April 2, 2012 |
Some people are meant to run the world. They have a special energy. They don’t do jet lag and they don’t do sleep. Four hours a night is plenty. They are the kind of people who notice everything and forget nothing. Downtime? It’s for wimps. Mrs Thatcher was one of these human dynamos and Kevin Carrigan is another.
A working-class lad from Cumbria, he might not appreciate the Thatcher comparison, but like her, he’s hard to keep up with. The global creative director of CK Calvin Klein and Calvin Klein Jeans, he’s got one of the biggest jobs in fashion. Francisco Costa takes care of Calvin’s runway collection. Carrigan, a Porsche-driving vegetarian, with a personality so large, it dwarfs his impish proportions, takes care of everything else. From jeans to umbrellas, underwear to eyewear, it all passes through him.
The first time I ever met Carrigan was at a Calvin Klein dinner at the Waverly Inn. He talked to everyone in the room. If you couldn’t find him, you just had to listen for the sound of proper laughter – the warm, infectious kind as opposed to the shrill, pretend stuff – and Kevin would be at the centre of it. It is exactly where he likes to be. When I arrived 20 minutes early for our interview at Calvin Klein’s Milan HQ, I found him straight off the red-eye from New York, with his shoes kicked off and sleeves rolled up, directing the set-up for the following day’s presentation. His small, shockingly elegant hands were busy putting the finishing touches to everything. No wonder he and David Walliams get on so well. He bonded with the comedian and husband of Calvin Klein face Lara Stone over a shared love of classic British comedy such as Morecambe and Wise, Dick Emery and Alan Bennett. Stone, by the way, has become a complete anglophile since marrying Walliams. On Calvin Klein shoots, says Carrigan, she now insists on PG tips and a “Twix for dipping” (Brit-comedy aficionados will recognise the reference from Julia Davis’s cult series Nighty Night).
Carrigan is the very definition of a people person. I’m telling you this not to flatter him, but because it is part of his genius. He couldn’t do his job if he didn’t have a way with folk.
“If you’re going to run a huge brand, it really is about teamwork,” he says. “You have to have a vision and a pure thought and you have to be a trained designer and understand everything, but you also have to be an amazing people person,” he says. Carrigan credits his team, which, over the years, has included Karl Templer, Venetia Scott, Kate Phelan, Joe McKenna and Mulberry’s Emma Hill, with keeping him sane. “The pressures today are really tough, but your team is everything around you. That’s what I’ve really learnt from Calvin. Calvin was really in tune with choosing the right people who are moving with the times, having them influence and evolve you, but always stay true to who you are.”
True to his people-loving soul, he socialises manically on several continents. Another trait that he shares with his former boss and mentor, Calvin Klein. “He was an out-and-about guy. He lived in Studio 54. He lived by soaking up what was going on out there. That’s why he launched jeans. It’s my job to be out there and keep looking.” Work and life are one. Carrigan launched the hugely successful ck eyewear range last year, after noticing the number of people wearing frames simply for the look, not because they needed them.
He hasn’t got any sympathy for stay-at-home types. “If you’re in fashion today, or if you’re any student for that matter, always be out there. I’m still out there now. I work 24 hours, 7 days a week, and I go out as well. You have to. It’s all encompassing. With design, you have to be out there. And I love going out.” Dalston is next on his to-do list and he’s a regular at what was the Boom Boom Room atop the Standard hotel in New York. His favourite place for dancing is Sao Paulo – “The movement of the body is just crazy there” – and when in Hong Kong he loves to hog the karaoke mike and belt out Careless Whisper.
China is the market that excites him most. “People love our brand because it evolves and is steeped in modernism. It is today. We don’t do retro. That’s why our business is going so great in places like Bejing and Shanghai and Hong Kong, where they want to be perceived as absolutely modern and current,” he says.
The biggest influence on him was his parents. His South African mother and, his Cumbrian father met and fell in love at deaf school in London. One of three children, Carrigan and his siblings can all hear, but their first language was sign language. “I’m a good communicator and I think that’s because of sign language. My grandmother taught me to speak,” he says, his northern vowels softened by years in America. He grew up surrounded by creative people. His father made furniture, his grandmother was a seamstress and tailor and his cousin was a textile designer. “They were always 100% supportive. They said whatever you want to do, follow your dream and it was always design.”
