The velvet ropes separating Studio 54 from the Manhattan streets outside might as well have been made of steel. Thousands would gather every night hoping to gain entrance, but only those who had the right look would be allowed to pass. (The look was usually determined by Steve Rubell, the nightclub’s gregarious but troubled co-owner.) The rest, typically the unfashionable “bridge-and-tunnel crowd” from New York City’s outer boroughs, would often hang around to listen to the pulsating disco beat blaring from within, and get a glimpse of the celebrities who would step out of their limos and waltz through the parted ropes into the most popular spot on the planet. In the late 1970s “the Me Decade” Studio 54 was the center of the social universe. And one of its brightest stars was a tall, handsome fashion designer named Calvin Klein.
The irony was telling: Klein had emigrated from the same kind of blue-collar Bronx neighborhood that was home to the very people the club shunned. Moreover, until recently, American clothing designers were near-no-bodies, relegated to back rooms while their “garmento” bosses basked in the glory–and the bucks. But Klein’s emergence on Seventh Avenue coincided with the nation’s brace of celebrity in all its forms, and he reveled in his newfound “somebody” status. “The Studio” was the place to be, and Klein was reportedly there nearly every night, partying with the likes of Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger, dancing with whichever hot young bodies caught his eye, and snorting cocaine often provided by Rubell himself. When mixing with the masses became tiresome, there was always the subterranean VIP room, an inner sanctum where anything went. Klein would often be the last to leave. Then it was on to an “after hours” club or back to his apartment, bleary-eyed, to catch a short sleep before heading back to the drawing board that helped him live out his dreams.
Calvin Richard Klein, now 55, grew up in a working-class Jewish enclave called Mosholu Parkway, raised in a modest apartment by his distant father, Leo, who ran a grocery, and his overbearing but doting mother, Flo, a clotheshorse whose own mother, Molly, had been a seamstress. His Protestant given name reportedly drew raised eyebrows among the mother hens along Mosholu, as did, presumably, the naming of his baby sister, Alexis. (Years later, when a series of designer jeans ads would give the term “Calvins” a life of its own, Klein reportedly admitted that he never really liked the name.) While his friends were outside playing stickball, Calvin–sensitive, shy, and a bit soft (and the polar opposite of his outgoing, streetwise older brother Barry)–liked to stay indoors and draw clothing. He relished the times Flo would take him to Loehmann’s, a New York City institution known for off-price designer fashions culled from manufacturer overruns and retailer returns. He attended Manhattan’s High School of Industrial Arts, then the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he felt less an outsider–and fell in love with Jayne Centre, a pretty blonde he’d known casually back in the Bronx. They married in a civil ceremony in 1964.
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