This book reveals how Calvin Klein created a fashion brand that made understated, all-American glamour his own – at the same time as building a vast billion-dollar empire that includes everything from pants and jeans to perfume and pillows.

A master of minimalism, Klein’s clothes have been beautifully documented in the pages of Vogue over the years by the world’s starriest photographers, including Terry Donovan, Herb Ritts, Snowdon and Nick Knight. While Vogue also reflected the public’s fascination with his film-star handsomeness, glamorous marriage and divorces, bi-sexuality, drama and stints in rehab, the magazine understood that Calvin Klein’s success lay in the very opposite of excess: ‘His clothes simply offered women practical elegance and cool, understated chic’.

In the early 1970s, he introduced his trademark jeans, which he elevated to designer status by cutting them tight and branding his name on the back pocket. Suggestive ads (with the nubile, 15-year-old Brooke Shields cooing ‘You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.’) created a designer jean frenzy among consumers. In 1993, he also made sexy male underwear mainstream with an equally seductive campaign featuring the beefcake charms of the young Mark Wahlberg.

This is the ultimate handbook to an American icon.