Calvin Klein

Calvin Klein opened in 1968 in New York, founded by Calvin Klein and his childhood friend Barry Schwartz with $10,000 in startup capital. The first shop was a small coat room at the York Hotel, and an early order from Bonwit Teller put the label on the map within its first year. The press would come to call Klein “the supreme master of minimalism,” a label that followed him through the next four decades and shaped how the brand would be perceived.

Klein introduced his first menswear collection in 1978, pitched at American men who wanted understated tailoring over anything overscale. The range covered suits, overcoats, sportswear separates, and the clean denim and boxer briefs that would come to define the house.

In 1982, Calvin Klein Underwear launched and turned a basics category into a designer one, a shift made famous by the 1992 Mark Wahlberg campaign shot by Herb Ritts. The Calvin Klein model became its own cultural archetype from that point forward, with the brand’s casting choices setting the template for how American underwear and denim campaigns would look for decades.

That minimalist American sportswear position placed Calvin Klein alongside Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis, and Donna Karan through the 1970s and 1980s, though Klein’s aesthetic ran closer to Jil Sander and Helmut Lang on the European side. Klein won three consecutive Coty American Fashion Critics’ Awards from 1973 to 1975 and was the youngest ready-to-wear designer elected to the Coty Hall of Fame.

Klein sold the company to Phillips-Van Heusen, now PVH Corp, in 2003 for approximately $700 million and stepped down as chief designer the following year. Francisco Costa took womenswear and Italo Zucchelli took menswear, with Zucchelli holding the post for over a decade. Raf Simons joined as chief creative officer in 2016, won both CFDA Designer of the Year titles in 2017, and exited in late 2018 over creative differences.

The Collection runway line went on hiatus in 2019, and in 2024 Veronica Leoni, formerly of The Row and Celine, was named creative director of Collection, reopening the line with a fall 2025 debut that covered men’s and women’s. Today Calvin Klein operates as a PVH-owned global lifestyle brand, dressing the mainstream American menswear shopper through jeans, underwear, tailoring, and fragrance, with the Collection tier aimed at the minimalist luxury customer. It sits at the premium end of mass-market American fashion, a position the brand has held since the 1970s.