Brooke Shields has big plans for the most special jeans of her life. In a new episode of her podcast, 'Now What?', she spoke with news anchor Katie Couric about her iconic 1980 campaign for denim brand Calvin Klein, and where those famous pants are after so many years. The TV presenter told the veteran model that she and her friends all bought themselves a pair of Calvin Klein jeans under the influence of that commercial.
The 58-year-old revealed that her mother kept three of the original pairs featured in the advertisement, and that she gave one of them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "Don't everyone give their jeans to the Met Museum?" she joked, adding that she still owns the other two pairs and has plans for them. "I'm going to frame the other two with plexiglass," she revealed, admitting that they were no longer suitable for her. "Now, only my daughters can wear them," she said, prompting Corrick to offer to pass them on to her daughters, Rowan, 20, and Greer, 17.
When the campaign — which included a TV commercial, print ads and billboards — was first launched, Shields was just 15 years old, just before appearances in two successful films that made her world famous: Blue Lagoon and Unadulterated Love. The campaign not only promoted the sale of the American designer's line of jeans, it also became one of the most memorable campaigns in the history of the fashion industry. Of course, the controversy that arose when high school student Brooke Shields looked straight into the camera and said, "Want to know what's between me and my Calvins? Nothing." A slogan in the same vein, "Nothing separates me from my jeans," appeared in the campaign ads.
Calvin Klein himself, who no longer heads the fashion house that bears his name after a $700 million "exit" in 2003, told People magazine earlier this year that the phrase was "both innocent and sexy." Shields, for her part, said: "I was a child, and where I was, I was naïve. A young woman, very protected, isolated, in a bubble. I believe the assumption was that I was much more mature than I really was." For her, she explained, it was an innocently meaningful phrase: "I had a dog, and I would say, 'Nothing separates me from my puppy.' It was a way of talking, I didn't think of it like I wasn't wearing underwear." She added that in hindsight she understood how the controversy came about, but clarified: "For some reason, and maybe it's just a defense, I'm not angry about it. It gave me a lot. "After all," she said, "sex sells. Sex has been sold since the dawn of history, and it still sells."
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Nearly 40 years after the controversial campaign, in the summer of 2017, Shields posed again for Calvin Klein, this time wearing the brand's sporty lingerie. In February 2022, Shields appeared in another denim campaign, but this time for Jordash.
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