Veronica Leoni at Calvin Klein: sexitude and the narcissistic kink

The first woman to lead Calvin Klein Collection in sixty years, Veronica Leoni is rebuilding the source code, relocating desire from the camera’s gaze to the architecture of the dressed body itself

Veronica Leoni grew up in Rome, studied philosophy and theory before clothing — a formation that shows in the precision of her critical language, the tendency to frame design decisions as propositions rather than preferences. She spent years inside the most reductive ateliers in the trade: The Row, Celine under Phoebe Philo, Jil Sander, Moncler. Before her appointment she had opened her own label, Quira, a finalist for the LVMH Prize in 2023, which positioned her as someone with a developed point of view rather than a house technician.

When she was named Creative Director of Calvin Klein Collection in May 2024, she became the first woman to lead the house in a history then approaching sixty years. The significance of that fact is not only symbolic. The house’s erotic code had been built almost entirely by men — designed by a man, photographed by men, and directed at a presumed male gaze even when its objects were female. Leoni’s arrival posed a structural question before she had shown a single garment: what happens to the gaze when the person organizing it changes?

At her debut in February 2025, with Klein himself, eighty-two, seated in the front row beside Kate Moss and Christy Turlington — the house’s own history arranged in the audience like a citation — she described the dormant runway line as a sleeping beauty waiting for a kiss. The metaphor was pointed. It placed her in the active position.

Sexitude: Veronica Leoni flips the Calvin Klein erotic code

Her stated project is a reading exercise rather than a revival. She has spoken of reclaiming what had been Calvin’s from the start and refusing the comfort of nostalgia — a distinction that matters because nostalgia and reclamation can look identical from the outside while being entirely different operations. Nostalgia reproduces the past. Reclamation asks what the past was actually doing and does it differently.

Before that first show she coined a term for what she wanted back in the house: sexitude. The word is clumsy in the way that coinages often are — it names a quality of erotic charge that is neither the passive availability nor the aggressive display of eighties power dressing. It’s something more internal, more self-directed.

The move she described was a reversal of the gaze structure that had organized the brand’s imagery since Avedon. Where the historic campaigns made the woman the object of the look, Leoni described flipping the position: the Calvin Klein woman as the one doing the desiring. The hand that clasps a coat shut. A neckline cut to reveal rather than to be seen. The body emerging in a provocative way — but on its own terms. The shift is from the body as image to the body as agent. It is, in the vocabulary of the theory Leoni studied before she studied tailoring, a reversal of the scopophilic logic that had organized the brand’s visual language for fifty years.

Calvin Klein Fall 2026: the cult of the body and the underwear as source code

By Fall 2026, shown at The Shed in Hudson Yards in February, the reading had a title. Leoni built the collection around the cult of the body — a phrase that carries its own cultural weight, invoking fitness culture, the wellness industry, the social media economy of the physique, all the contemporary structures through which the body has become a project and a performance simultaneously. She described the outing as more provocative than her earlier work, and located the obsession in two artifacts: the underwear and the denim, the hero pieces from which the house is constructed — the source code rather than the product.

The jeans on the runway reinterpreted an archival pair first walked in 1976, the year the brand was still new enough to be scandalous and old enough to have developed a syntax. Underwear branding migrated onto outerwear. The CK elastic waistband crossed a long dress, a gesture that collapsed the distinction between what is seen and what is hidden, between the garment as surface and the garment as infrastructure.

Narcissistic kink: how Leoni relocated desire from the camera to the body

Leoni’s method marks a structural departure from the campaign tradition, and understanding it requires taking her vocabulary seriously. The historic imagery operated through an external gaze — the camera looking at the body, the viewer looking at the camera’s image of the body, the body available to both looks without reciprocating either. Her Fall 2026 position relocates the charge inside the wearer. She framed the cult of the body as extremely Calvin, and set out to push what she termed a narcissistic kind of kink further into the collection.

The word narcissistic is precise here, and not pejorative. Narcissism, in the psychoanalytic tradition that runs from Freud through the object-relations theorists, is the libidinal investment in one’s own image — the pleasure taken in seeing oneself as desirable. What Leoni is proposing is a fashion practice organized around that pleasure rather than around the pleasure of being seen by another. The body dressed for itself. The erotic charge produced by the wearer’s own awareness of being well-constructed, well-cut, well-held.

The construction carried the argument with unusual directness. Tailoring was sliced open and knotted back together with white cotton, like undergarments brought to the surface — the infrastructure of the body made visible, the hidden architecture of support and shaping exposed as ornament. A sequence of fitted jackets had the sleeves sheared off to reveal the arms, a gesture that recalls the way bodybuilders cut their sweatshirts in the gyms of nineteen-eighties Venice Beach — the modification of the garment as declaration of the body beneath. One black dress appeared to have slipped to expose the underpinnings beneath, a controlled accident, desire staged as revelation.

The bicep-bearing tailoring is a comment on the fitness economy of the present — the Instagram physique, the carefully documented transformation, the body as content. The contemporary fitness figure and the Venice Beach bodybuilder share a logic: the body is built to be seen, and the seeing is part of the pleasure of building. Leoni’s tailoring addresses that logic directly, treating the garment as a frame for a body that has already been worked on, already invested in, already performing its own desirability before it enters the room.

Critical reception of the Veronica Leoni Calvin Klein relaunch

The reception has been split, and the split is instructive. Some coverage called the Fall 2026 collection her strongest for the house, and judged that the sheared sleeves and knotted tailoring carried a charge that recent restrained runways had lacked — that the construction, finally, had enough physical presence to carry the erotic argument she had been making in words. Other coverage was severe. A widely circulated trade newsletter judged her sophomore show a failure of both polish and eroticism, and noted that the company president who hired her had departed in May 2025. Reader forums recorded the work described as a mood board rather than a wardrobe.

The disagreement is itself the subject. “It’s so Calvin” has long been a contested measure, and the house has survived, even thrived, on the energy that contestation produces. Leoni is attempting to keep the erotic charge that the phrase encodes while moving its source — from the spectacle of undress to the subtler charge of construction. Whether that displacement is possible, whether the charge can survive the translation, is the question her tenure poses. It is also, in a broader sense, a question about whether desire can be relocated — whether the structures that produce it are as fixed as half a century of visual culture suggests, or whether they can be rebuilt from within.