Background

Ethnicity: Calvin Klein's father immigrated to the United States from Hungary. His mother was the daughter of Galicia (Eastern Europe) and Buchenland, Austrian Empire (modern day-Ukraine) immigrants.

Calvin Klein was born on November 19, 1942, in New York City, New York, the United States, to Flore (née Stern) and Leo Klein. He was the second of the three children that the couple had. The family lived relatively comfortably. His father, originally from Hungary, owned a family grocery store in Harlem while his mother was a homemaker who took great delight in visiting her divorced mother’s tailoring shop, helping to give shape to Klein’s love of clothes and design.

Education

Klein went to Isobel Rooney Middle School 80. A driven youth, Klein started working on fashion sketches before his adolescence. Since he was five Calvin Richard Klein knew that he wanted to design women’s clothes. While other boys in the Bronx neighborhood played baseball and did all the things kids do before they grow up, Calvin spent time watching his grandmother, Molly Stern, a former Hattie Carnegie seamstress, creating gorgeous garments for her customers, accompanying his mother.

Eventually, he attended the High School of Industrial Art in New York City, then majored in apparel design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, from where he graduated in 1962.

Career

Klein worked in various industry jobs before starting his own label. After graduating in 1962, Klein went to work as an apprentice designer for a coat-and-suit manufacturer in the New York garment district. For the next few years, he took various jobs in the garment industry, including a four-month stint as a copy boy at Women's Wear Daily, the trade newspaper that would write about him for decades to come.

In 1968, when Klein was 26, he wanted to open his own business. He went to Barry Schwartz, whom he had known since the age of five, and asked for a loan of $10,000. Schwartz, six months older than Klein, was working at his family's supermarket in Harlem. He loaned Klein the money and two months later, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing Harlem riots, Schwartz walked away from the food business and became Klein's partner.

At the time of its initiation, the company was limited to being a coat shop. Renting a small showroom, Klein was eventually able to secure a deal with the department store Bonwit Teller after a chance encounter with one of its buyers. With the exposure provided by Teller and consumer demand, Klein was able to secure millions in sales by the early ‘70s.

New York fashion industry was in a depressed period, with casual hippie-style clothing and the miniskirt defining the range of fashions. Klein undertook to provide simple, understated clothing. Though noted at first for suits and coats, he gradually placed more emphasis on sportswear, particularly interchangeable separates. Klein’s hard work, dedication, and commitment to fashion paid huge financial dividends too. From a modest start-up of $10,000, the company’s revenues escalated to $30 million by 1977. At that time, other than women’s wear, the company had licenses for scarves, shoes, belts, furs, sunglasses, and sheets.

Not the one to be content easily, Klein ventured forth to expand his business further and acquired a license for cosmetics, jeans, and menswear. Henceforth, the Klein Empire became one of the leading fashion labels, providing customers with an impressive line, all under one brand. Calvin Klein jeans, snug-fitting and with the designer's name emblazoned on the back pocket, created an international sensation. Promoted by a now-legendary series of television commercials, they were made by Puritan Fashions Corporation, headed by Carl Rosen.

While Klein experienced an uphill climb with his business venture, the journey reached the summit when he launched his first jeans line that revolutionized the way people looked at fashion. His introduction of tight-fitting jeans in the market earned him his first mainstream success and gave him and the brand a cult status. The new underwear collections alone brought in $70 million in just one year, and they were advertised heavily throughout the 1990s on large billboards and other advertisements.

In 1992, facing serious financial difficulties, Klein was rescued by his friend David Geffen, who purchased all the company's outstanding debt securities. Klein also added a less expensive line of casual apparel and accessories under the CK brand and moved into the home decor and cosmetics markets. The decade of the 1990s was dominated by his highly popular perfume lines. His three major fragrances, Obsession, Eternity, and Escape, were huge successes.

In 1994, he sold the jeans business for $50 million and his underwear business for $64 million but retained royalty rights in each. He also opened a business in Japan. In 2000, he became embroiled in a contentious trademark infringement suit against The Warnaco Group, the company then licensed to make Calvin Klein jeans. Klein said Warnaco was damaging his reputation and his brand by changing his designs, exercising poor quality control, and selling the jeans to cheap discount stores. A settlement was reached.

