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By the early 54s, Calvin Klein was already a fixture in New York. Creator of "designer" jeans, he was a regular at Studio 1980 along with Grace Jones, Donna Summers, Salvador Dalí, Cher and Warhol and was on the verge of patenting minimalism in fashion. By that time, the designer already knew two things: first, that sex sells, something he proved in <> when he placed a fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields before Richard Avedon's lens with erotic innuendo ("Do you want to know what's standing between me and my Calvins? Nothing," the ad read.)
The controversy unleashed managed to sell thousands of jeans just hours after the launch. The second lesson Mr. Klein had already learned was the power of image: "The only way to advertise is not to focus on the product," he once said. Thus, on these two pillars, the American designer turned underwear into an emblem of status, its wearers into sex symbols and his brand, which he had launched with only 10,000 dollars in 1968, into the photograph of popular aspirations over the following decades. Today its campaigns continue to have repercussions, and unleash controversies: Jeremy Allen White (The Bear) has starred in the latest viral advertisement of the firm and the British singer FKA Twigs has regretted the withdrawal of the ad that she stars in in the United Kingdom, where she has been accused of showing an "excessively sexualized" image of the artist: "I don't see the 'stereotypical sex object' with which I have been labeled. I see a beautiful, strong Black woman whose incredible body has overcome more pain than you can imagine," Twigs said on her Instagram account.
Brooke Shields' ad for Calvin Klein Jeans.
These are not the only images of the company that have been talked about throughout its history. Calvin Klein debuted its first underwear ad in 1982. The Underwear line, launched that same year, was Klein's big commercial bet (the women's line would arrive a year later) and the American knew that he needed a campaign that would place it in the collective imagination. And so it was.
The chosen one was a man as prodigious in sport as he is at first glance: the pole vaulter and Olympic athlete of Brazilian origin Tom Hintaus. The photographer was the legendary Bruce Weber (born in 1946 on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, and at that time a renowned photographer for GQ and Vogue) and the shoot was done in Santorini: the athlete appears, like a Greek god, leaning on the typical white stone of the island dressed only in white underpants whose waistband reads the mark. The pose is discussed by gender studies expert David Coad in his bookThe Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport. Accordingto this author, the posture was reminiscent of the Greek statues of the Archaic Period, the so-called Kouroi, which were "large sculptures of naked male bodies that served as devotional offerings to the gods." Soon after, the image of Hintaus arrived in New York in a big way, literally, with a 40-meter-long by 15-meter-wide poster displayed in the middle of Times Square. Calvin Klein also wallpapered bus stops across the city with the ad, and what happened next perfectly captures the euphoria that the ad unleashed: numerous bus shelters were vandalized, and the poster was stolen.
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2023, the year we live in panties
That image decreed that underwear was more than underwear: Calvin Klein's white briefs were designed to be seen (in fact in the following years the trend of showing the waistband with the brand was greatly favored by the fashion of low-rise jeans), but they also conferred status. They were totemic underpants.
Brazilian Tom Hintaus starring in Calvin Klein's first underwear campaign.
As The New Yorker analyzes, Hintaus's images had a grandeur greater than was evident: the ad evoked a fetish of the gay male subculture of the 1980s such as the tight white underpants and, in addition, the celebration of the man as a sexual object reflected the growing visibility of homosexual culture. "What had been hidden inside the adult movie theaters of Times Square was now in public and on a pedestal," Coad writes in his book.
In the following years, Calvin Klein's underwear campaigns became a recognizable visual element of Manhattan's image, as did yellow cabs, and even the New York magazine paid tribute to them through a cover in 1994.
The Hintaus campaign was the first to create a visual language with identifiable coordinates (star photographer, protagonist chiseled with pheromones, white underpants) that defined advertising and fashion in the following years, until the campaign starring Jeremy Allen White in 2024.
