and a vast beach house on Long Island. On the shelf the 1988 scent, Eternity, supplanted 1985’s Obsession, and in the ever iconic ads a family picnic on a beach sidelined a sweaty naked threesome on a shadowy sofa. It’s a rare brand that can survive quite such a radical volte-face.
In her 2003 biography of the business, Lisa Marsh wrote that the brand was arguably the most well-known fashion brand in the world. She added, ‘It would be safe to say that every man, woman and child in America has owned something that bears the Calvin Klein label at one point or another. To most fashion watchers, professional and pedestrian, the company’s brand can be summed up in a few words—modern, clean, sleek, and American.’
Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1942, the son of a Jewish grocer, young Calvin taught himself to sketch and sew. His mother was an elegant woman who played an important role in shaping her son’s fashion sense by taking him with her when she visited her dressmakers, and his grandmother taught him to use a sewing machine. Klein graduated from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 1962 and worked for a series of middle- to down-market Seventh Avenue manufacturers whose product he loathed. ‘Real hooker clothes,’ he called them. On his marriage to Jayne Centre, a classmate from his Bronx elementary school, he began to moonlight, creating his own collection on his kitchen table in Queens and having it made up by a Jewish tailor on Coney Island. His current boss found out, threatened to sue him and confiscate the new designs. ‘I just broke down and started crying,’ he told Coleridge. ‘He asked me to leave at that moment and I never worked for anyone again.’
In 1968 his childhood friend, Barry Schwartz, having inherited his father’s supermarket business, invited Klein to go into business with him. Instead Schwartz became Klein’s partner in his business, lending the designer $10,000 to open a small showroom in the York Hotel on Seventh Avenue, designing and selling youthful, simple coats for women. What happened next has become ragtrade legend. The merchandise manager of Bonwit Teller got out of the lift on the wrong floor, glimpsed Klein’s coats, liked them and invited him to show them to Mildred Custin, the renowned president of the store. To ensure that the clothes did not get creased or soiled, the designer pushed his collection up Seventh Avenue on a clothes rail. Custin placed an order worth $50,000.
Klein has always focused on modernity and simplicity. ‘I’ve always had a clear design philosophy and point of view about being modern, sophisticated, sexy, clean and minimal. They all apply to my design aesthetic,’ he told Women’s Wear Daily. He had no respect for the couture tradition, acknowledging Claire McCardell as a significant influence. Of her clothes he said, ‘They are the only clothes from the late forties and fifties that could still be worn today beautifully.’ Through the 1970s his classic and classy clean-cut look became a working uniform for large parts of a generation of women motivated by the women’s movement to forge a path into many industries and professions. His spare sportswear style was most often executed in neutral shades and earth tones, the colours most associated with the semi-desert, bare-bones landscape of south-western America and the paintings of Andrew Wyeth—stone, sand, ochre, ubiquitous camel—and Georgia O’Keefe—azure, violet, white, oyster. His daywear classics were tailored in the most expensive flannels, worsteds and tweeds Europe could supply—he criticised American textile producers for poor quality and lack of innovation. Many jackets were cut like a loose shirt, which worked over both skirt and trousers. In 1971 he was a leading exponent of the Big Look, simple loose tops—his smock shape was wildly successful—loose skirts and baggy pants. In 1976 his T-shirt and chemise shaped evening dresses made headlines; in 1977 it was metallic effects and in 1978 slinky cotton jersey slip dresses and his all-year-round butter-soft, unstructured suede and leather pieces in pale, show-every-mark colours.
In 1974 Klein and his first wife, with whom he had a daughter, Marci, were divorced, and he adopted a hedonistic lifestyle. He was regularly seen at celebrity night spots, such as Studio 54, accompanied by a loose-knit circle of friends, including the designers Halston and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, artist Andy Warhol and his Factory acolytes, and Bianca Jagger. Rumours of drug consumption and sexual excesses abounded, as did rumours that Klein had contracted Aids. In fact, an Italian radio station erroneously announced his death from the disease. In 1978, 12-year-old Marci was kidnapped and ransomed for $100,000; Klein paid the ransom and found her alive tied up in a New York tenement.
Both his lifestyle and the growing sexualisation of the image conveyed by his advertising fuelled wide speculation about Klein’s own sexuality. In their 1994 unauthorized biography, Obsession, Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher alleged that he is bisexual. They said that he has a preference for ‘straight boys’ and that he is a member of a so-called ‘Velvet Mafia’ of millionaires who swap lovers. The fact that, after their marriage in 1986, he and Kelly Rector continued to live in separate apartments appeared to confirm the stories. There were allegations about ‘beards’ and ‘contracts’ on the fashion scene, particularly among gay men eager to claim the glamorous Klein for their own.
In 1982 Klein achieved his second great coup with the introduction of Calvin Klein underpants. He launched the snug white briefs in an ad on an enormous billboard in New York’s Times Square; the image was an overtly sexual one of a lithe and muscular man wearing nothing but white underwear. Questioned about the homoerotic appeal of their advertising by Karen Stabiner for The New York Times Magazine, a spokesperson for Calvin Klein deadpanned, ‘We did not try to appeal to gays. We try to appeal, period. If there’s an awareness in that community of health and grooming, then they’ll respond to the ads.’ Klein’s billboard has been credited with heralding a new era in imagery of men in advertising. He went on to produce many more of the same, working with iconic contemporary photographers such as Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts.
In 1983 he launched man-style cotton Calvins for women. Time magazine called them ‘Calvin’s New Gender Benders’ and Women’s Wear Daily deemed it ‘the hottest look in women’s lingerie since the bikini brief’. The boxer shorts had a fly opening. ‘It’s sexier with the fly,’ said Klein. ‘These things are carefully thought out.’ Adapting to the ethos of the 1980s, he showed he could do classic glamour, opting for a more structured look to his tailoring and crisp details like ruffled lace. On the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, Klein said, ‘We all guessed on Seventh Avenue that glamour would be back and we’d be doing glam evening dresses to show it off because the Reagans are Californian and California is pretty showy. It was a great change from the Carter administration w
hich was very much, you sewed your own dress!’ He proved a masterly architect of dramatically streamlined evening wear which owed something to the Adrian and Banton gowns from 1930s movies—all lush satins cut on the bias.
Marsh wrote:
Many in the industry like to believe the fashion business is all about the design, cut, colour and draping of garments—that it is an artistic endeavour—that the fashion industry is one based more on creativity than on commerce. However, the American designer houses that have reigned supreme … have proven that design is a small part of the business of fashion. These businesses draw breath from things like the marketing and positioning of the company’s image, shrewd partnerships with retailers, regular support from the fashion press and, above all, astute business management who can see beyond the hype.
Certainly these things, done so consummately well in America, have resulted in some US brands gaining an undeserved dominance of world markets. But in the case of Calvin Klein, working so successfully to remould American designer sportswear for the 1970s and 1980s, the design input was more than a ‘small part’.
In 2003 Klein and Schwartz sold the company to Phillips-Van Heusen for $739 million, and Francisco Costa took over as creative director, regenerating the brand and restoring its fashion profile.
Further reading: For Klein’s life, see Obsession (1994) by Stephen Gaines and Sharon Churcher; for the story of a mega-brand, see Lisa Marsh’s The House of Klein: Fashion, Controversy and a Business Obsession (2003).
