The Morning After Minimalism
Review of Calvin Klein Collection Spring 2026 Fashion Show
By Mackenzie Richard Zuckerman
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
Editorial Minimalism & Inherited Restraint
In her sophomore collection for Calvin Klein, Veronica Leoni continued the quiet excavation she began last season—sifting through the house’s storied codes with a designer’s precision and a New Yorker’s observational lens. Staged at the Brant Foundation in the East Village, the Spring 2026 show read as part field research, part fashion experiment: a cinematic expression of city mornings and late-night returns, textured with nods to streetwear, underwear, and old-school sensuality.
This was a collection deeply attuned to the lives of people Leoni has been, by her own account, watching—those on early coffee runs, dressed in slightly crinkled trench coats, keys in hand, undone but considered. Through this lens, she reached for that most elusive of American ideals: freedom. But not the billboard-sized kind—rather, a quieter kind of autonomy. A woman’s freedom to throw on a crushed leather slip, a man’s ease in mismatched tailoring, both somehow making their way toward intimacy.
There’s something fascinating about seeing a European designer interpret Calvin Klein’s legacy not just as an aesthetic, but as a psychological imprint: rigor, sex appeal, and restraint, wrapped into one. The show’s tension between exposure and subtlety, between iconography and experimentation, asked a larger question—one increasingly relevant for houses in evolution: How do you honor cultural memory while creating something new that belongs to the street, not the archive?
THE DIRECTION
THE WRAP UP
What this collection proved is that Veronica Leoni is not afraid of the complexity required to modernize a brand as mythic as Calvin Klein. She’s doing the patient, iterative work of world-building—this season more emotionally expressive, more tactile, more human. The cast, the setting, the product: all stitched into a story about New York as a mood, not a map. And within that, she offered compelling interpretations of the brand’s most recognizable motifs—from logoed boxer bands reimagined as couture trims to bathrobes in laser-cut leather.
Still, the collection didn’t always land with clarity. At times, the overconstructed ideas—the crinkled coats, pom-pom harnesses, and sculpted waistband dress—tipped into overstatement. Calvin Klein, at its core, is about the edit. The tension here lies between a reverence for minimalism and Veronica Leoni’s impulse to explore a more expressive, even intellectual, territory. It’s an admirable ambition. But in this case, less might have said more—and more importantly, the collection’s relevance to the present moment remains unclear.
Yet it’s clear that Leoni is moving with intent. There’s a kind of humility in her approach—a recognition that the brand “belongs to the people,” as she put it, and that her job is not just to design, but to listen. As she heads into her third season, the foundation is being laid. The question now becomes: What will she strip back—and what will she dare to leave in?
