“The idea was that I would go and photograph my girlfriend and just create something intimate and personal.” Kate & Mario circa 1993 “ There wasn’t really a specific concept,” says Sorrenti. And so they did, without hair and makeup or any other people around. Seeing that spark of passion and longing conveyed in the photos, Klein tasked the photographer to hole up on a remote island in the Virgin Islands with Moss for a week and take pictures of her for the then soon-to-launch fragrance. As Sorrenti tells it, the campaign came to be as a result of designer Calvin Klein seeing images Sorrenti had taken of his then-girlfriend, 18-year-old Moss, on holiday.

The deeply personal story behind the campaign-that of Sorrenti and Moss’s love story is perhaps just as iconic as the images themselves. “If one thing summed up Calvin Klein for us visually, it was Mario Sorrenti’s Obsession campaign with Kate Moss.”

“I suppose you could say we were obsessed by Obsession,” says Simons. Reinventions of the classic, citrus and white lavender contrast with musk to give sensuous warmth to the women’s scent, while notes of black pepper, cardamom, patchouli, and vanilla deliver a captivating, spiced aroma for the men’s. Twenty-five years later, the images still resonate today, so much so that the recently installed chief creative officer for Calvin Klein, Raf Simons, decided to revisit never-before-seen outtakes from the original campaign to launch the new fragrances, Obsessed for Women and Obsessed for Men.

Mario sorrenti kate moss calvin klein