On a rainy day in early May, Veronica Leoni, the Roman creative director behind Calvin Klein, is at a fitting for her spring 2026 collection in New York’s garment district, where the company has its headquarters. She examines a dress and a trench coat—all the while refining what she calls the transatlantic vision of the new Calvin Klein Collection: combining the “casual, deconstructed beauty” of Rome with the fast rhythm of New York’s streets.
After six years away from the runway, Calvin Klein wants to reclaim its place as the prime mover for contemporary American excellence in minimalist fashion. Enter Leoni, 42, an animated pixie with a sweep of salt-and-pepper hair. When we meet, in a white-walled room next to a bare-bones atelier full of tables with sewing machines and hanging samples, she’s wearing a slouchy gray button-down shirt, black drawstring dress pants, and Tabi boots. Tailors and a seamstress are at work as Leoni goes over the garments with her designer and patternmaker.
“My inner trend is actually chaos and disorder,” she says, laughing. “But I’m beyond a perfectionist—I can see the issue of a pattern from far, and I’m obsessed with 90-degree corners.”
Her debut collection for fall 2025 was one of the most anticipated shows of New York Fashion Week, the first time Calvin Klein had shown there since the label decided to stop producing luxury collections—and parted ways with chief creative officer Raf Simons—in 2018. The house’s namesake founder, now in his early 80s, sold the business to fashion conglomerate PVH in 2003, and was back in attendance at Leoni’s show, along with other faces from the label’s heyday: Kate Moss, Christy Turlington, and the photographer Mario Sorrenti, who shot a teenage Moss, his then girlfriend, for the brand’s sultry Obsession campaign in 1993. Leoni’s mother flew in from Rome; her younger brother, a butcher, came with his two kids. Greta Lee and Bad Bunny, both of whom have starred in Calvin Klein underwear campaigns, were there as well.
When Leoni and Klein met for a coffee the day before the show, “He said, ‘How can you be with me while you’ve got a show to prep?’ ” Leoni recalls. “I could spend hours and hours with him.” Klein told her that the collection was hers now, and to do what she liked. Leoni says that the only reason she didn’t cry was because “I was too stressed.”
Klein’s ex-wife, Kelly Klein, also came to be fitted before the show and seemed to be moved by being back at the headquarters after 20 years away, as was Moss. “Walking back into the same building where I did my original castings brought back many memories for me,” Moss tells me. “The doorman, the atelier are still there. Veronica is bringing a fresh energy to the clothes, but you can see she is honoring the timeless minimal chic that Calvin did back in the day.”
The clothes were sleek, finely tailored, and minimalist in a palette of cream, gray, black, and khaki, with occasional bursts of color. Leoni rolled out a variety of long coats—some trench-like, others long blazers with padded shoulders or concealed buttons or low necklines and exaggeratedly long sleeves. Oversized scarves were swept over and attached to slim coats and a delicate blouse. Strikingly feminine dresses in pink and red contrasted with more severe dresses that covered nearly every inch of skin and liquid-like skirt suits.
Leoni says her image of New York’s mythical characters—the taxi driver, the sexy office worker—and the “heightened simplicity” of their outfits inspired the collection. Reviews were mixed: While many praised the collection’s overall refinement, others thought the clothes needed more sex appeal and insouciance.
“I get the critique, and I’m working on it,” Leoni tells me, before adding: “I love a bit of nerdy sexy. It’s a kink—the kink that comes from subtle gestures.” (Witness the exposed wrists below her cropped sleeves and exposed knees under the tailored skirts.)
Her friend the model Guinevere van Seenus wore a black dress with a deep-V neckline and a long skirt to the show; the end of the skirt was ruched and tied, with the tie trailing back up to the waist and cinched around it. It was “interesting and sexy,” van Seenus says, “while also being practical and comfortable.”
It’s worth pointing out that Calvin Klein’s association with sexiness never really came from the clothes, which have always been on the understated side. The brand’s underwear and fragrance campaigns are what made the brand hot. (And the main earner of the $4 billion brand remains that ubiquitous underwear.)
“Calvin really shaped what is modern American style and modern American fashion—he created that,” says Stefan Larsson, the chief executive officer of PVH. Explaining the decision to hire Leoni, Larsson said that “she showed a true understanding and love for the DNA, but she also had a really strong creative vision of looking at it through her own eyes. I feel like everything she had done up until now had built her up to be ready for this moment.”
Leoni was born and raised on the outskirts of Rome and, like so many teenagers of the ’90s, wore bleached denim and oversized shirts. “I was part of the CK One generation,” she says of the androgynous, skater-grunge vibe of the fragrance campaign. Her parents ran a café and bar, which only recently closed. Her grandmother made clothes for the family, including Leoni’s beloved navy blue pleated wool skirt that hit below the knee. Leoni learned how to sew from her, and soon was sketching outfits for her dolls and crocheting her swimsuits.
We are chatting at the apartment in Monteverde that Leoni shares with her wife, Sara Casani, 41, a film casting director she met 13 years ago. Leoni and Casani married in 2023 wearing suits from Quira, the brand Leoni started in 2021. “We met in Rome at a dance party organized by some friends in an iconic club,” Casani tells me. “Veronica evasively introduced herself and, smoking one of my cigarettes, told me she lived in Milan. We met again after a few months, and only then I discovered that we had grown up a few kilometers apart. We spent the evening talking nonstop. I was struck by her confidence and her total dedication—I found her so ambitious.”
