“I feel like King Kong today,” Veronica Leoni joked backstage shortly after her debut presentation for Calvin Klein Collection. It was her response when asked how she felt about being not just one of a handful of women leading a major fashion house but the first female creative director in the brand’s almost 60-year history. She had every right to be puffed up with pride. Just minutes prior, original Calvin Klein muses, Kate Moss and Christy Turlington, along with Calvin Klein himself, had gathered in a spare, white room at Calvin Klein headquarters on West 39 Street for her show, the most anticipated event of the fall 2025 season. The occasion marked not only Leoni’s debut, but the brand’s first runway presentation since Raf Simons’s final collection in 2018. So what did Klein, now 82, have to say to the new woman in charge? “He was happy that he found a new coat to buy,” Leoni explained with a laugh. “He was happy, I think. I’m really proud for him to feel at home again, and I hope he is going to really cherish this moment, because for me, it has been fantastic.”
The Rome-born Leoni arrives at Calvin Klein after having worked at Jil Sander (with the house founder), Céline under Phoebe Philo, then The Row, before landing at Moncler. She founded her own brand, Quira, in 2020—which made her an LVMH Prize finalist in 2023 but has, until now, been an unknown to fashion followers. In a recent interview with The New York Times, she spoke a bit about the scrutiny that’s come with her new high-profile job: “People are putting together the pieces of my C.V. to predict the first outfit in my show, almost like an A.I. situation,” she said. “But I am really trying to surprise myself.”
To embark upon her Calvin Klein journey, Leoni dug into the house archives, being mindful not to succumb to too much nostalgia. They were “the root” of the collection, like “Sleeping Beauties, that wanted to have a kiss” in order to be awakened, she told reporters post-show, a pair of trimming scissors slung around her neck. She was also inspired by her “personal exotic dreams with America. I felt that I knew America before I came here, because I grew with this fictional image of New York; I knew the places before I visited them.” From this view of the city, sprouted a number of characters in Leoni’s mind: “the sexy worker, the taxi driver… Jessica Rabbit, Clark Kent”—all of which shaped the personalities that floated down the runway on Friday afternoon. There was a fuzzy brown nubby coat worn with slingback ballet flats—a style she lifted from the archives and reimagined for 2025. Nautical-tinged looks included an oversized cream anorak worn with a matching beret, plus a beaded golden gown that clicked and clacked with every step. For men, Western-inspired garments like square-toe boots and plaid shirts seemed to nod to Simons’s time at Calvin Klein 205W39NYC. (Leoni noted she enjoyed doing menswear for this collection, especially since “you need to find muses outside of yourself.”) A pared-back “monumental minimalism” ran strongly throughout the entire lineup. However, there was one playful and, yes, nostalgic touch. Leoni, like many who came of age in the ’90s, was obsessed with the CK One fragrance, so in homage, its iconic bottle appeared on the runway in the form of minaudières.
In terms of her vision for Klein’s signature brand of sexiness, “I would call it ‘sexitude,’” she explained. “It’s more like an attitude, it is something you own in the way you wear the clothes. I have wanted to redefine femininity and masculinity—to explore beauty in the most authentic way.” To be comfortable in one’s own skin is, after all, the purest form of seductive power. And as for her muse? The woman she specifically had in mind for this collection? “I would say my wife—the sexiest woman I know.”
It turns out for Leoni, there is “sexitude” a-plenty to be found in everything from scarf coats and sharp suiting worn with Oxford shirts to see-through glittering pencil skirts paired with Klein’s “most essential cashmere sweater” and slingback ballet flats—two styles she pulled from the archives and reimagined for now. Overall, it was a reclamation of sex appeal on one’s own terms, a concept with which the fashion industry is obsessed: Show skin however you want to—even if it’s from a trench coat buttoned to the top.
