In Brief: 7 Photos From 'Calvin Klein' by Calvin Klein

"I've always loved taking risks and pushing boundaries, whether the world was ready or not," writes Calvin Klein in the introduction to Calvin Klein, a handsome new collection of the designer's erotically charged images dating back to the mid-1970s, when Helmut Newton photographed Lisa Taylor staring down a shirtless guy--sexually provocative for its time, but also resonant of an era defined by the hedonism of disco and Studio 54. Fittingly, it was in the famous club, at 3 a.m. one morning in 1977, that Klein was approached by a fashion executive inviting him to design jeans. He didn't need much persuading. "I immediately said yes," he writes. "To me, jeans were a state of mind that was young, sexy, and rebellious." Jeans, and the ads that sold them, would come to immortalize Klein -- and launch a designer-label obsession that defined the 1980s and '90s. When Brooke Shields agreed to pose for CK's "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins" campaign in 1981, the backlash was inevitable. Rather than retreat, Klein was emboldened, moving on to men's underwear with a striking ad shot by Bruce Weber that epitomized the gay gaze. "We photographed it on Tom Hintnaus, an athlete with an incredible physique who had never modeled before," Klein recalls. "Bruce Weber and I took Tom to Greece, where we put him against a large white phallic chimney, a classic element of Santorini's architecture. The ad was so stunningly sexual, the posters were stolen from bus kiosks." Within months, teenagers were pulling the waistbands of their CK briefs above the waistbands of their CK jeans--and the rest, as they say, is history.

All photographs from Calvin Klein by Calvin Klein. Rizzoli. $150.00 U.S. available October 2017.