The Calvin Klein / Tommy Hilfiger NOligarchy Profile
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Calvin Klein / Tommy Hilfiger’s parent company, PVH Corp, earns a NOligarchy Score of 59.45 out of 100 — just above the midpoint, but nowhere near a clean record. A perfect score of 100 would mean zero spending on political influence, zero shareholder extraction, and zero regulatory violations. PVH Corp passes on compliance, falls short on political access, and produces deeply troubling numbers on the wealth extraction front.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
68.7
Wealth Extraction
18.3
Playing by the Rules
100.0
Score history — 23 quarters
Tier bands show where each quarter's score falls — no numeric y-axis needed. The dashed ring marks the year-over-year comparison point. Tap any quarter but the first to see its pillar breakdown.
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Political Access Grade: 68.42/100. PVH Corp maintained a relatively light but strategically directed presence in Washington during the two-year tracking period, spending $60,000 on federal lobbying concentrated in the first two quarters of 2026 and focused on trade and apparel issues — routing that spending through well-connected outside firms, including one with a former U.S. Senator on the payroll. No Political Action Committee (PAC) spending was recorded.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 19.04/100. This is where the numbers turn damaging. PVH Corp channeled more than a billion dollars into stock buybacks over its two most recent fiscal years, all while paying its median worker roughly $23,000 a year — and handing its chief executive a compensation package 907 times that size.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 100/100. The public record shows no regulatory fines, no government penalties, and no public subsidy payments on the books. On this dimension, PVH Corp is clean.
Calvin Klein / Tommy Hilfiger ranks 14th out of 23 companies in the Clothing and clothing accessories retailers sector, against a sector average NOligarchy Score of 68.8. PVH Corp scores lower than most of its peers — trailing the industry standard by more than 9 points, driven almost entirely by its wealth extraction practices.
The Bottom Line: A Billion-Dollar Bet on Wall Street While Workers Earn $23,000 a Year
PVH Corp reported nearly $8.95 billion in annual revenue, and in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 alone, it chose to spend more than $1.1 billion deliberately reducing its own shares outstanding — a mechanism that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — while its median worker took home just $23,461. The company kept its Washington footprint modest and avoided regulatory penalties entirely, yet the gap between what it handed to shareholders and what it left for its frontline workforce tells the real story of its priorities. For a brand that drapes itself in aspiration, the internal economics look a great deal more like extraction.
Small Spend, Serious Connections
From Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period), PVH Corp spent $60,000 on federal lobbying — all of it concentrated in Q1 and Q2 of 2026, at $30,000 per quarter. The dollar figure is deliberately modest. What it bought is not.
PVH Corp retained two outside lobbying firms to work those filings. One of them — Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld — also lobbies for Dell Technologies, Ralph Lauren, and Shein, giving it a seat at the table across the apparel and retail landscape. All filings cited issues related to trade and the apparel and textiles industry. The government entities named most often in PVH Corp’s lobbyists’ filings were the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) — the federal office that sets America’s tariff and trade deal positions — followed by the White House Office and the Treasury Department.
Shared Lobbying Exposure
Calvin Klein / Tommy Hilfiger
client
AKIN GUMP STRAUSS HAUER & FELD
lobbying firm
AT&T
also a client
Dell Technologies Inc
also a client
KKR & Co. Inc.
also a client
+2 more
clients
Why it matters: the same firm argues Calvin Klein / Tommy Hilfiger’s case and its rivals’ — one hire buys a web of shared access that can’t be seen from outside. This network worsens Calvin Klein / Tommy Hilfiger’s political-access score (see methodology for the exact factor).
One of PVH Corp’s three lobbyists came through the revolving door: Norm Coleman, who served as a U.S. Senator from 2003 to 2009. Access to the USTR and White House on trade questions is precisely the kind of work a former senator is positioned to accelerate.
THE PUBLIC DOOR
Public comment form
90-day docket
maybe a form reply
WAIT: MONTHS
THE REVOLVING DOOR
1 lobbyists on the roster once held covered government positions.
