FASHION / SCENE : Klein’d & Dined : At a Charity Dinner and Launch for Saks West, Calvinisms Ruled Throughout the Evening

It was Calvin Klein everywhere you looked Tuesday night. Waiters wore his baggyblack suits. Valets sported his black T-shirts. Enormous bottles of his perfume were on display. Women poured themselves into his satin sheaths. And there he was in a black double-breasted suit, signature white shirt and smarty glasses, lithe wife Kelly by his side.

The designer, who has brought us signature underwear, expensive jeans and an ad campaign provocative enough to get the FBI interested, was the main attraction at Saks Fifth Avenue for a cocktail party/fashion show/dinner to benefit the RACE to Erase MS, Nancy Davis’ charity for multiple sclerosis.

The event--black tie if you felt like it--also kicked off Saks West, the store’s Wilshire Boulevard expansion. Cocktails were consumed amid the handbag displays. There, actor-director Ben Stiller said he “kinda had a little bit of a problem” with Klein’s beleaguered ad campaign.

“I didn’t object to the ads,” he said, “but they gave me a weird feeling. . . . I thought the print ads were provocative, but the commercials felt forced, and were really creepy.”

The squeamish will be happy to know that right this very minute a new ad campaign is being shot. Earlier in the day at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, Klein said his mea culpas for the umpteenth time. (“I apologize. When people say, ‘How could he have been shocked [at the reaction]?’ I’ll tell you, I was shocked.”) And he promised not to let it happen again. “I will look at [future ads] very carefully and examine them,” he said.

Klein was equally reassuring to fans of Kate Moss. “A very healthy young woman who eats an awful lot. She has gained weight, actually,” he said of his favorite former waif. Moss had signed autographs at the store earlier in the week for a crush of admirers, including three transvestites.

Meanwhile, back at the party, the crowd, heavily populated with TV names, was massing around the fragrance counter: Cathy Moriarty, John Stamos, Jay Thomas, Rita Wilson (sans Tom Hanks), Kate Capshaw (sans Steven Spielberg), Wayne Gretzky, Kirsten Dunst, Daphne Zuniga, Vanna White and Juliacnna Margulies.

Eventually, they migrated to the parking lot for the tented fashion show, where it was so warm that the models, showing Klein’s fall ’95 sleek knits, tweeds and satins, looked dewy.

Dinner for 400 was in another tent; once again it was Kleinworld: He designed the minimalist table settings (white linens, fat white candles) and decor (huge bouquets of Calla lilies on white pillars).

By now everyone was hungry enough to pull a Kate Moss, chowing down on the meal of lobster medallions, grilled chicken and warm chocolate cake. Probably the only thing Calvin Klein didn’t design.