555: Revisiting the Fashion Archive of Francisco Costa

An evocative photographic homage shot by renowned image-makers that celebrates the iconic archival fashion designs of Francisco Costa for Calvin Klein.

From 2003 to 2016, Francisco Costa was the creative director and women’s collections designer for the American fashion house Calvin Klein. It was a time of creative abundance, one that simultaneously supported both fashion design experimentation and its traditional crafts. In 2020, Costa revisited his fashion collections archive and invited twenty-one photographers to receive a box containing hand-selected prototype and runway clothing from Costa’s Calvin Klein women’s collections that could be used either as inspiration or directly as props and costumes within photographs. 555 is a collaborative project that celebrates the iconic collection’s reanimation and visual transformation by an extraordinary congregation of participating artists and image-makers. Moody, contemplative, and provocative images featured range from observational and documentary photography to self-portraiture, evocative nude editorials, fashion photography, and visual records of artistic performances.

Housed in a beautifully crafted, limited edition clamshell box, twenty-one unbound booklets, printed on various tactile paper stocks, feature photographic stories by Diego Villarreal, Marcelo Gomes, Nick Waplington, Jamie Hawkesworth, Hugh Lippe, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Joel Meyerowitz, Lea Colombo, and Collier Schorr.

Francisco Costa is a Brazilian designer, founder of the beauty line Costa Brazil, and former Women’s Creative Director for Calvin Klein. Charlotte Cotton is an English author, visiting scholar, and curator of photography.