One was Assistant Textile Negotiator, USTR.
WAIT: NONE
1 of the lobbyists on Calvin Klein / Tommy Hilfiger's filings previously held covered government positions — the same door, entered from both sides.
The company operates no PAC and contributed nothing to one during the period. Individual executive donations to federal candidates totaled just $602 across the two-year period — $102 in Q3 2024 and $500 in Q3 2025 — a figure so small it barely registers with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
The picture that emerges is not of a company flooding Washington with cash. It is of a company that knows which doors to knock on. PVH Corp sources garments from factories across Asia and Latin America, making tariff schedules and trade agreement terms a direct line to its profit margins. Sixty thousand dollars routed through a powerful firm and a former senator, aimed squarely at the offices that shape U.S. trade policy, is a precise instrument — not a casual one.
Prioritizing Wall Street Over the Workforce — By a Factor of 907
The starkest number in PVH Corp’s public filings is not its revenue. It is the CEO pay ratio: 907:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, according to the company’s own SEC DEF 14A filing. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $21.3 million — set against a median worker salary of $23,461 a year. That median worker — likely a store associate, a warehouse employee, or a production worker — would need to labor for more than nine centuries to match what PVH Corp’s chief executive collected over three years.
The Shareholder Payout
PVH Corp didn’t just reward its CEO. It poured cash directly into the hands of its largest shareholders. According to SEC 10-K filings, the company spent $577.7 million on buybacks in fiscal year 2025 and $524.8 million in fiscal year 2024 — more than $1.1 billion across those two years. This money flowed disproportionately to the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who own 93% of the stock market.
The Missed Raise
The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of its 27,325 workers a $40,348 raise, spread across the last 2 fiscal years. Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $20,174 annual raise the company chose not to give — a figure that, on its own, would represent nearly a year’s worth of additional take-home pay for a worker already earning $23,461.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 27K employees
Spent on buybacks
$1.1B
directed to shareholders
÷ 27K
workers
Per-worker raise
$40,348
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 86% annual raise on the median worker's $23,461 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
EARNINGS STATEMENT — ANNUAL
EMPLOYEE: 1 of 27,325
Your share of the buyback
+$40,348
Per biweekly paycheck
+$775.92
SPENT INFLATING THE SHARE PRICE
Stock buybacks over the two most recent fiscal years: $1.1 billion.
Spread across Calvin Klein / Tommy Hilfiger's 27,325 employees, its stock buybacks over the last two fiscal years come to $40,348 per worker — about $776 on each of the 52 biweekly paychecks in that span.
The Dividend Factor
PVH Corp did not abandon traditional dividends entirely, but it treated them as an afterthought. Over fiscal years 2024 and 2025 combined, it paid out just $16.1 million in dividends — per SEC 10-K — compared to more than $1.1 billion in buybacks over the same period. That ratio, roughly 68-to-1 in favor of buybacks over dividends, is not an accident of timing. Buybacks are a more concentrated mechanism: they reward shareholders who can time their exits, and they directly lift the earnings-per-share figures that determine whether top executives collect their performance bonuses. Dividends, by contrast, are distributed to all shareholders equally and don’t move earnings per share. PVH Corp funneled the overwhelming bulk of its shareholder payouts into the instrument that benefits insiders most.
Executive Bonuses
With a CEO compensation package averaging $21.3 million a year across three years, and a buyback program that reduces shares outstanding and inflates per-share earnings, the incentive structure at PVH Corp is self-reinforcing. The same executives who approved the buyback program reaped the rewards when shrunken share counts made the company’s earnings-per-share figures look stronger — directly triggering the performance bonuses that padded that $21.3 million average.
A Clean Record on the Public Docket
PVH Corp’s legal record, as reflected in available public data, carries no regulatory fines, no government penalties, and no enforcement actions during the tracking period. The company also received no government subsidies on the public record. On the question of regulatory compliance, the public docket is empty — and that, at minimum, is worth acknowledging.