Fashion Review: Calvin Klein’s Style Sharknado

There was blood on the floor at Calvin Klein.

Or, to be accurate, a blood-red carpet on the floor of Calvin Klein 205W39NYC, which is the painfully long official name of the collection that determines the direction of the brand. On the walls, screens displayed a video of crystalline water sparkling in the sunshine. A swimmer hove languidly into view. Then John Williams’s classic two-note thrum — the one now recognized around the world as the harbinger of scary things to come, the one that increasingly seems like the soundtrack of life — filled the air.

“Jaws” had entered the fashion week. Well, we all know we’re teetering on the edge of something. “Fear” is the best seller of the day. We might as well dress for it.

Since being named the house’s chief creative officer in 2016, Raf Simons has made something of a signature of exploring the dark side of the American pop landscape: car-crash road trips, post-apocalyptic prairies. This time around his setting was the beach, and his topic the moment of lip-biting anticipation: the seconds before the shark actually appears, when you know it is coming and things will either all work out — it will miss the girl, she will swim on in the sunshine, the threat will pass by until another time — or go horribly wrong.

It’s a moment, like this moment, where the future is not yet decided. We know how it ended that time. The question is: What about this time?

Mr. Simons, who called “Jaws” a “masterpiece” in post-show interviews after being swarmed by his celebrity guests as if they were sea gulls going after a crust of bread, didn’t have an answer. But he did have some pretty great ideas about what we might wear while we waited, gnawing our fingernails, to find out.

It began with the wet suit, protective and kind of kinky at the same time, spliced and re-engineered with wardrobe classics in the Anne Bancroft vein — relics from an era that believed in a different sort of ending.

Miniskirts dangling with what looked like garter belts turned out to be inverted scuba suit tops (often worn with tanks splashed with the “Jaws” promo picture), washed with Impressionist florals or cafe-society leopard print, which were also used as aprons/cummerbunds that wrapped the hips of both men and women. It was as if a surfer had just emerged from the waves, begun to peel away his or her top to dry off, and then decided it was actually a really great accessory.

Swingy pleated skirts had a giant bite taken out of them over one thigh. Midcentury sleeveless martini-shift dresses were made from crushed rosettes of taffeta caught up at the hip or shoulder with rhinestone circle pins and finished with a big bow at the top and a gear harness draped like a cape on the shoulders. There were oversize tweed blazers and chunky fisherman knits (for both men and women) and baby blue tuxedo jackets and skinny lounge-lizard pants (for men). There were some tighty whiteys.

Also graduation robes, with mortarboards and a fringed sash slung across the chest, printed with Warhol portraits of Stephen Sprouse. “The Graduate,” it turns out, is another one of Mr. Simons’s favorite films. (Education is in the air: Vaquera also ended its meditation on the high school condition by taking the graduation gown to a literal extreme, complete with hoop skirt beneath.)

Graduation is, after all, another time of looming possibility. The connections made an unexpected amount of sense. It was hard not to smile. That clothes can make you do that when the subject is dread is part of the point. As is the fact that the designer at the helm of a brand like Calvin Klein might appreciate the value of a commercial blockbuster and how it meshes with more artistic aspirations.

In any case, Mr. Simons wasn’t the only designer wrestling with dystopian visions and the once and future dreams of his adopted country. At Coach 1941, Stuart Vevers took his prairie girls and boys on the road to a dust-ridden desert after the fall. Under the rusted metal bones of a dinosaur skeleton form came floor-sweeping nightie gowns and ruffled shirts, fringed suedes and distressed leathers, big sweatshirts and lace-trimmed slip dresses, like ghosts of a Laura Ingalls Wilder past.

It was a marked contrast with the glossy restraint of Gabriela Hearst’s slim pantsuits and exactingly pleated sundresses, which seemed less to wrestle with contemporary angst than attempt to provide spalike sanctuary, and the far-flung travelogue of Oscar de la Renta, where the creative directors Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim were mapping in fabric and line the places they had been: India, Morocco, Croatia.

Ikat mixed with Berber stripes, exotic blooms with feathers and fringe, classic entrance gowns with silver-embroidered and swathed bustier tops over trousers. A long white T-shirt dress with little cap sleeves had four folkloric rose bushes down the front.

They made a pretty good case that escapism is always an option.