When Raf Simons took over the helm at Calvin Klein as Chief Creative Director, his immediate action in reshaping the identity of the iconic American brand was to consolidate the entire Calvin Klein portfolio and adhering to one singular creative vision. For Spring Summer ’18, Simons is thinking southwestern Americana and cowboy aesthetics.
Luella Bartley, ex-designer of Marc by Marc Jacobs and now head of global design at Calvin Klein Jeans, embraced this “nouveau Americana” aesthetic and took us on a journey through the great western outdoors in her first full collection for the brand. Youthful, bold and provocative, her spring summer ‘18 line up comprised 16 irresistible women’s looks that boasted a dynamic mixture of classic denim in its iconic silhouette fits and washes with pops of colours and stark, graphic tones.
Highlights include several reiterations of denim wear and modern western utilitarian styles that paid tribute to the American classics; from cowboy denim shirts with contrasting pockets and western high rise denim pants with sporty side lines, to oversized denim trucker jacket with vibrant paint splash detailing all over the jacket and short sleeved work shirts, all styled with cowboy boots. Elsewhere, playful prairie shirt dresses were added to soften the collection’s work wear-inspired pinafore dress while rich colours appearing in colour blocks of say, a red slouchy denim jumpsuit worn over tailored yellow shirt, nod to Simon’s vision of the symmetry of modern American pop art and the iconography of Calvin Klein denim jeans.
Bartley also injected a nineties spin into her youthful, casual wear collection by bringing back the iconic cK monogram and rendering them on several pieces in the form of logo patch details. To sum up the youthful, Americana spirit of the collection, a Calvin Klein Jeans’ Spring Summer ’18 campaign starring model-of-the-moment Kaia Gerber in a denim-on-denim look alongside her brother Presley Gerber, the teenage model offspring of 90s supermodel Cindy Crawford and her husband Rande Gerber, couldn’t be more cooler and relevant to Simon’s call to togetherness/unity in his “Our Family. #MyCalvins” global campaign for the brand.
View the collection here:
