From Mass Market to High End and Back Again: What Happened Between a 50-Year-Old Creative Director and a 50-Year-Old Fashion Brand?

In under two years, an experiment in remaking a brand has been declared a failure. But Raf Simons and the Calvin Klein Group did test two questions almost no one else tries to answer.

On December 21, local time, Calvin Klein announced it was parting ways with its creative director, Raf Simons, effective immediately. That was eight months before the contract was due to expire, and less than two years after Simons took the job to enormous fanfare.

When the partnership began two years ago, the press called it "the most high-profile brand-reinvention experiment in 21st-century American fashion" and "a fairy tale". Calvin Klein said at the time that it intended to lift annual revenue from $8 billion to $10 billion, and the founder said warmly: "They've finally made the design change I'd been waiting for — actually replacing me, finding someone with an extraordinary eye who can also lead the creative side."

Two years later, the partnership has broken down. There will be no Calvin Klein show at New York Fashion Week in February, and for now no word on how long it will be before a successor is named.

Neither side would explain the split. The official statement put it this way: "The Calvin Klein Group has decided to change the direction of the brand, and this diverged from Raf Simons's creative vision. The two sides then decided to part ways amicably."

"The only thing clear to onlookers is that this is no longer a fashion fairy tale. The story has turned cautious," wrote Vanessa Friedman, fashion director of The New York Times.

The rift had in fact been public since the third-quarter earnings call a month earlier. Calvin Klein's earnings before interest and taxes for the quarter fell to $121 million from $142 million a year earlier. Revenue for the brand as a whole slipped 2% to $963 million. The stock was down 35% for the year.

Emanuel Chirico, CEO of parent company PVH, then said in public, unexpectedly, that the third-quarter decline came down to "a $1 million increase in creative and marketing spend" — meaning that the creative director, Raf Simons, was to blame.

Chirico also called two of Simons's major moves on the product lines "a fashion miss": "While most product categories sold well, we haven't seen much return on our investment in Calvin Klein 205W39NYC, the 'halo business.' We also believe the relaunched Calvin Klein Jeans line was pitched too high-end and didn't sell as well as planned."

For the business side of a fashion group to blame a sitting creative director in public is rare. The last split to cause comparable shock was in 2015, when Alexander Wang left Balenciaga after less than three years — though there, too, both sides stuck to "an amicable parting" on every occasion.

Calling Raf Simons's arrival at Calvin Klein "a fairy tale" was not an overstatement. It tested at least two questions almost no one else tries to answer: can a star creative director turn a mass-market brand into a high-end one, and do it fast? And if a brand wants commercial success, should it hand its creative director more control, so that his aesthetic runs through everything?

For a 50-year-old designer, and for a 50-year-old brand, the chance to answer those two questions probably comes only once.

Fifty years after it was founded, the American brand Calvin Klein has done well as a business but has never been known for leading fashion. It began with women's coats, and by the 1970s had added sportswear, classic jackets and underwear to its womenswear. After PVH bought it in 2002, Calvin Klein built out three main lines: the high-fashion Calvin Klein Collection, the upmarket ready-to-wear CK Calvin Klein, and the denim line Calvin Klein Jeans. It also makes fragrance, eyewear, socks, underwear, sleepwear, swimwear and home furnishings.

But most people still think of Calvin Klein as a mass brand that sells minimalist underwear and jeans. Those two lines have always been the profitable ones. The clothes are minimal and sexy; high fashion they are not. Its runway shows did not excite many people either. According to former CEO Tom Murry, the runway collection was booked on the brand's balance sheet as marketing spend — it did not even count as investment in product development.

The change came out of Calvin Klein's ambition to pass $10 billion in annual revenue quickly. It borrowed the approach of Gucci and Alessandro Michele, Yves Saint Laurent and Hedi Slimane, Coach and Stuart Vevers: put a star creative director at the center of the brand's success story — the "halo," in CEO Emanuel Chirico's word. The hope was not only that his arrival would cast a halo over the cheaper products, but that the high-end ready-to-wear business would stop being a marketing exercise and start driving results.

Raf Simons carried those hopes. He is quiet, reserved and sensitive, but not short of nerve; devoted to minimal design, and also obsessed with contemporary art and youth culture.

The Belgian founded his own label as early as 1995, but what made his name were two rescue jobs. First he took Jil Sander's minimalism further after its founder left; then, after John Galliano was fired by Dior over his antisemitic remarks, he overturned Galliano's theatrical staging and returned Dior to elegance. Three years in at Dior, though, frustrated that his work was confined to womenswear, he left.

Calvin Klein gave Raf Simons control no one there had been given before. He drew a million-dollar annual salary, took the title of chief creative officer, and ran design and marketing across the whole range — womenswear, menswear, denim, underwear. That work had previously been divided among three designers: Francisco Costa, Italo Zucchelli and Kevin Corrigan.

The gamble carried very high risk and very high pressure. Simons had spent his career at high-end labels and had little experience of mass marketing, and the mass market was where Calvin Klein made its money. Nor was he an unknown, the way Alessandro Michele was when he arrived at Gucci and could meet the doubters with a newcomer's nerve.

