Calvin Klein Shines On

Any designer can make an educated guess about what will be craveable next based on quiet signs of present fatigue. Those who focused on ladylike street-wear this season in soft retaliation against 90s grunge can tell you that — but Calvin Klein’s Francisco Costa does more than react.

The collection opened with a glossy black pony hair jacket and leather shoe-pants which are at once as fun to say as they were to question. How does one put shoe-pants on? Is assistance required? Baby powder? A wax? Were they, indeed, body-con trousers with feet, or were they thigh high boots that I imagined as otherwise?

Never mind, because clothes that cause confusion feed the soul.

Just as vitally nourishing but instantly easy to understand was Costa’s unwavering attention to detail. Each item was cut with a razor sharp eye and the X-acto knife equivalent of predictive aesthetic. Costa must see wavelengths of energy as it ripples below the black heeled feet of his front row in the same way that animals can sense a storm. But he doesn’t immediately take action for movement’s sake; rather, he thinks methodically. He’s careful. Precise. There’s order in the layered plackets of leather and suede. There’s rhyme to the hems that — per his reasoning — needed shredding.

Costa is able to reference and apply influence in the way that an expert makeup artist can make you bronzed, not “tan.” Sure we’ve seen these shapes before; these large buttons before; these shoe-pants before; Mod when it was actually modern and mod when, years, later, it became popular again. But have we seen it done this well?

Or perhaps the question to be asking is: have we seen it done in such a way that it feels as important (as this one does) to right now?  These clothes are needed immediately.

Well before the closing black perforated dresses stormed the second-to-last runway of the New York Fall 2015 show season, the crowd was already buzzing about whether or not this meant the trending 70s were already over. (Confusing, seeing as the original 70s obviously came after the 60s,  but at this point it’s chicken versus egg.)

Designers like Francisco Costa know that to create a moment means you’ve materialized what’s ultimately ephemeral. And that’s okay. As tenured artists they’ve given in to the loop and have accepted that if fashion is cyclical, all trends are technically dead. But stars die millions of years before we stop seeing their light, don’t they? Doesn’t make them any less bright.

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Images via Style.com