No. 7: American Fashion Flushed With Challenges

Two thousand nineteen was a tumultuous year for American fashion, and a telling one. While major European luxury brands garnered reams of media attention, its denizens often registering seemingly limitless growth, the U.S. designer world operated in a state of traumatic flux, its shifting fortunes reflected in a diminished collective global profile and a number of major-name shifts and closures. In fact, American fashion has been challenged for some time, a reality many of its participants acknowledged when WWD surveyed them in September 2018. But it all came together in a stunning whirl this year, with a series of touchstone events that brought into sharp focus the struggle of American businesses to compete at the luxury level. Arguably, the company that experienced the most upheaval this year was Calvin Klein Inc., following the abrupt departure in December of Raf Simons, chief creative officer, over differences in brand direction. Simons’ avant garde designs and rocky tenure were a huge and costly experiment — a $240 million debacle — for the Calvin Klein business. Following the split with Simons, CKI exited the Collection business, shuttered its Madison Avenue flagship (which went from minimal to maximal in a yellow makeover), closed its Milan office, laid off

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