Calvin Klein At A Major Turning Point

The American fashion landscape might be changing shape.

With Calvin Klein having announced this week that its creative directors of men’s wear and women’s wear — Italo Zucchelli and Francisco Costa, who have held their respective positions for more than a decade — are leaving the company, The New York Times finds the fashion retailer at a turning point that could affect the industry throughout the country.

Calvin Klein has stated, shares the outlet, that both the men’s wear and women’s wear divisions will be united — along with other categories — under one “vision,” the individual leader of which has yet to be named.

NYT notes that Raf Simons, the former artistic director at Dior, is widely speculated to be high on Calvin Klein’s list to take the reins. Whoever does (and the outlet suggests that Simons — who did comment on the matter — would be a good idea), the NYT story attests that he or she, with the company’s support, would be in a unique position to shake up the New York fashion scene to a degree arguably not seen since the “Big Three” in the design space (Klein himself, Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan) rose to prominence in the 1980s.

Finding that Lauren and Karan have — by choice or by happenstance — over the decades lost the influence on the fashion industry that they once held, while other designers that have emerged in the interim have failed to make an impact equivalent to their predecessors, NYT posits that Calvin Klein (the brand) — having achieved $8.2 billion in sales just last year — stands as the company best equipped to unveil a new aesthetic powerful enough to return the fashion industry in New York — and beyond — to its previous heights of glory.