To her point, when designers take on legacy brands like this one, they can feel an urge to start fresh. “But they’re not broken, so they don’t really need to be fixed,” Shields says. “They need to be enhanced and nurtured and preserved. I think it’s a strong designer who can incorporate the initial sort of essence or DNA [of a brand], and modernize it and put their stamp on it, I feel like that’s true design.”
It’s not just advertising that has changed, but fashion, too. So much of what’s shown on the runways today appears to be a desperate call for attention—from the internet, from the audience at the show, from someone. “In this day and age, there’s shock value and all these different ways to get people’s attention, and that’s not what this brand ever was,” Shields says.
Sure, the advertisements of the ‘80s and ‘90s were sparked conversations, and they still do, but those were for the underwear or jeans, not for the collections shown on the runway. At Calvin Klein, that’s been historically a space for a concise, and essential, point of view on dressing. “Even when I was a part of it, you know, 100 years ago, there was a newness to it while maintaining what it was,” she says.
Photo: Niamh Murphy / Courtesy of Calvin Klein
What stands out the most to Shields about Leoni’s Calvin Klein is a quality she finds in the designer herself: “I met her for the first time, and she has this beautiful mane of hair in this great silver color, and there’s a strength to her, and yet she’s so feminine and sexy,” Shields says. “That’s not something that you can fake or pretend,” she says.
So what, according to Brooke Shields, is the new “sex sells”? “It’s about drawing you in rather than bombarding you,” she says, “they way [Veronica] is, the way her collection is, you want to get closer to it, you want to be a part of it, but not because it’s slapping you in the face, but because it’s silently strong and beautiful and sexy.”
