CK Senior Creative Design Director Talks About "Design": Minimalism Is The Hardest Part.

CalvinKlein senior creative design director WalidZaazaa has just concluded Seoul.

The trip arrived in Beijing. These days, he will give a speech on behalf of CalvinKlein at the annual Chinese clothing forum. He will explain to the forum invited economists and managers of Chinese garment enterprises how to make a fashionable brand produce a moving product.

From the Zaazaa resume, the French designer is very suitable for analyzing international brands such as CalvinKlein.

He is French, mainly responsible for high-end business in men's clothing.

And accessories design, and also good at handling fabric and color.

He has worked in the Singapore Design Department of DKNY for many years, and has been a senior design consultant for DKNY. He is now in New York and has a good knowledge of the markets in America, Europe and Asia.

More importantly, the pure black suit on his looks really not a bit of redundant elements, and the lines are tough and agile. Like the famous American designer CalvinKlein, they all advocate modern minimalism and prefer a slovenly masculine tailoring.

Now in the US and Europe, the term "American Minimalism" has been tightly tied to CalvinKlein.

Because of its highly recognizable brand image and business strategy, CalvinKlein is positioned as the first big designer brand in the United States.

But for Chinese people, the acronym "CK" in their mouth represents a kind of past. CalvinKlein, founded in 1968 in New York, is probably the earliest known Chinese brand in the United States, and CK and underwear can be equated over a long period of time.

Once upon a time, the wholesale market was full of underwear with CalvinKlein characters on the side of trousers. It is a standard for young people to pursue the way of life on the other side of the ocean. The fashionable way of dressing is also uniform: Please boldly show your underwear.

This is largely due to the billboards appearing in the times square of New York at the end of last century. Indeed, CalvinKlein is an authoritative advertiser in most minds.

In the 60s and 70s of last century, pornography began to spread in Times Square, and sex became a part of street art.

Soon, CalvinKlein, a business savvy, released its own underwear advertisement. When the Brazil Olympic pole vaulting athlete TomHintnaus's bare body appeared on the building, he became a household name as well as CalvinKlein.

Later on, advertisements gradually increased girls, such as the most popular young actress BrookShields in 70s.

Boys and girls sometimes put on hip jeans and willfully expose their underpants.

But in fact, the CalvinKlein brand was built at the very beginning, making women's coats. The choice of fabrics is also very exquisite. Klein likes silk and satin.

He used to use these materials in fashion design.

Once the product was launched, it received orders from major department stores in New York, and the upper floor of the media publicized its life style with a comfortable attitude.

In 2014, CalvinKlein entered the Asian market with only one purpose: to change the situation of selling jeans and underwear for a long time in Asia, and to introduce well designed fashion.

This change has also made CalvinKlein's three most important product lines complete in Asia: CalvinKleinCollection, CKCalvinKlein and cowboy CalvinKleinJeans.

The most familiar underwear is just the tip of the iceberg, which includes perfume, glasses, socks, pajamas, bathing suits, household clothes and so on.

Among them, perfume, Obesession, Eternity, Escape, CKOne, Ckbe and other perfume series are the most representative products of CalvinKlein.

Although there are many products and all over the world, CalvinKlein's design language is very unified: sexy and concise, which is also the most important design philosophy of CalvinKlein.

In his interview, he repeatedly said: "the essence of American style is internationalized. Like New York, it is not a typical American city, but a typical international city.

People who live in all international cities will respond to my design because their needs for life are universal.

This philosophy has been preserved till now.

Even in December 2002, Klein decided to retire behind the scenes. He sold the brand to Phillips-VanHeusen, the largest shirt manufacturer in the United States, in exchange for 400 million dollars in cash plus 30 million dollars in stock, and Phillips-VanHeusen also chose to stick to her brand style in design.

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This is the lucky thing.

But in the business plan, CalvinKlein has also stepped up the way to expand to super brand. Under the management of Phillips-VanHeusen, it has launched many lines such as men's sportswear product line and low-end line. The price is beginning to be erratic and retail channels are also numerous.

Once the high-end American brand has gone down the altar, it has been pformed into a mass consumer brand.

This is a real pleasure for customers who can buy 30 dollars a CK jeans in Messi department store, but for the CalvinKlein that has grown for 50 years, the collapse of brand value may be in a flash.

This worry is also traceable in the following interface and Zaazaa dialogue.

Reporter: the topic of your speech is how to make a moving product. Can you briefly introduce your main points?

Zaazaa: the theme of my speech is about how creativity can be combined with business and how to apply it to the fashion industry.

One is inspiration, which is the topic we most care about. Inspiration comes from every place.

