Italo Zucchelli is an Italian fashion designer best known for his leadership of Calvin Klein Collection menswear. His work took the clean shapes of American sportswear into material experiments, making a sweatshirt or a suit appear subtly unfamiliar. Reflective surfaces and engineered fabrics gave the clothes a forward-looking edge while keeping the male body central.

Born in La Spezia, Zucchelli worked at Romeo Gigli and Jil Sander before joining Calvin Klein around the turn of the millennium. He became the men’s creative director following the founder’s departure and led the collection through 2016. His tenure offered continuity with Klein’s graphic simplicity, developed through a designer drawn to electronic music and the visual world of British style magazines.

In a January 2010 conversation with Tim Blanks for Interview, Zucchelli connected his visual education to British music and style magazines. “I’ve never liked retro,” he said. He saw new materials and unusual uses of color as ways to move menswear forward, while a fluorescent suit could remain consistent with Calvin Klein’s graphic identity.

The experiments still had to work as clothes. “The fabric makes it new, makes it interesting,” he told Esquire in December 2008. He described a technical-fabric suit jacket that resisted creasing, but also rejected fabrics too heavy or stiff to wear. That distinction gives his work its practical logic. The innovation lay in changing the experience of a recognizable garment, with sportswear and formal dress sharing the same appetite for material research.