Calvin Klein Profiles
The career behind the clean line — a $10,000 coat shop that became a global name.
Calvin Klein Inc. is a fashion house founded by American fashion designer Calvin Klein. The company is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City and is owned by Phillips-Van Heusen. This profiles page tells the founding story and the career behind it: the coat shop that became, on clean minimal design, one of the most recognizable names in world fashion.
In 1968, Klein founded Calvin Klein Limited, a coat shop in the York Hotel in New York City, with $10,000. The first Calvin Klein collection was a line of men's and women's coats featured at the New York City store Bonwit Teller. The biography searches in the references gather the career coverage; the official Calvin Klein website is also linked there.
Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.
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From Coats to a Complete Wardrobe
The founding facts explain the design. A designer who begins with coats — garments of pure structure, with no decoration to hide behind — learns to trust line and cloth, and Klein never stopped trusting them. From coats the label grew into the full wardrobe his other pages in this series document: tailored clothing, the dresses treated on their own page, menswear and womenswear, each category held to the same standard of reduction.
Like other fashion brands, Calvin Klein established a monogram: the cK emblem. But the label's true signature was never the letters — it was the discipline they stood for, a wardrobe pared to essentials and presented with an instinct for imagery that repeatedly set the terms of fashion advertising.
The Categories That Carried the Name
Three categories carried the coat shop's name to the world. Designer jeans in the late 1970s made it a phenomenon; underwear made it a fixture of popular culture; fragrance — Obsession, and the unisex CK One in 1994 — made it a worldwide vocabulary. Each was, at root, the founding discipline applied to a staple: nothing added, everything considered.
Read with the menswear and womenswear pages, the profiles give the complete picture: a Midtown Manhattan fashion house, owned by Phillips-Van Heusen, whose founder's $10,000 coat shop set a standard American fashion still measures itself against.
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Common Questions
Who is Calvin Klein?
Calvin Klein is an American fashion designer who founded Calvin Klein Limited in 1968 — a coat shop in New York's York Hotel, started with $10,000. His first collection, a line of men's and women's coats, was featured at Bonwit Teller.
What company did he build?
Calvin Klein Inc., a fashion house headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, owned by Phillips-Van Heusen. Like other fashion brands, Calvin Klein established a monogram: the cK emblem.
Where can I read more about his career?
The biography and profile searches in the references gather career coverage, and his main page in this series links the full record — collections, seasons, menswear, womenswear, fashion week, news and runway.