London - There’s an old story that the New York base of Calvin Klein used to be whitewashed every weekend during Klein’s tenure.
Kleinland is as white as the tighty-whitey underwear that, along with designer jeans, helped build an empire worth $2.8bn (about R43bn) today.
Italo Zucchelli’s eyes are the same blue as his Calvins. He’s the men’s creative director of the Calvin Klein Collection label, which shows in Milan and is known for precise suiting, rigorous minimalism and a conceptual thought process. Zucchelli’s jeans will set you back about £450 (about R9 700).
Those jeans epitomise the 50-year-old designer’s approach to the Calvin Klein Collection - the final word in the name is emphasised to distinguish it from the other Klein subdivisions. These include Calvin Klein Platinum, Calvin Klein White Label, Calvin Klein Jeans and Calvin Klein Underwear. The Calvin Klein Collection has been dubbed the ‘halo brand’.
Calvin Klein, 73, is no longer on the scene. His company was bought in 2003 by Phillips-Van Heusen. There’s still plenty of Calvin in the house Klein built.
I met Zucchelli in those whiter-than-white CK offices.
He was born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1965 and trained in Florence, first in architecture and then in fashion at the Polimoda International Institute, graduating in 1988. He worked for the Milanese designer Romeo Gigli and the German Jil Sander, before joining Klein.
He frequently pushes the architecture of his garments, creating clothes that bubble and lift around the body, forming unusual shapes and abstract effects.
Zucchelli’s designs toe a strange line, almost unique in contemporary menswear. Calvin Klein is a point of convergence between contemporary ideas of masculine sexuality and beauty, American cultural imperialism and clean sportswear. All ideas that have relevance to the wardrobes of men across the world. Give them to a designer like Zucchelli, and you end up with something unexpected and compelling.
“My first recollection of this brand was when i was 16 or 17,” said Zucchelli.
“It was the Bruce Weber underwear campaign. It was new. It was expressing an ideal of masculinity that was in my imagination, very American. It was clean, athletic, healthy-looking.”
It’s an idea that has undoubtedly informed Zucchelli, his perceptions of Klein, and his projection of the label’s aesthetic.
Calvin Klein menswear stands out in the landscape of contemporary fashion for its apparent simplicity, its strength and, overwhelmingly, for an odd, twisted take on the cliches of Americana. Paradoxically, Zucchelli won the award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America for menswear designer in 2009, apparently for challenging those menswear mores.
That’s a little alien to the Italian Zucchelli - but, he argues, not so alien.
“We all grew up, in Europe Americanised. Italy has a strong identity as a country, as a culture. But I think it adds a different spin on what an otherwise literal vision of Americanness would be. I put in an element of fantasising the Americanness. Of exaggerating it.”
That’s the interesting thing - Zucchelli’s America is not straightforward, not even jeans.
“That’s what I think my job is,” he said. “That’s how we dress. It’s also especially part of American style. There is an unfussiness, an easiness to it. Especially to Calvin Klein. You don’t have to think too much about it.”
But Zucchelli does. He’s evidently been considering Calvin Klein for years, what it represents, how to represent it.
He is thinking about our perceptions of Calvin Klein.
“There is another element, I think. It’s a big paradox. Calvin Klein, even to an Italian, was very American. I thought it was the most European of American brands, because of the level of sophistication. Clean lines, sober. I don’t have to stop myself from putting jewels on it - which, as a stereotypical Italian, you might think I would do.”
There’s no inner Donatella in Zucchelli, screaming to wreak havoc at CK.
“Although I love her,” Zucchelli says enthusiastically. “It’s a second skin for me this aesthetic. It’s not an effort.” What he likes are the core values of Calvin Klein.
“I like to take these two references, the underwear and the jeans, because they’re part of the language of the brand” - his voice drops a bit - “and the sexiness of the brand.”
Sex is all-important at Calvin Klein. The designer himself was a Studio 54 wild-child: he named a perfume Obsession, syncing it with sexual desire. If the notion of sex selling wasn’t created by Klein, he took it to new heights.
The new heights, in the post-gay liberation and pre-Aids era of the late 1970s and early 1980s, were in male sexuality.
Klein launched his underwear in 1982 with the Weber image that Zucchelli saw in his teenage years - of former Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus, shot from the ground up, the outline of his penis evident in plain white briefs, and the centrepiece of the image.
“You had a man, in his underwear, on a billboard in 1983,” said Zucchelli, still incredulous. “It was pretty ground-breaking. Now it’s everywhere. We’re used to it, we don’t think about it. But then it was the first time. There is always this element, of the masculinity, of the sexuality. Expressed in different ways. It’s part of the language of Calvin Klein.”
“It’s a balancing game.”
The Independent