KARL TEMPLER: A sounding board of sorts at Calvin Klein
By CATHY HORYN
ON the 12th floor of the Calvin Klein headquarters on West 39th Street, models wait, bus-depot style, for their fittings. Some are so young they are accompanied by a parent. Inside, beyond the waiting area, is another whitewashed room with racks of clothes, long tables strewn with Polaroid film and marking pens, and a white seamless background bathed in studio light.
Francisco Costa, the women’s designer at Calvin Klein, has worked by the same process since he succeeded Mr. Klein five years ago. He is intense and seemingly disorganized, colored by five o’clock shadow. On the days and nights before his show on Tuesday, he will work with a team that includes studio assistants, people who handle accessories, and with his stylist of five years, Karl Templer.
Mr. Templer, the son of an auto mechanic from London, began styling for fashion magazines and companies more than 10 years ago and has worked with some of the top photographers, including Steven Meisel and Craig McDean. He describes his role at Klein as more of an instigator and sounding board than a stylist decorator. He doesn’t simply compose looks from a room of clothes and accessories. Partly that’s because Mr. Costa is refining the designs right up to the last days before the show. And partly because Mr. Templer must take into account the legacy of the brand.
“This isn’t a place where you’d say, ‘We’re inspired this season by Andrew Wyeth,’ ” Mr. Templer said. “There’s a certain clarity to this house.” That clarity is expressed not only by the minimalist clothes, he adds, but also by the makeup and hair, and by using the hottest new models before anyone else, a Calvin Klein tradition. (This season the new model is a young German woman named Tonne.)
“It’s such a different experience here,” said Mr. Templer, who by agreement works only on the Calvin Klein show.
Like other British stylists, Mr. Templer comes from a culture at once steeped in pop music, street fashion and aristocratic styles that verge on the theatrical. “That’s why so many designers, like Jean Paul Gaultier, came to London for inspiration,” he pointed out. At Calvin Klein, his challenge is how to highlight Mr. Costa’s main themes and, at the same time, incorporate new, subtle changes in fashion.
“Francisco is very much in his own world when he’s working — he’s a designer’s designer,” Mr. Templer said. “I don’t think he’s out shopping the market.” So it helps if Mr. Templer can bring him the latest viewpoints, which they then discuss. “You’re like a second pair of eyes,” he said.
Mr. Costa agrees. “Being a designer, you get caught up in dressmaking,” he said last week between fittings. “He helps me to refine everything. The process feels very natural. We’ve really grown a lot together.”
Last season, Mr. Templer helped Mr. Costa convey the ultraslim silhouette that became one of the key statements for fall. Very often the two of them are simply talking things through. Should that pleat continue? Should there be more coats? Before returning to the studio the other day, Mr. Templer observed, “We’re in a semivulgar moment,” and he noted the profusion of color, accessories and tattoos. It was something to consider in a house where every nuance is considered.
Mr. Templer laughed. “Obviously we wouldn’t do a red runway at Calvin Klein, for instance.”
