Calvin Klein Collection relaunched in New York with immense pretension, which is generally a pretty good way to create hype around fashion. A friend told me that only the highest ranking editors were invited to the show on West 39th Street, Calvin Klein’s corporate headquarters. Here, 82-year-old Calvin Klein himself sat in the audience alongside brand faces of yore, Christy Turlington and Kate Moss. The brand’s abs, Jeremy Allen White, were nowhere to be seen, maybe because he’s mass Calvin and this is Collection Calvin. Serious Runway!

The brand teased the show on Instagram with images of the bottom of a nude kitten heel that new 41-year-old creative director Veronica Leoni reproduced almost exactly from the archive, along with close-ups of two bags. The logo font is so skinny it screams 1992. The collection itself was called “monumental minimalism.”

The Cut’s Cathy Horyn interviewed Leoni before the show:

Part of Leoni’s problem at this point is that there is absolutely no shortage of eye-wateringly expensive or “sophisticated” minimalism in the marketplace. Thanks to the pandemic-era explosion of the stealth wealth trend, if you want to buy $400 T-shirts or four-figure swishy trousers, you’ve probably never had more options. Stealth wealth has been going on for long enough that if you can’t afford The Row or Loro Piana or Phoebe Philo or Calvin Klein Collection, you can get basically the same look at Cos, which is owned by H&M and is faster at mass-producing these sorts of nothing clothes, and then selling them for a small fraction of designer prices.

Leoni had to do interviews to promote her debut, and of course had to have an answer as to why Calvin now? And unfortunately, there is no great answer.