In 2003, Klein and Schwartz, who had remained his partner since the day the company was born, sold their business to the publicly owned Phillips-Van Heusen Corp. for $430 million, plus other considerations, including a 4.4 percent stake in PVH for both men. Klein agreed to stay on as a creative consultant. After retiring the following year, he maintained a low public profile. In 2017, however, he published Calvin Klein, a survey of his career that included photographs and anecdotes.

Achievements

• Fashion designer Calvin Klein is known for a range of clothing lines that include ladies' and men's apparel, denim and underwear along with high-profile, provocative ads featuring models and celebrities. Klein is known for his "casual chic" clothing, stylish but casual designs created for active women. He is undoubtedly one of the most successful American clothing designers.
  
  Klein has been honored by various fashion councils from the world over. Klein was the first designer to win three consecutive Coty Awards for womenswear (1973-1975) and was the youngest designer of ready-to-wear clothes ever elected to the Coty Hall of Fame (1975). In 1996, he made it to the list of 25 most influential Americans, published by Times Magazine. In 2003, he received an honorary Doctorate from his alma-mater, Fashion Institute of Technology.

Works

More photos

• audiobook

  • The Emperor's New Clothes: An All-Star Illustrated Retelling of the Classic Fairy Tale

    (Once upon a time, there lived an Emperor with a passion f...)

• book

  • Calvin Klein

    (This magnificent survey is the first and only book that K...)

    2017

Politics

Klein is the supporter of the Democratic Party. He has donated over $250,000 to democratic candidates.

Views

Klein described his design philosophy as the making of "simple, comfortable but stylish clothes - but with nothing overscale or extreme." His clothes were relatively expensive, classic, elegant, and easy to wear, and they struck a responsive chord among buyers in the United States and other countries.

Calvin Klein has supported the following charities: AIDS LIFE, American Foundation for AIDS Research, Elephant Family, Habitat For Humanity, and NYCLASS.

Quotations: "I love women. I'm trying to do beautiful things with them. I'm not trying to insult them. My life is not about that."

"I'm more offended when someone's killed on television than when there's something that's sensuous or sexual. So what?"

"I don't dwell on success. Maybe that's one reason I'm successful."

Personality

Though generally private, Klein has openly spoken about having intimate relationships with both women and men, declining to assign any specific labels to his sexual identity in interviews. However, he admits that the inspiration for much of his ad campaigns comes from what’s happening in his personal life.

A former avid night-lifer and denizen of the famed Studio 54, Klein has also struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, having checked himself into a rehab center in Minnesota in 1988. He later struggled with substance abuse again around the time of his company sale and was able to successfully complete rehab in Arizona.

Interests

• photography

• Politicians

  Barack Obama

• Artists

  Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Steven Klein, Herb Ritts, Mario Testino, Bruce Weber, Mark Rothko, Donald Judd, Georgia O’Keeffe

• Sport & Clubs

  basketball

Connections

In 1964, Calvin Klein married Jayne Centre, a textile designer, but they divorced in 1974. They had one child, Marci. In 1986, he married his assistant, Kelly Rector. This union too wasn’t successful for long. The couple separated in 1996 and legally divorced in 2006. He was also in a brief relationship with a male model known as Nick Gruber.

Father:

Leo Klein

Mother:

Flore Klein

ex-wife:

Jayne Centre Klein

Daughter:

Marci Klein

In 1978, Calvin's daughter, Marci - then 11 - was kidnapped and held for $100,000 ransom before being released unharmed the following day. Nowadays, she is the talent producer for the television show Saturday Night Live.

ex-wife:

Kelly Rector

In September 1986, Klein got married to his personal assistant Kelly Rector. Their romantic and low key ceremony was held in Rome. They officially announced their separation in 1996. However, they didn’t get officially divorced until 2006.

ex-boyfriend:

Nick Gruber

Nick and Calvin's relationship caused a huge stir as Klein was about 48 years older than his new boyfriend. Their relationship came to end by the start of 2012. Gruber later revealed that Klein had gifted him a Bentley but after the breakup, he asked Gruber to return it. He also claimed that Klein had forced him to take a lie detector test and got him interrogated by a former detective. Klein was suspicious that Gruber was cheating on him.

Friend:

Donna Karan

Acquaintance:

Ralph Lauren

References

• The House of Klein: Fashion, Controversy, and a Business Obsession
  2003