555: Revisiting The Fashion Archive of Francisco Costa

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.