The V-line of his lower abs peekaboo-ing out from above his lopsided boxer-briefs. The adonic, sun-lit stretch toward the heavens. Pants pulled down, his skivvies-clad butt greeting the skyline as he lies prone on some mystery surface above New York City. There are so many elements of Jeremy Allen White’s new turn as an underwear model for Calvin Klein that deserve our attention—and they’re getting lots of it. But the thing I can’t stop fixating on is the song that’s playing over a video that was released in conjunction with the ad campaign: ’60s hit “You Don’t Own Me” by Lesley Gore.
I’ll get back to why I think the song is key to understanding these images in a minute, but first, some context. White’s starring role in the FX series The Bear has thrust the actor into the spotlight over the last two years, earning him critical claim and a growing reputation as a somewhat unlikely sex symbol: He’s got some of that ugly-hot Pete Davidson thing, only he’s on the shorter side—an underdog!—and fans eat up the loveable fuckup character he plays on The Bear. He’s sort of the thinking woman’s alternative to a Hollywood Chris—except, thanks in part to playing a professional wrestler in the recent movie The Iron Claw, he is just as ripped as any Chris. White has leaned into his new status by participating in lascivious photo shoots—so many photo shoots—and conveniently being captured by paparazzi as he runs around Los Angeles sweaty and shirtless. And now he has arrived at the ultimate showcase for any budding sex object: the underwear photo shoot.
It’s interesting that even as some male stars might be sheepish about participating in certain celebrity vanity rituals, like People’s Sexiest Man Alive, a chance to take off your clothes for Calvin Klein retains some prestige. It’s thirstiness with the plausible deniability that maybe it’s also art. White is developing a real knack for toeing a line somewhere between the two, and that may be what made him the perfect choice for this campaign. Strangely, last year he got some minor attention when he left an Instagram comment, saying simply, “Wow,” under an image of the actress Alexa Demie modeling lingerie for Calvin Klein. He later said he meant it as a compliment to the photographers behind the shoot, which seemed kind of phony at the time. But now he’s been redeemed: He is merely a fan of Calvin Klein underwear photo shoots! And they don’t let just anyone take off their clothes for Calvin Klein, either. Part of why the brand continues to hold cache lies in its history of canny advertising strategy and a keen eye for the kinds of models that will resonate with its customer base: In addition to Demie, recent models have included BTS’s Jung Kook, singer Troye Sivan, and Kendall Jenner.
Aside from A-list models, the other thing Calvin Klein ads have in common is controversy. Going back to the jeans ads that starred Brooke Shields in the ‘80s (Tagline: “You know what comes between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing.”), the company’s advertising has always aimed to get people talking. As the New York Times put it in 2017, “In a pre-internet world, [Klein] built a global brand on the power of astonishingly provocative imagery. Before there was such a thing as going viral, his ad campaigns did it anyway, born on tides of outrage and, well, obsessive looking.”
The most clear predecessors for the Jeremy Allen White photos might be the brand’s 1992 boxer-brief ads starring Mark Walhberg (then known as Marky Mark) and the 2015 campaign starring Justin Bieber that was itself a riff on the Wahlberg ads. Both the 1992 and 2015 campaigns featured women draping themselves over the male stars—a teenage Kate Moss and the model Laura Stone, respectively. The Wahlberg broadcast ads almost have to be seen to be believed, for both the things the star says in them (“The best protection against AIDS is to keep your Calvin’s on”) and the way that he says them, in what one can only assume is his Marky Mark voice. There’s also a topless Moss just circling him, silently, until the moment in one of them when Wahlberg gestures to her rear and announces, “Now that could come between me and my Calvin’s.” The Bieber ads pay homage to the Wahlberg campaign, but are also transgressive simply for starring Bieber, who was at the time going through a bit of a wild child phase after beginning his career as a squeaky-clean teen idol.
The White images notably feature no deferential female role, and generally seem much less, well, toxically masculine. I’m not going to say they’re the first Calvin Klein ads intended for the female (or otherwise non-cis straight male) gaze—the brand has definitely featured other male hotties posed in ways that might especially appeal to women, including Michael B. Jordan last year—but here’s where that song choice comes in again. Maybe the lack of female star allows the audience to imagine, like that One Direction video shot so the viewer can envision herself as on a date with each of the boys, that you’re the other character in it.
“You Don’t Own Me,” the song cheekily reminds anyone watching, but for a few seconds, you kind of do own White. It’s just such a girly, feminine but also feminist song, an anthem for women, and not far out from the Barbie movie and the Year of Girl Everything, it struck me as marking these ads as especially “for the girls,” as they say. The song choice gives women and others permission to own their thirst, to luxuriate in it, concepts that are more in vogue now than they ever have been. The images are still controversial in that Calvin Klein way—there’s no other reason for White to look like he got pantsed in that one shot, or for him to get undressed while keeping his sneakers and socks on, other than to be provocative—but how it’s achieving that has shifted considerably. We don’t own them, they don’t own us, but Jeremy Allen White and Calvin Klein are owning this moment.
