The ex-CK design director sharing her diaries from the 90s

"It was great until it wasn’t. And the 'wasn’t' is in the journal."

By Jorinde Croese

When we published “New creative directors bring chaos for in-house designers” last year, the designers who spoke to us did so anonymously. They were still working, and they were afraid. That’s something Barbara de Vries isn’t. She left the fashion industry decades ago, kept the journal she wrote during her last month at Calvin Klein, and recently sent it to us unprompted, names and all.

The story it tells is, remarkably, the same as the ones we hear today. In December 1990, Barbara says Calvin Klein hired her to fix three problems: a dull sportswear line stranded next to irrelevant brands in the department store, a near-dead jeans business still trading on Brooke Shields, and a company so close to bankruptcy that media mogul David Geffen would soon bail his friend out. Calvin was fresh out of rehab and newly married to Kelly, on the cusp of what became the golden age of his brand. According to Barbara – who had run her own post-punk label in London for a decade – she was the one handed the work.

Over the next three years, with a hand-picked all-women team working out of a single studio, Barbara says she turned Calvin Klein Sport into CK, rebuilt the jeans around an unknown Kate Moss, and helped engineer a comeback. Then, just as the line became the hottest in the market – allegedly selling $70,000 in a single day at Neiman Marcus – she was forced out because, according to Barbara, a rival executive with the CEO’s ear took her title, claiming that her responsibilities were stripped one memo at a time, her desks were reassigned out from under her team while she was at lunch, and her own company’s lawyers accused her of insubordination for refusing to report to the woman hired to replace her.

Here, 35 years after she wrote them, we speak with Barbara about the diaries she kept.

When you read the journal back now, what strikes you most about that period?

I think my lawyers must have said to me, “Keep a journal.” But because I was already journaling, it didn’t become the kind of journal they were expecting, which would have been, “11am, I met with so-and-so about this.” It just became an extension of what I already did, because for that month, that’s all I wrote about. It was great to find this document of that period of my life, which I’d kind of forgotten about. So it was really great to read it back and go, “Oh yes, that’s what happened.”

There is a lot of anguish, frustration and anger in it, but also a sense that writing was helping you process what was happening.

Yes, that’s why I was journaling. I’d been seeing a therapist for the first time, when I came to America. I had this very spiritual friend, who introduced me. She wasn’t really a therapist – she was more like a shaman – and she really helped me stay on track. I think it also helped me keep the CK team on track. We were a bit of an island within the company. We had a very large, 1,500-square-foot studio room, and we just worked there all day as a unit. All our presentations were in our space, so really the only times I went out was when Calvin called a meeting somewhere. There wasn’t much interaction with anyone else. We were very much our own thing, and I think that’s one of the reasons it was so successful, because not many people factored in. We were doing what we were doing.