How it started
The early years
Calvin Klein was one of several design leaders raised in the Jewish community in the Bronx, along with Robert Denning and Ralph Lauren. He became a protégé of Baron de Gunzburg.
In 1968, Klein founded Calvin Klein Limited, a coat shop in the York Hotel in New York City, with $10,000. The first Calvin Klein collection was a line of "youthful, understated coats and dresses" featured at the New York City store Bonwit Teller.
In September 1969, Klein appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine.
1970s
In 1973, Klein received his first Coty American Fashion Critics' Award for his 74-piece womenswear collection – the youngest recipient at that time. He won the award again in 1974 and 1975. By 1977, annual revenues had increased to $30 million (equivalent to $159 million in 2025), and Klein had licenses for scarves, shoes, belts, furs, sunglasses, and bedsheets. Klein and Schwartz were making $4 million each. After the company signed licenses for cosmetics, jeans, and menswear, Klein's annual retail volume was estimated at $100 million (equivalent to $531 million in 2025). By 1981, Fortune figured Klein's annual income at $8.5 million. In the mid-1970s, he had created a designer-jeans craze by putting his name on the back pocket. Klein's design assistant at the time, Jeffrey Banks, has claimed credit for the logo garments, stating that he had the logo from a press folder silkscreened onto the sleeve of a brown T-shirt as a present for Klein. The gift was assumed by Schwartz to be part of the upcoming line, and similar logo shirts formed the uniform for the front-of-house staff at Klein's next catwalk show, leading to buyer demand.
From Wikipedia’s article on Calvin Klein, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2