Calvin Klein

Calvin Klein born 19 November 1942

American designer Calvin Klein has created an extraordinarily successful fashion empire through the simple and elegant design of his clothes and through his skilful employment of provocative advertising campaigns that are saturated with homoeroticism.

Born in the Bronx, New York, the son of a Jewish grocer, Klein taught himself to sketch and sew as a boy. His mother was an elegant and sophisticated woman who played an important role in shaping her son's fashion sense by taking him on trips to her dressmakers. His grandmother had the greatest influence on his budding career by teaching him to use a sewing machine.

Klein attended New York's Fashion Institute of Technology. After graduating in 1962, he worked for a Seventh Avenue coat and suit house. In 1968, with his childhood friend Barry Schwartz, he opened his own business, designing and selling women's coats.

Klein's emphasis in designing clothes has always been on modernity and simplicity, creating wearable outfits for both men and women.

In 1964, Klein married Jayne Centre, with whom he had a daughter, Marci. Klein and Centre were divorced in 1974.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Klein was a familiar face on the New York club scene. He was regularly seen at celebrity night spots, such as the now legendary Studio 54, accompanied by a loosely knit circle of friends, who included designers Halston and Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, artist Andy Warhol and his acolytes, and Bianca Jagger, among others.

Rumours of drug consumption and sexual excesses abounded, as did rumours that Klein had contracted AIDS. In fact, an Italian radio station announced his death from the disease. In May 1988, Klein revealed his drug addiction and checked into a drug rehabilitation clinic.

Rumours have circulated widely about Klein's sexuality. In their 1994 unauthorised biography, Obsession, Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher alleged that he is bisexual. They said that he has a preference for 'straight boys' and that he is a member of a so-called 'Velvet Mafia' of millionaires who swap lovers.

In 1986, Klein wed a thirty-two-year-old worker from his design studio, Kelly Rector. The fact that the couple continued to live in separate apartments only added fuel to the rumours.

Klein developed his fashion empire by branching out from women's coats to sportswear, then developing a line of designer jeans, and launching successful fragrances in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1982 Klein altered the way men viewed and bought underwear with the introduction of Calvin Klein underwear. This may be his biggest contribution to gay culture. To announce the launch of his men's white briefs, he erected an enormous billboard in New York's Times Square, featuring an overtly sexual image of a perfectly formed muscular man wearing nothing but white underwear.

Klein's billboard has been credited with heralding a new era in imagery of men in advertising and in precipitating a new fashion in men's underwear. This campaign ran just a few years before the revolution in men's magazine advertising that sexualised the male form as a hairless muscular object of desire.

The homoerotic appeal was enhanced by the use of photographs by Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts. By the beginning of the 1990s, Calvin Klein white cotton briefs were the most popular item of underwear for gay men, enhanced by the use of increasingly sexual images, such as the 1992 campaign featuring then rap star Marky Mark (Wahlberg).

In 1993 Klein created a breakthrough new concept in designer fragrance with the launch of cK One, a unisex fragrance designed to be worn by both men and women.

Advertising has played a major role in the success of Calvin Klein's many fashion enterprises. From the Richard Avedon advertisement for Calvin Klein jeans featuring a young Brooke Shields asking, 'You know what comes between me and my Calvin's? Nothing,' through the homoeroticism of the jeans insert in Vanity Fair shot by Bruce Weber, and the stylish black and white advertisements for the perfumes Obsession and Eternity, to the controversial 1995 campaign for cK Calvin Klein jeans that was quickly withdrawn after accusations of child pornography, Klein's advertising campaigns have been both provocative and enormously successful.

Commenting on the importance of advertising Klein himself stated that 'I think it starts with the product. Then you need to communicate what the product's about. We've done that efficiently.'

More than efficient, the advertising campaigns for Klein's products have made homoeroticism a staple of consumer culture in North America and Western Europe.