WHAT COMES BETWEEN BROOKE AND HER CALVINS? CHINA!

A review of the Calvin Klein boutique

This piece previously appeared in the New York Times in 2009.

FROM the late 1970s through the early ’90s, despite some wide financial mood swings, Calvin Klein occupied an infinity of clean white space in the design world. Everything the brand touched was reflective of the spare architectural minimalism (that had yet to be mass produced by places like West Elm). The sumptuously erotic black-and-white Herb Ritts ads created a nostalgia for an easy Utopian future, full of startlingly intimate moments — snapshots of seaside romps with surreally beautiful lovers in various stages of undress. The designer’s wife at the time, invariably described as “the leonine Kelly Klein,” was admired for looking casually ravishing with loose hair, natural makeup and little or no jewelry. The Calvin Klein brand was a heady mix of white sand, cloudless skies, stress-less luxury and urgent passion.

I asked my fashionista friend Johanna to accompany me to the flagship store on Madison Avenue because I haven’t known how to think about Calvin Klein lately. Since Francisco Costa became the company’s creative director of women’s wear in 2003, the iconic sharpness of the looks has softened into a mood I had not quite deciphered.

“Ah, but it’s all so simple,” Johanna cooed, gravitating to a black dress that I thought looked like something Jackie O. might wear to the funeral of either husband, a timelessly somber thing with three-quarter sleeves and a high neckline.

I examined a short dress spun from a fine nylon mesh. “This looks like mosquito netting,” I said.

“Yeah,” Johanna agreed, “but the best mosquito netting.”

Next to this was a large cashmere-silk hoodie, ostensibly for haute dog-walking ($1,295), and a cashmere tank ($350). I found these puzzling, mainly because these basic items can be found almost anywhere, in similarly conservative cuts, and generally at a fraction of the cost. I kept adjusting my antennas but could not get the big picture.

On the way in, I had passed a futonlike flat on the floor displaying the season’s new sandals. They were not dissimilar to Prada’s sporty platform sandals, but were noticeably huge, with a wide, square toe and a rounded base like the bottom of a rowboat. My first thought was that they were bold and commendable: metallic T-strap sandals for men!

A saleswoman breezed by with a pair.

“What size are those?” I asked, expecting an answer in the gentleman’s footwear range.

“This is the last 38,” she said. “They’re really popular.”

I had that vertiginous wah-wah feeling one gets when plunged into cognitive dissonance.

The sandals, detailed with silver mesh, were more or less my size, but looked as if they would fit my dad, and seemed, literally, to weigh around three pounds. But they are very comfortable, which made me think that Shelley Winters might have enjoyed wearing them to assist in her own drowning by Montgomery Clift.

Upstairs, I found an asymmetrical white goddess dress, which was difficult to envision outside a toga party. A rack of offerings in sea-foam green and soapy mauve were so timidly undersexed that it was impossible not to associate them with mothers of brides, but I couldn’t tell if this was intentional.

We scuttled off to the dressing rooms, with stacks of loot. I was excited to try a sleeveless tank dress in shimmery liquid satin ($1,095). It didn’t give me the chrome hood-ornament effect I had hoped for. There was an asymmetrical bunching at one side that made me resemble a sock scrunched the wrong way down a combat boot.

Johanna was confident that a particular pewter cocktail dress would win my love, once on. I wasn’t so sure; it was a roiling mass of gray pin-tucks, swooping in conflicting directions for a crosscurrent-undertow effect. I was willing to be won over, but the dress was not kind. I staggered out to show her.

“I am your lung after five years of chain-smoking,” I said in the affectless voice of a disembodied organ.

She liked it. I didn’t understand it.

We had great hopes for a teal silk-jersey dress with lovely mandarin-neck detail ($600).

“Nope,” Johanna called from the dressing room. It was clingy in all the wrong places — too tight over the curves; loose and baggy in the middle — basically the problem I had with the things I tried on: knit numbers that had a kicky Zelda Fitzgerald look on the hanger, but on the body evoked the wrong years of Brigitte Nielsen.

Best of show was Johanna’s first pick: the black sheath funeral dress ($895), which had lovely tailoring and made her look like the comeliest researcher in the cryogenics lab.

I was totally bewildered. I cornered our salesman, the kind and helpful David Sim, and asked him as delicately as possible, “Is Calvin Klein being designed primarily for the Asian market now?”

Mr. Sim smiled serenely. “Calvin Klein does a lot more business in Asia and Europe” than in the States.

Suddenly it all made sense: the baby pinks, too-polite cashmeres, proper necklines and sheath cuts dropping straight from the shoulders to the knees, with fewer of the usual feminine detours. Once there were subtle perks to being a functional superpower: Everything was attuned to our cultural preferences, from candy flavors to comedy films to electronic beeping sounds. We were once the gravitational center of the aesthetic universe. We aren’t anymore.

Who would have predicted that China would eventually come between Brooke and her Calvins?

The brand has changed; the bronze Calvin Klein in white who danced so well at Studio 54 isn’t the sun god around which it orbits anymore. The brand’s aesthetic loyalties have expatriated to where the gold is.

It’s our fault, really: We drove Calvin away. America went to the economic Russian roulette table with the bluster of a drunk cowboy. We became greedy, whacked-out and belligerent in those lost, unregulated years. We gambled away everything sacred, sucked our friends and families dry, ordered more rounds on our maxed-out credit cards and sucker-punched anyone who tried to tell us how fast our chips were falling.

Now, in the unforgiving light of a fluorescent hangover, we are here: facing the loss of our face, our boots, our Calvins and everything that was in them, standing by a crumbling roadway, trying to hitch a ride on that slow boat to China.

CALVIN KLEIN

654 Madison Avenue (60th Street); (212) 292-9000.

COOLER KLIME Styles may have changed at Calvin Klein, but you can still count on the essentials. It’s still a high, cool white box where one can find Hamptons linens, table-top sets and unabashedly huge coffee-table books by Kelly Klein on subjects like “Pools” and  “Horse.”  

CLIPPED ’N’ KLEEN The staff is kindly and hospitable, used to a haute international clientele that likes shiny flat shoes and cashmere tanks.

CRISPY KREME It’s a softer, pinker look these days for the perennially modern line, but if your idea of one-stop shopping includes everything from martini shakers to a vaguely Japanese asymmetrical wedding dress — well, you’re probably too wealthy to be American.

Cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: “Anna May Wong in Fur,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2022