Gagosian Director Antwaun Sargent Curated the Walter De Maria Sculptures at Calvin Klein’s Spring 2027 Show

Calvin Klein’s creative director Veronica Leoni is injecting art back into the American brand. At the brand’s spring 2027 runway show last Friday during New York Fashion Week, Walter De Maria’s sculptures were scattered around Terminal Warehouse in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

Leoni, who joined Calvin Klein in 2024, said her collection was a continuation of exploring the art movement that De Maria is most closely associated with in an expanded form. “American Minimalism was a discipline of removal: take away everything that does not carry the work, until only what is necessary remains,” she said in a statement. “Calvin drew from that and turned it toward the body. I turn it toward the woman inside it. My minimalism begins there, in the relation between design and a body, with nothing in between. Take everything away. What is left is desire.”

The curation of De Maria’s sculptures was organized by Gagosian director Antwaun Sargent. “I first became involved through a meeting with Veronica, when she shared the show’s theme of American Minimalism and asked me to curate the art for the space,” he told Wallpaper Magazine. “Given the iconic setting of Terminal Warehouse, Walter De Maria immediately felt like a natural choice. As a key figure of American Minimalism, with landmark New York installations such as The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), his work offered a compelling dialogue with Calvin Klein and the architecture of the space.”

Sargent handpicked steel works by De Maria on view as part of the show; they included Truth / Beauty (1990–2016), 14-Sided Open Polygon (1984), 16-Sided Open Polygon (1984), and 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows (1985). “[They all] speak to De Maria’s fascination with geometry, repetition, and mathematical order, while their polished steel surfaces interact with the architecture, light, and movement of the fashion show,” said Sargent.

It wasn’t just De Maria that Leoni took cues from for her fourth collection at Calvin Klein. The collection’s color palette featured a multitude of hues from whites and blacks, scarlet, bright yellow, royal blue, cherry and light citron to a check print drawn from Georgia O’Keeffe’s wardrobe.

When Raf Simons, now co-creative director at Prada, was chief creative officer at Calvin Klein from 2016 to 2018, he worked with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts by having free access to the archives that he borrowed for his collections. During his tenure at Calvin Klein, Simons also collaborated with Sterling Ruby, Peter Saville, and Richard Prince.