Calvin Klein owed its breakthrough in fashion to chance and an elevator.
In the early 1970s, so the legend goes, a buyer from the American department store giant Bonwit Teller got off the wrong floor of a New York hotel and stumbled into Klein's studio.
He only founded his fashion company in 1968 together with his childhood friend Barry Schwartz – Klein, born in the Bronx in 1942 as the second of three sons of Jewish immigrants, lacked his own start-up capital.
Maria Wiesner
Style Coordinator.
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And so he kept his workshop in a small, hidden hotel suite for the first few years.
The shopper who had been dropped off on the wrong floor in the elevator found the pieces enticing him to wear a trench coat, and Calvin Klein landed his first big order.
His name would soon be known far beyond New York.
He knew how to combine two things that could hardly be more opposite: strict, minimalist design in neutral tones and advertising campaigns full of eroticism and bare skin.
At the end of the 1970s he ventured into the jeans market, which at the time was considered saturated.
Klein gave the former worker trousers an image of wicked sexiness.
Nothing but muscles above
For the campaign for a skin-tight jeans model that flared only slightly at the feet, he had the then 15-year-old model Brooke Shields photographed and provided with the slogan "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins".
He later ennobled profane white underwear with a similar trick: the actor Mark Wahlberg wore them in such a way that the boxer shorts with the characteristic lettering of the brand peeked out over the waistband of his jeans.
Nothing but muscles above.
With success: underwear became a fashion accessory even for men and brand symbolism as an obsession was a feature of the nineties.
Klein later admitted to the New York Times that he deliberately played with provocation in his campaigns: "I always chose the pictures myself, all based on the same principle: what makes my heart beat faster?"
It wasn't always well received in the US.
In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton found one of the jeans ads too lascivious.
He publicly spoke out against the pictures, saying he didn't want his daughter to see them.
Klein withdrew the ad, instead printing an apology.
That didn't stop him from continuing to flaunt his products - from unisex perfume "ck One" to underwear - with, for example, the nude Kate Moss.
Influence of the “Studio 54” era
Referring to fellow American fashion designer Ralph Lauren, Klein said at a fashion event in Iceland in 2014: "Ralph Lauren was influenced by British design.
I always wanted to be 'on the edge'.” He has repeatedly emphasized the influence of the era of “Studio 54”, the time of the wild New York nightlife, had on him.
In marketing-effective doses, he disclosed to the public that his private life also had phases of excess.
There was talk of two withdrawal cures, in 1988 and 2003, because of alcohol and drug addiction.
Nor was it a secret that he had relationships with both men and women.
Shortly after the turn of the millennium, he retired from the fashion business and sold the company to the American clothing group Phillips-Van Heusen for $430 million.
“The trick is to let out everything that is unimportant.
And to only show what is new,” he later said of his work.
He designed everything he wanted to implement, and when there was nothing new for him, he said goodbye to his profession.
This, too, is an art in its own right that few have mastered.
Designer Calvin Klein turns 80 this Saturday.