Today, we have a lot of new ways to find inspiration. Today's fashion brands like to find inspiration from the Internet (social media, fashion blog, fashion street report), and the media has become the greatest tool for designers to make creative research.

Access to information, development trends and opinion leaders has become extremely simple and important.

Any fashion brand should maximize the use of these new media to start the new season's design, and try to combine with more traditional inspiration research, such as research and market report.

The most important habit that a designer or fashion brand should have is to define his design style accurately. CalvinKlein is a person who knows how to design and how to run business.

For example, AlexanderWangxo's design inspiration always comes from New York street fashion, but he also likes to mix it with the trend.

So he always looks for cool and novel street style, and at the same time, he constantly tries to integrate modern art into buildings or furniture.

Two different areas of collision create a unique style.

Reporter: what are the main contents of your CK design?

Zaazaa: I am responsible for designing all men's clothing, swimwear, wallet, accessories and all other men's clothing related products.

Reporter: when you work in CalvinKlein and DKNY, can you compare the design philosophy of these two brands?

Zaazaa: of course, every independent brand should have its own philosophy.

CK is famous for its minimalism. In the 70s of last century, minimalism in the United States was not as popular as it is today. This style has nurturing the market for many years. Almost 10 years later, the market realized that minimalism and CalvinKlein can be equated.

DKNY, no CK pays much attention to minimalism, but it attaches great importance to New York culture and fashion. With a city's style dominated, there is a richer style to play.

When people think of DKNY, they think of New York, but when people think of American minimalism, they think of CK.

Reporter: as you mentioned above, CalvinKlein is extremely simple and wind year after year. It does not create a more popular fashion every year than other independent brands or even luxury brands.

But why do people still want to pay for the same thing over the years?

Zaazaa: the philosophy of a brand is unchanged in the past 50 years.

But as you say, the trend will change. We will actually make some changes in the details of the designers.

Let me give you an example. Sneakers are a big trend in fashion world. Later, you find that Valentino, Celine and even Chanel now have sports shoes.

15 years ago, you could never have imagined that these brands could make sneakers, but every brand of sports shoes used their own methods.

If a successful brand wants to succeed in business, it is necessary to take into account both the popularity and the philosophy of its own brand.

CK many years ago, there were not so many colors today. When fur clothing prevailed, they would also make fur coats.

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Interviewer: is minimalism really the most difficult to design? Tell me about your own experience in designing CK.

Zaazaa: is really the hardest.

Minimalism is very popular in Japan. It talks about LessisMore.

In the design industry, many designers make the mistake of desperately trying to impress others.

The minimalism will go through more Reconsiderations in the design. For CK, we will all design it, and then the team will look at something that can be removed. For example, the CK in my suit, the cuff had several buttons, and there were only two left, and it was a small test for the designer, and we would take some time to make a choice, give up what you think good, and any wrong choice may destroy a piece of work.

It is the most difficult part to guess again and again.

Minimalism also requires more tailoring, including the ability to handle fabrics.

When you do the most complex design, you can use the printing, bright colors and other things to disperse the design highlights. This will also affect the customer's judgment of a dress, and they will be more vulnerable to shortcomings.

But when you take away these distractions, everything becomes clearer.

This will be reflected in the design of swimsuit, CK swimsuit is very elegant in size and shape, because swimsuit and daily wear are difficult to withstand more complicated design.

Reporter: ClavinKlein has a lot of product lines now. In 2014, it launched a product line specially for Asia.

I know you used to work in Singapore. Can you explain the difference between Asian product lines and European and American designs?

Zaazaa: I have worked in Asia for many years. For DKNY, Asia is the largest market for DKNY.

CK's designer team is huge, like I am French, working for an American brand, and designing for Asia, and understanding the needs of different parts of the market is a great challenge.

In fact, CK has found that consumers in Asian markets are actually more daring in clothing than the European and American markets, though it looks as if the brands in Europe and the United States seem to have made a lot of innovations.

In Europe, people care about "style" rather than "fashion", but in Asia, people only care about "fashion", which means that Asian fashion consumers actually prefer to buy very extreme and fresh designs.

But Japan and other Asian markets will be separated, so the minimalist design that attaches more importance to fabric than Logo will have a foundation in Japan.

This will affect our strategy to enter the market.

For me, designers will introduce more slim jeans and more Oversized models for Asia. The proportion of these two versions is not high in Europe and the United States.

In Asia, we will also provide super large jeans version, but this ratio must be controlled, otherwise the risk is very high. Sometimes the brand will win the bet and sometimes lose, which requires brand to do marketing, but it may not be useful.