In 1980, a fully clothed Brooke Shields reinvented sex with just 11 words.
“You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing,” she purred into the camera, doing nothing but batting her eyes ever so slightly and letting the concealed curves of her body do all the work.
If the internet had existed at the time, she surely would’ve broken it. Shields was grossly sexualized and pimped out by Hollywood as a child, a fact to which she later attributed her low self-esteem. But unlike her borderline pedophilic scenes in “Pretty Baby” and “Blue Lagoon,” Shields’ notorious Calvin Klein ads were hers. They were radical acts of fashion, seduction, decadence, and most important, her own agency.
But oh, how the once-mighty designer jeans giant has fallen. The company’s stature in the luxury fashion world has oscillated over the past 40 years, reaching its nadir sometime about the turn of the century when the brand lost its prestige, flirted with bankruptcy, and was ultimately acquired by the midrange Phillips-Van Heusen, pairing the brand with Izod instead of Ralph Lauren.
Five years ago, it was ready for a comeback. Leaning into its brand’s more streetside appeal, the newly revamped Calvin Klein launched the wildly successful #MyCalvins campaign, employing models and celebrities to evoke the glam of the ’80s and heroin chic of the ’90s with a millennial social media spin. In 2016, the brand hired the indomitable Raf Simons of Dior to infuse haute couture into the brand and bring it back to the best runways.
But as it turned out, Instaculture and avant garde don’t go hand in hand. Despite balancing his ultra luxurious 205W39NYC high-end line with Kardashian-modeled campaigns for the brand’s lower-end lines, Simons abruptly broke up with Calvin Klein last year.
Now Calvin is flailing. The brand has no identity, and it knows it.
Its latest ad campaigns include the “nonbinary” Indya Moore speaking “My Truth in #MYCALVINS” and Billie Eilish lamenting that pernicious male gaze. But no stunt is as pathetic and yawn-inducing as Bella Hadid making out with some chick I’ve never heard of before.
Performative lesbianism was already tired when Britney Spears and Madonna did it at the VMAs in 2003, and now it’s plain old hackneyed. Calvin Klein is out of ideas, and its desperate attempts at relevance only demonstrate how lost it has become in the wake of Simons’ exit.