It was also hard to say whether PVH — a listed company with little experience running a high-end brand, facing consumers and investors with ever less patience — was as prepared as it claimed for the enormous money the transformation would take, and for the time investors and shoppers would need to accept it.

The changes Raf Simons brought were obvious. Along with the new logo, advertising that had been built on sexy young bodies gave way to cooler, more artful imagery. Some people objected. The high-end ready-to-wear business was renamed 205W39NYC, after the address of Calvin Klein's New York headquarters at 205 West 39th Street, and came to the runway with a new look. Some complained the name was a mouthful, and remote.

Simons was not afraid to use fashion to talk politics. At the February 2018 show — a year after Donald Trump was sworn in as U.S. president — he covered the floor of the American Stock Exchange with 50,000 gallons of white popcorn and opened and closed with David Bowie's This Is Not America. "My understanding of Calvin Klein is also my understanding of American society," he said. The show drew wide praise: Calvin Klein had finally given New York Fashion Week — which brands kept leaving and which had grown dull from too much commerce — something worth watching.

Over the past two years, the American fashion industry gave him three of its top awards: Womenswear Designer of the Year at the CFDA Awards in 2017 and 2018, and Menswear Designer of the Year in 2017.

But Raf Simons also spent a great deal of money. He had the artist Sterling Ruby remake the Madison Avenue flagship, launched Calvin Klein by Appointment, the brand's first made-to-order line, and signed a multi-year agreement with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

PVH CEO Emanuel Chirico later told analysts that the group had put $60 million to $70 million into the 205W39NYC line over the past three years.

The high-end ready-to-wear line drew decent early responses. In the first season alone, the number of stores carrying it grew from 30 to 300. And Simons did think about how to be high-end and approachable at the same time. He called on executives at Macy's; he put the Kardashians in Calvin Klein underwear and denim campaigns. The front row filled with young famous faces: the Hollywood actor Jake Gyllenhaal, Motofumi Kogi of the Japanese streetwear label United Arrows, the rapper A$AP Rocky.

As late as this March, PVH still seemed to trust Simons completely, praising at every turn the endorsement 205W39NYC gave the other product lines.

Over the past eight months, that patience ran out fast. The reason was simple: Simons's designs did not turn into steadily rising numbers on the earnings report, just as the awkward name 205W39NYC never lodged in most people's minds.

In February, PVH brought in the former L'Oréal executive Marie Gulin-Merle as chief marketing officer — but she reported to brand CEO Steve Shiffman, not to Raf Simons. She then pulled marketing money out of Simons's highly conceptual advertising and put it into influencers and social media. The new concept stores the company had promised were never heard of again. In September, a show scheduled for the ground floor of the headquarters building was cancelled on budget grounds.

According to BoF, several sources also said PVH worried that Simons's work with the Andy Warhol Foundation was "too artsy, too high-end" for ordinary shoppers to accept — even though PVH was the one that had started the move upmarket.

What Emanuel Chirico said after the November earnings release settled the matter: "From a product point of view, we went too far, too fast, on fashion and on price." He added that the group would cut its investment in 205W39NYC and move in a more commercial direction. Marketing would shift from high fashion to goods aimed at a mainstream audience at friendlier prices. Which sounds like the Calvin Klein of two years ago.

The transformation — hugely expensive, and attempted under enormous risk and pressure — had failed.

"A hit with the critics, a miss at the register" is too easy a summary of what Calvin Klein and Raf Simons attempted over the past two years.

"A company the size of Calvin Klein needs a creative person, a certain amount of time and a lot of money to change. Calvin Klein was not built in a day, or in 18 months. It's a delicate and complicated challenge. Neither side seems to have anticipated how heavy the task was," Robert Burke, a luxury consultant at Robert Burke Associates, told The New York Times. His view was typical of the commentary: rather than fault either side, most people simply regretted that the experiment had failed.

Or you could say that Raf Simons's departure lets everyone reconsider what "failure" means in fashion. The year Simons took the job, Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, editor-in-chief of the fashion journal Vestoj, gathered 14 people from the industry to discuss "What's Wrong with the Fashion Industry". Two years on, some of what they said still holds.

In fashion, failure is not selling.

Ralph Toledano, president of the French women's ready-to-wear federation and the French fashion designers' federation, and chairman of the designer label Victoria Beckham

Success in fashion today can be measured by how many $5,000 bags you can sell. That decides whether a designer keeps the creative director's chair. How many bags you sell matters far more than anything said by fashion critics like Vanessa Friedman, Suzy Menkes or me.

Nicole Phelps, director of Vogue Runway

Most managers and CEOs today come out of business school. They're smart, strategic and good at making money, but they don't love fashion and they don't know what's changing on the street. So they need young designers — Humberto Leon and Carol Lim of Opening Ceremony running Kenzo, an LVMH brand. They stand for the younger generation. But all they really do is make noise; the collections themselves soon turn boring and pointless.

Motofumi Kogi, director of the Japanese streetwear label United Arrows

In fashion, success or failure can't tell you whether you're a talented designer. The most talented designers in the world fail too. Countless designers of astonishing gifts have had to close their labels because the business didn't work. Praise from the press doesn't last. If you don't know how to turn a creative idea into a product that sells, this industry will spit you out.

Jean-Jacques Picart, fashion and luxury consultant

Cover image from tucsonnewsnow.com