Calvin Klein Fall/Winter 2026 Reveals Reductionist Glamour and Coat-Forward Tailoring

Veronica Leoni opened at The Shed in Hudson Yards with a Calvin Klein Collection that felt like a memoire of the brand’s most disciplined moments, and a practical brief for workplace dressing: long, straight coats, razor-sharp suiting, and a full denim suit layered under slender coats for a weekday that still reads like occasion. It was a confident, coat-forward statement for New York Fashion Week that will divide opinion — and I, for one, preferred the restraint to the ornamentation.

The creative thesis arrived in the press materials and on the runway in identical language. “Veronica’s Calvin Klein Collection for Fall 2026 explores the hedonistic elegance at the core of the brand: the cult of the body, the satisfaction of accentuating its perfection and the obsessive quest for beauty,” the house announced after the show. The release also set the date and place: NEW YORK, NY, February 13, 2026, presented at The Shed in Hudson Yards, New York City. Leoni herself framed the work as archival and surgical: “This season was formed by an investigation of Calvin Klein’s strong history of iconography and a rigorous exploration of shape, craft and meaningful simplification,” she said, adding that she wanted to “tighten my expression of elegance and style in the spirit of how the brand defined it in the late 1970s and early 1980s.”

On the runway the agenda translated into architecture. Coverage called the silhouettes “lean, architectural tailoring” with “long, straight coats” and “razor-sharp suiting,” and noted an “unusually coat-forward lineup that read like a modern profess.” Fabrics reinforced the engineering: Fuckingyoung catalogued dry tailoring wools, cottons, fluid velvet, bonded satin, and both opaque and transparent leathers, while the color story stayed “rooted in urban neutrals, punctuated with flashes of burgundy and tangerine.” Accessories named in the brand brief — stilettos, flats, boots, clutch and duffle bags, and tonal gloves — finished the looks with utility-minded polish.

Archival denim played a headline role. The press materials positioned an “interpretation of 1976 archival denim, the first ever presented on the Calvin Klein runway,” with a full denim suit worn under slender coats and the “original longhand logo embroidered on an aviator jacket and a checked trench coat.” Those details read as a deliberate nod to the house’s denim and logo history, transplanted into the Collection’s tightened silhouette language.

Reaction split along predictable lines. Fuckingyoung hailed the show as “one of the standout moments of the American runway” and praised “urban minimalism, precise tailoring, and a casual elegance that breathes the spirit of New York.” Fashionweekdaily responded to material choices with: “Each texture contributed to the sculptural volume without sacrificing the collection’s reductionist agenda, letting the materials tell their own story, because as it turns out, minimalism can also shout.” Counterpoints were sharp: Fashionweekdaily reproduced Nicole Phelps for Vogue.com observing that “Leoni has leaned conceptual where Calvin was clean, and she has a proclivity for layering, while the house founder was a believer in reduction,” and quoted Nico Gavino for Hypebeast via Fashionweekdaily calling some looks “overly complicated” and questioning the execution of the “cult of the body.”

The wider context matters. Vogue noted Leoni’s remit as “rebuilding Collection, the highest end of the Calvin Klein brand pyramid, which was paused in the years after Raf Simons’s exit,” and pointed to 1990s Calvin Klein imagery — Carolyn Bessette Kennedy among them — as cultural touchstones pinned to Leoni’s moodboard. L’Officiel summed the production up visually: “Creative director Veronica Leoni transformed The Shed into a minimalist laboratory of precision dressing for New York Fashion Week.”

For workwear-minded shoppers the takeaway is concrete: invest in coat-first proportion and sharply cut suiting, and consider the new denim suit as a structured layer rather than casual weekendwear. If restoring Collection’s high-end signal was the brief, Veronica Leoni has given Calvin Klein a clarified silhouette and a clear debate to live through as orders and audience reaction follow.