With campaigns such as those of Calvin Klein, advertising in the 1980s underwent a revolution in messages, language and aesthetics. Suddenly, the claims of underwear ads began to be modern and creative, more suggestive and daring, included desire as a common element and opened the door to a new masculinity. While Hintaus was revolutionizing New York, in Spain it was the golden years of Abanderado, whose advertising went from being family and aimed at parents and children, to start showing young boys with colored briefs and even transparencies.
In the years that followed, Klein continued to openly flirt with sensuality: in 1983 he organized an underwear show in which the models, who wore only panties, covered their chests with their arms, and in 1984 he commissioned Weber to paint another suggestive campaign for Calvin Klein Underwear in which three models, two men and a woman, They were sprawled out on a bed, dressed only in boxer shorts and panties. A couple of years later, in 1989, Weber again took Greek eroticism as inspiration for another black-and-white campaign, and rolled Maltbie Napoleon and Susan Hess between the sheets for that year's Spring/Summer campaign. The idea of the nude gained strength in the brand and the American photographer put numerous completely nude models in front of his lens (such as Justin Lazard, Tim Schnellenberger, Blake Daniels, Paul Wadina, Ana Drummond and Lisa Marie Smith in 1987, or Rick Arango and again Lisa Marie Smith in 1989) for the brand's Obsession perfume campaigns.
Soon after, the moment came that catapulted the CK briefs to worldwide fame. In 1992 Mark "Marky" Whalberg starred in one of the most iconic campaigns of the following decades, confidently clutching his package, sporting gym muscles and promoting white boxer shorts with the logo on the rubber. He was 21 years old and the year before, in 1991, he had reached No. 1 on the US Billboard charts with the song Good Vibrations. In the video clip of the song he already showed his body, wearing denim dungarees and a baseball. The video caught the attention of Neil Kraft, who at the time was a senior executive at Calvin Klein, who commissioned the ads: Whalberg represented the ideal face and body but also the mood and desires of the moment. Years later, Kraft explained why it was a perfect choice: Wahlberg appealed to everyone, women, gay men, and straight men who wanted to be like him. That launched him to stardom. The photographer was Herb Ritts, the photos were not retouched and again the image was very minimalist: black and white, and studio.
The next campaign was already a stratospheric success: in 1993 a very young Kate Moss, topless at just 17 years old, accompanied Whalberg in the ads. Again, the photographs were signed by Herb Ritts. Moss herself would say years later that the photo shoot made her feel vulnerable and scared, and that she had to take Valium to cope with the anxiety of facing such a large campaign. However, that image cemented Calvin Klein's visual identity into a brand so powerful that its influence on pop culture was comparable to that of Coca-Cola or McDonalds.
What is clear is that those photographs transformed global visual culture and became a reference not only for pop culture but also for emerging clothing brands that in the 90s hoped to make their mark.
The years went by and starring in or photographing Calvin Klein's underwear campaign also became a status symbol. Supermodel Christy Turlington took over from Kate Moss, and after Mark Whalberg began to arrive superstars such as Travis Fimmel, Jamie Dornan, Justin Bieber, A$AP Rocky, who posed in front of the lens of famous photographers such as Steven Meisel, Mario Testino, Steven Klein or Mert Alas.
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All of them have contributed to telling the story of the culture of their time, but probably none of them has had as much impact since Whalberg's as the brand's latest campaign, starring Jeremy Allen White.
Photographed by Mert Alas in his hometown of New York, the campaign ratifies Allen White's golden moment. "You couldn't take your eyes off the [Calvin Klein] fences," White told GQ. "They were huge. I've always associated them—and still do—with New York City itself." This unexpected opportunity came to Jeremy Allen White at the best time: the actor had just filmed The Iron Claw the previous winter, had just won a Golden Globe for his role in The Bear and, according to reports, is in a relationship with Rosalía. In the campaign images, he once again plays the muscular, rough-looking man with a neighborhood attitude that made Whalberg famous 32 years ago. Giant billboards now decorate New York with his image in his underpants and now the virality of his effect is measured on the internet. Many have already crowned him on social networks: "Motopapi".