KLEIN, Calvin

(b. 19 November 1942 in New York City), legendary fashion designer who, in the later 1960s, pioneered casual chic in sportswear with high-quality natural fibers, slim silhouettes, and neutral or earthen colors.

Klein was the second of three children of Leo, a grocer, and Flo (Stern) Klein, a supermarket cashier. The family lived along the Mosholu Parkway section of the Bronx in New York City, a neighborhood populated by garment workers or proprietors of small local shops. His maternal grandmother, Molly Stern, was a seamstress for the dress designer Hattie Carnegie, and his mother was a fashion-conscious clotheshorse who often took her son to a local Loehmann's, where she bought designer labels at discount prices. At Loehmann's, Klein would closely examine the garments to see how they were constructed. From early childhood he sketched, often comic-book characters or women in fancy gowns. For one early birthday, his grandmother Molly gave Klein a sewing machine, and he designed and sewed an entire wardrobe for the dolls of his younger sister and her friends.

From kindergarten through ninth grade, Klein attended Public School 80, where he excelled in art and always carried a sketchbook. His mother always made sure that the young Klein was impeccably groomed and dressed. He was the neighborhood trendsetter, even in kindergarten, where he wore light-colored shirts with a bow tie. By age twelve he was taking life drawing and sketching lessons on weekends at the Art Students League in Manhattan.

Klein then attended the High School of Industrial Arts in Manhattan. It specialized in various trades, and Klein majored in fashion illustration. Among his classmates there were the fashion illustrator Antonio and the poet-photographer Gerard Malanga. After graduating in 1960 Klein took a summer job at a Bronx amusement park and then entered the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). After studying for one year at FIT, Klein was discouraged with his talents and became a copyboy in the art department of Women's Wear Daily, the bible of the fashion industry. For six months he tried to become an illustrator for the publication, but no one there was interested in his sketches. He did learn, though, about fashion as an industry.

Klein reentered FIT, where his acquired tastes for his later career were formed. His passion for expensive fabrics tended toward natural yarns of cotton and silk. "I hate polyester!" he would often tell later interviewers. Also, his preference for assignments emphasized his later trademark muted shades of browns and beiges. After his graduation from FIT in 1962 and several odd jobs in New York City's fashion district, Klein became a sketcher and then a design apprentice for Dan Millstein, whose plush showroom building is now occupied by Calvin Klein, Inc. He learned the nuts and bolts of manufacturing garments, including quality control and rapport with buyers. Millstein introduced Klein to haute couture by taking him to Europe to view the Paris collections. In 1964 Klein married Jayne Center, and they had a daughter (who was briefly kidnapped for ransom in 1978).

In 1965 Klein began work at Louis Shlansky's Halldon Ltd., a fake-fur coat manufacturer. Klein designed moderately priced coats in tweeds, gabardine, and wool twills. Klein's design room was right off Shlansky's showroom, and he was introduced to all the merchandise buyers. Klein's work began appearing in industrial publications, including the influential Tobe Report, which in 1967 noted that Klein was "one of the more aggressive and imaginative young coat and suit designers." That year Klein began to formulate samples for his own line of women's garments. Klein has always been primarily an idea man. Until then, he had little actual practice in constructing and tailoring clothes, but he learned the tricks of those trades over weekends for several months from Shansky's pattern maker, Abe Morenstein. Also that year he was offered a position with the sportswear firm of Bobbie Brooks.

Klein was advised against the move by Barry Schwartz. Schwartz and Klein had been inseparable best friends since they were five years old and dreamed of getting rich together. While Klein attended FIT, Schwartz studied business at New York University and then worked in his family's supermarket business. In 1968 Schwartz persuaded Klein to become partners with him in what was initially called Calvin Klein Ltd. The company operated first out of a small suite of a Seventh Avenue hotel and then bought out Millstein and moved into his building at 205 West Thirty-ninth Street.

During the late 1960s American fashion as fashion was at a low ebb. The fads then were dressing down, hippie style, or the "mod" look of miniskirt and plastic boots. Klein wanted a classic look in which garments would have muted pastel shades and crisp, precise lines and silhouettes. In 1969, while still located at his hotel suite, Klein had few orders. By sheer luck, the vice president of the chic department store Bonwit Teller, Donald O'Brien, happened to see a rack of Klein's garments near the hotel's elevator. That chance occurrence led Klein to show his garments to Mildred Custin, the president of Bonwit. That encounter became legendary in fashion history. Not only did she offer Klein his first substantial order of $50,000 retail, but she also agreed to give him $10 more per garment if they were of the same high quality as the samples. Custin wanted his clothes exclusively, but Klein was able to convince her that other stores also were interested. Shortly after Bonwit's order, a scout for the buying service William Van Buren and a buyer for the chic Washington, D.C., chain Garfinckel's also placed orders. Klein's career was launched.

By the end of Klein's first year in business, his shipping orders exceeded a million dollars. Until 1972 he designed two-piece suits and coats; that year he began sportswear that translated Parisian couture into trimmer proportions more appropriate for American women. He began licensing deals in 1974. That year he and his wife divorced. He married Kelly Rector on 26 September 1986. In 1978 Klein began his menswear collections. Since the late 1960s Klein's garments have pioneered casual chic at a time when American high fashion was in a slump brought about by younger women wearing informal clothes. His clothes, first for women and then for men, became known for high-quality natural fibers, elegant and trim lines, and subdued earth tones or neutral colors. "I design for the new look," Klein once commented, "but with an everlasting feeling."

A biography of Klein is Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher, Obsession: The Lives and Times of Calvin Klein (1994). See also John Fairchild, Chic Savages (1989), and Barbaralee Diamonstein, Fashion: The Inside Story (1985).

Patrick S. Smith