The couple has been together ever since, with Leoni splitting her time between their apartment and New York hotels. (The collection is similarly split—half constructed in the New York atelier, and the other half in Italy.) Leoni was wearing a loose white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and jeans with distressed knees. The living room opened on to a garden filled with cacti: “My Frida Kahlo moment,” she says. A framed painting in the hallway read: “Lets quit our fuckin jobs and go dancing.”
“She’s very sweet, and also quite quiet and humble, but you can feel her history underneath everything that she does,” says van Seenus, who spends a lot of time taking in art with Leoni. (After the fitting, Leoni and I went to Hauser Wirth to see a show of Francis Picabia paintings, one of which mirrored the blues and red in her collection.)
Leoni was good at math and preparing to study architecture when her mother told her that a university in Rome was starting a fashion studies program. After finishing that degree, Leoni was eager to “get my hands dirty and start to play,” as she puts it. She interned at a family-run fashion house, where she engaged in all aspects of design. Then she managed an interview with Jil Sander for a head knitwear design job—she still has the white crepe de chine shirt she wore. “This must be my talisman for the rest of my life,” Leoni says, laughing. “That very moment—7 a.m., Four Seasons Milan—is the beginning of all this.”
That time was one of the most enjoyable of Leoni’s life. “We were just the wildest—we had so much fun,” she recalls. She and her tight group of friends went out dancing at clubs and to concerts. “And then I got serious,” she says, “and I left Milan and moved to London.” In 2014 she joined Céline, working for Phoebe Philo on “the hottest ticket on the market,” Leoni says.
She commuted to Paris twice a week and flew to Rome on the weekends to see Casani—“this crazy triangle.” At the end of 2017, Leoni left Céline and returned to Rome before signing on to design a capsule collection of performance outerwear for Moncler under Remo Ruffini. But Moncler was a “very different taste from what I love to do,” Leoni tells me, and so in 2021 she started Quira, named after her grandmother Quirina.
“It was the opportunity for freedom,” she says, “a chance to play the game my way.” Quira’s sharply tailored clothes with dramatic shapes and surprising details were built around an idea of an intelligent, sensitive woman, and aimed to “uplift the minimalist to a certain level of extravaganza,” she says. The label, which is currently on pause, became a finalist for the LVMH Prize. “And then Mary-Kate [Olsen] arrived in my life,” she says. Leoni was hired by The Row as Olsen and her sister Ashley expanded their presence in Europe. But in 2023 she started talking with the Calvin Klein company, joining them in the fall of 2024.
Leoni is the first woman designer behind Calvin Klein, and one of the few women currently directing a major fashion house. “I feel privileged, but I’m very sorry to feel privileged,” she says. “I would just like to feel like every other one of my colleagues: in a fair, ambitious market where you try to do your best to gain your space.”
On a hot spring afternoon in Rome, just days after Pope Francis died, Leoni and I have lunch in a serene hotel courtyard. A weekday lunch in the city was something of a novelty for her: After years of living between several cities for work, her hometown is finally her base—her first time having a job here. “The calendar is organic,” she says. “There’s moments where I’m more needed in Italy, and moments where New York is more dominant. New York is bringing to the project a very different energy than Rome—it’s almost a way of making sure I stay true to myself and to the brand. New York injects continuity and dynamism. Rome is more deconstructed—it brings a sort of casual glamour, a warmer relationship with beauty.”
Friends and family are getting used to having her around. She can now attend birthday parties, or see a movie on short notice. When she’s not at work, Leoni likes to take care of her cactus garden, try new restaurants (but will still—always—have a smash burger and fries upon arriving in New York), go to independent cinema and theater with Casani, and see everything from contemporary dance and ballet to live music, where she can be found “standing and screaming and singing.” (Billie Eilish is next up.)
Her new design studio in Rome is up one of the city’s green hills, away from many of the tourists but within walking distance of her apartment. She’s a bit of an industry outsider here, having never worked at the city’s big traditional houses—Valentino, Fendi—where many young Italian designers start their careers. Her studio is light and airy, with doors that lead to gardens. Several big mood boards and racks of samples dominate the main room, where Leoni is working with her small, diverse team on the spring collection, which she will show in September. Leoni is tasked with producing only two shows a year. “We’re stretching our timing a little bit more for creativity,” she says. “This is the place for experiments to happen.” At the moment, they are playing with silhouettes, shapes, volume, and vibes before working with their patternmakers and factories.
“It’s spring, so you want to inject a lightness as much as possible,” says Leoni, who is exploring the “ultrafemininity” and American glamour evoked by the ’80s television show Dynasty. “My mom was obsessed,” she says. Leoni is now obsessed with the idea of a woman slipping on a single cotton piece and feeling effortlessly dressed up in a second. “I love to play with fabrics,” she says. “I always feel there are a few fabrics that will dictate the shape that a piece will go in, instead of the opposite. I love poplin, I love cotton. The white shirt is the most important item for me.”
On the business side, Calvin Klein Collection is setting about building up its distribution and partnering with wholesalers and retailers. “We’re starting from scratch again,” Leoni says, adding that what she is aiming for in her next collection is recognizability—where the customer would know a piece was Calvin Klein before they saw the label. Rather than simply recycling looks from the archive, she is picking up where Klein left off when he retired and innovating from there.
“I’m not nostalgic,” Leoni says. “I think of it more like having an energizing perspective on the past and trying to bring it into today’s context. This is a brand-new conversation. I try to be seduced by the past, but not to be taken away.”
Leoni: Produced by Circus Studios.
For Jacobson and Mark: Fashion Editor: Max Ortega. Hair, Sonny Molina; makeup, Yumi Lee. Produced by artProduction.