His studies, at Ravensbourne, then the Royal College of Art, were set against the backdrop of 1980s club land, where his wild personal style (blond mohawk, leather jacket, 1950s clothes) contrasted with a cool love of the Bauhaus and modernism. “Form, function, beauty, always. They’re constantly my three words.” So it was inevitable that, after stints at MaxMara and Nicole Farhi, and on a recommendation from Phelan, he joined Calvin Klein in 1998. He may be the most powerful designer you have never heard of, but for Carrigan, household-name status isn’t as important as the influence he can have over how we all dress at a global brand the size of Calvin Klein.
“I’m not a person who designs a one-off flamboyant dress; that doesn’t really interest me. I love innovation, I love technology, I love looking at the evolution of certain things. There’s something about this brand I could never do anywhere else. To touch the amount that I touch and reach the amount I can reach – the reach is so vast. It is amazing,” he says. The workload is relentless. Not a problem for Carrigan, who diagnoses himself as having design addiction. “All you do is think about how to do it better, improve it, how you make it better for somebody to wear, to carry. I read the other day a quote from Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect, who’s 103, and he’s still designing today. He was asked if he planned to retire and he said, ‘No, not until the day I die. And I’m a 103 now, so not very soon.’ I read it and I thought, ‘I would love to be like that.’ That feeling of being an artist. That you’ve got to constantly keep designing. It’s just in our blood as creatives. Whether you call it a design addiction or design obsession, yes, I have that, absolutely.”
We talk about great actors having range, but designers have it, too. Think about the kind of creative somersaults your brain has to do in order to re-engineer a pair of skinny jeans one day, then inspire the sock team the next, as well as keep the underwear business motoring and design the Calvin Klein White collection (for spring 2012 it’s all about the ease of slip dresses or pyjamas in creamy vanilla shades: “It’s very Calvin – nonchalant, effortless and a little androgynous.”).
In the spring, he launched the new ck One fashion line, with the not-so-modest aim of dressing the digital generation. His starting point was the cult unisex scent, which was launched in 1994 with a startling black and white ad campaign shot by Steven Meisel and featuring Kate Moss with a gaggle of cool 1990s youth. It was such a touchstone for a generation and, at its height, it sold 20 bottles a minute worldwide. Working back from that to a clothing line could have been a simple exercise in fashion nostalgia (Kate Moss, moody in a cut-off denim mini, Stella Tennant peerless in chunky heeled sandals, Donovan Leitch topless in grubby jeans and Jenny Shimizu aggressive in a bra), but that wouldn’t have worked, insists Carrigan, because times have changed and so has the idea of what’s cool. “From Rob the boxer in England to Skye, this singer from LA, there was a sense of more optimism and happiness within the kids of today,” he says of the current crop of ck One campaign kids. “Back then, I think there was a little bit more anger, maybe it was politics, Thatcher, and obviously what’s happening in England now, that’s a completely different thing… What I found really interesting was their sense of sharing positivity and sharing their life online and being open and probably being more open sexually, being more aware and in tune with what’s going on than back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Aids was just happening, there was definitely a lot of anger. It was a different time.” This tight, 40-piece collection is all about the edit, he says – another thing he learnt from Mr Klein, “He was an amazing editor, an amazing purist. He would ask, ‘Why do you need five of them? Why isn’t there one perfect one? Let’s reduce down to perfection.’”
Carrigan, too, is freaky for details and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Calvin Klein archive – a vast temperature-controlled storage space where every piece is catalogued with a Polaroid of the model who wore it on the runway. “I’ll say, ‘Can you pick out Look 38 from 1989 – the red dress.’”
Carrigan is a rare bird, for a fashion designer, because his left brain (where all the strategic thinking is done) is as switched on and powerful as his creative right brain (Yves Saint Laurent, for instance, was pure right brain – all art and emotion, while Pierre Bergé provided the left brain strategic input. Ditto Marc Jacobs and Robert Duffy). He constantly refers to “art and commerce”, as if you can’t have one without the other. So, while the rest of us are sleeping, he is looking for the next blockbuster design opportunity. “The Calvin Klein aesthetic we all know – clean, minimalist, architectural, sexy shapes – can be applied to many different products. You might see Calvin Klein phones or computers. There are product categories still to come. Wait and see. The trajectory is endless.” And with that, it’s back to work.
by Claudia Croft
Claudia Croft is deputy editor of The Sunday Times Style
