Calvin Klein

American Fashion King!

"Calvin's stooped, subdued, Hungarian-born father, Leo Klein, was less comfortable with his son's interest in women's clothing than his wife, but Leo didn't have much to say about it - or about anything else in the household...A grocer by trade, he had come to this country at age eleven with his older brother Ernest, and together the two had worked six and seven days a week building up a series of superettes." pg 15, OBSESSION, The Lives and Times of Calvin Klein, 1994.

Calvin Klein graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1962 at the age of twenty and then worked five years for the Seventh Avenue manufacturer Dan Misstein. In 1968, longtime friends Calvin Klein and Barry Schwartz opened their first apparel company, designing and selling women´s coats - an anterprise that combined Klein's design talent and Schwartz´s business acumen. A chance meeting with a Bonwit Teiler buyer lead to a substantial order and Klein's achievements soon earned the recognition of the fashion world.

By 1969 he had landed the cover of Vogue. In 1973 he won the first three consecutive Coty awards. By 1975 Calvin Klein had become a celebrity, and he changed his somewhat homespun earlier image (a 1973 advertisement quoted him as saying about his new collection, "I made a lot of things that go with things.") for a more glamorous one. Actress Brooke Shields created a stir with her 1980 ads for Calvin Klein jeans, which carried the tagline "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins."

Source: The Hungary Page