Calvin Klein has taken a highbrow turn in the two years since Veronica Leoni took charge. The Italian designer, a philosophy graduate who was schooled in the chic design studios of Jil Sander and Celine, has shifted away from jeans, boxer shorts and logos, stripping the brand to its minimalist bones: slip dresses and simple coats, slim skirts and crisp T-shirts.
Leoni called this the “discipline of removal”. Her muse this season was Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist who the brand’s namesake founder admired. Klein bought O’Keeffe’s painting Summer Days in 1983 for $1m, subsequently donating it to the Whitney Museum. A checked pattern taken from O’Keeffe’s distinctive capsule wardrobe of utilitarian chic appeared on this catwalk as a wrap coat, hardware-free with a fabric belt and no buttons.
One nod to pop culture was allowed: a model in a crepe-back satin ivory slip dress, her blond hair scraped back by a simple headband, called to mind the late Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the iconic Calvin Klein employee who was launched back into the fashion conversation by Ryan Murphy’s Love Story earlier this year.
Over at the Michael Kors show staged in the sunny courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art, the first model was wearing glossy black disc earrings the size of potato crisps suspended from glinting stainless steel hooks. They looked like pieces from Alexander Calder’s huge mobile, Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, which hangs in the stairwell of the museum.
No art heist had taken place, but Kors admitted to being indebted to Calder. This summer, the designer travelled with his husband to Paris, where a major Calder retrospective was held. “We were just in love! The magic of it,” Kors enthused at a preview before his show. Modernism became the theme for this latest collection.
As well as the Calder-adjacent earrings, there was an evening dress carved with crescent-shaped edges at the shoulders in homage to Matisse’s cut-outs, and a pencil skirt zigzagged with black and white stripes which winked to Carmen Herrera. A ribbon of banana yellow floating from the hem of a black dress was giving Ellsworth Kelly.
“I love the boldness of modernism and the optimism of it,” Kors said. After the bedazzled glamour of last season’s show, held in the Lincoln Center opera house, this collection leaned into a more artsy sensibility, with traditionally feminine colours swapped out for tobacco, black and moss green.
Held on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the show was also “a remembrance”, Kors said, and a tribute to the resilience of the city. “We keep going. Everyone said that no one would ever want to live downtown again,” he recalled. “And now look at us.”
Tory Burch has transformed her brand, once synonymous with logoed ballet flats and polished Upper East Side good taste, into one of the most directional names of New York fashion week.
Her show was accompanied by the eerie, unsettling soundtrack from The Shining, because “it’s quite dystopian for all of us right now”, she said backstage. The clothes were a cheerful contrast, opening with a lavender silk dress accessorised with a boa of golden silk feathers.
Jewel-toned pencil skirts, embellished cardigans and ballerina necklines had a midcentury sophistication. “I was thinking about how much people need to feel joy right now. We need to dream and escape, to find bright spots where we can, and that’s where this collection came from.”