Although he was never content with couture's past glory and always, even 50 years ago, was exploring a different orbit, the designer is an impeccable couturier whose silken dresses, cut on the bias so that they fall like a water shower, are as classically beautiful as they come.
If you want to shoot a film, it's so much easier to find yourself in the orbit of great costume designers, or sound engineers, or actors, and for there to be enough of them that you can find co-collaborators on the same wavelength as you, who are willing to give something a try.
The architect Kathryn Findlay, who has died aged 60 after suffering from a brain tumour, was the creator of surreal space-age houses in Japan and co-designer of the Orbit tower in the London Olympic Park.
Going beyond the no-nonsense look of archetypal typeface families like Times and Helvetica, designers in Emigre's orbit, like John Hersey, Joachim Müller-Lancé and Ms. Licko, saw font design as a form of creative expression.
Due to the constraints of space flight where on-orbit weight is at a premium, designers often must double book resources to address worst-case contingency scenarios.
This "almost free ride to orbit" is fuelling entrepreneurship and innovation, says Aaron Rogers, a designer of intelligence and military satellites at John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab in Maryland.
As the Soviet rocket program's chief designer, he went on launching crews into orbit until his death in 1966.
This last result could be of interest for space designers dealing with the sizing of on-orbit servicing infrastructures.
He's built a universe with a strong visual gravity that pulls people into its orbit, and we should expect the same from Calvin Klein with the cult designer at its helm.
Darby Roach is a designer and a writer and heads up his own marketing agency, Orbit Direct.
