Calvin Klein circa 1994. Ah, remember this? Well, if you don't, don't even worry because everyone is dressing like this circa right fucking now.
In 1994, I remember being a nine year old wearing crazy colored turtlenecks under everything (dresses, t-shirts, other sweaters) largely because my mom still dominated my closet choices/purchases, but mostly because I was nine.
Despite this age, I remember I was starting to feel like the colorful clothes didn't reflect me and I yearned for something more minimal. My mom had some awesome outfits in her arsenal back then and even though I loved dressing exactly like her when I was a kid, I noticed that my clothes were adorably kids clothes no matter how much I tried to look older. Still! I loved the idea of wearing black at a young age, but even then it was seen as such a taboo — as if other parents would judge my mother's choices to allow her young innocent daughter to wear such a dark color. Is she into Marilyn Manson music from satan?!
This collection is not only memorable for me as a kid because it was so iconically laid back, but because all of my favorite celebrities were wearing this type of slouchy minimal palette — Winona Ryder, Kate Moss, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Sarah Michelle Geller, etc. And I wanted to be just like them! Not like my colorful classmates in elementary school who didn't know better with their Lisa Frank sensibilities and simple minds! I had real problems to keep track of at home with my mom. I was her co-pilot, helping her navigate the English-only world of post-divorce poordom, so that may have been another reason I felt so distant and unrelatable to anyone at school. They were chatting 90210 and how hot some dude on the show was, and I was consoling my mom through one of her migraines probably induced by the debilitating stress of having to pay such bills and raise three kids largely on her own. So I did what I could with my clothes. I worked what I could and took copious mental notes (I should have invented blogging back then because I feel like I was still doing this type of documentation of what I love even then) so I could take advantage when my dad came over once in a while and took me clothes shopping to the mall.
There was one problem; for some reason this deceptively simple wardrobe was outrageously expensive. I couldn't understand why a simple pair of jeans with this "CK" mans name were so much money, but I knew that if I wore these logo clothes they'd somehow imprint me with a sort of status and cred, making me untouchable in a way. Clothes had the power to do that and I wanted in — or more specifically, a way out of the poor monotony of what I had at the time, and a way to look as old as I felt at the time. But that meant that unless I was getting these super-cool Calvin Klein-esque hand-me-downs from my brothers and other male family friends, or unless these items were magically on the racks at Old Navy, then there was no fucking way I was going to be this cool in 1994.
Ok, so let's zoom forward to 2016, and as a 30-year old I look back at this collection with the nostalgia that even though this couldn't be mine, and I couldn't wear any of it, this collection served as motivation for the future me. That sounds so cheesy, but people, it's beyond just a cheesy metaphor because it was my real life experience as a kid. This collection signified what I couldn't have, and I made a decision to have it and other nice things in my life and so I worked hard to make it happen. So thank you Calvin Klein for this beautiful, materialistic, and painful motivator to work hard and get out: get out of my situation of sad depressing poorness, out of the small town feel of where I lived, and out of the materialism and superficialness that I think I willfully missed out on so I could worry about more adult things.
