On the Calvin Klein Billboard off Broadway-Lafayette St.

Most of my time in the city is spent window shopping around downtown New York. I’m not gonna lie, I’m broke with expensive taste. A sin in New York City unfortunately but it’s my cross to bear. When I moved here back in 2014 I spent more than a handful of weekdays skipping class and checking out what was on the racks in Opening Ceremony or the VFiles store front, thumbing through artisanal street wear and costumes for the Instagram elite back when I was 18 and on a diet of pick-a-bagel and Arizona iced tea. Imagining what it must of felt like to walk down the street in a HBA original; these brands sold sophistication and sex in a way that made me feel like I too could achieve a certain type of allure that titillated my peers. To see someone in an outfit pulled from Greene street and dropped right into the basement of a GHE20G0TH1K party created the iconographic foundation for a certain kind of New York Cool that I’ve carried with me ever since.  But a brand that carries a more accessible price tag and was overseeing all of this was Calvin Klein and their giant larger than life billboard that hangs like the T.G. Eckleberg eyeglasses over the Broadway Lafayette St. subway stop that’d I’d take to get down to this part of town.

Calvin Klein for a long time sold this sort of sophistication to a larger, global audience. It was cool, hot, sexy, fun, smart and in a lot of ways defined the way so many young Americans saw themselves. In the mid-90s they had a media saturation high with every A-lister rocking their basics and a porn star casting couch inspired advertising campaign spearheaded by then creative director (and one of my guiding lights) Glenn O’Brian that shook the nation to its core. The brand even became the poster child for the coined phrase Heroine Chic, Kate Moss being a frequent collaborator for their campaigns at the time. Into the 2000s and by the time I started meandering around SoHo in the mid-2010s their giant billboard became a backdrop for so much of this ideology of clothing brands in the neighborhood selling this sensibility, albeit the good and the bad.

Nowadays I’m not sure most advertisements hold the same sort of cultural power, with an influx of readily accessible pornography, OnlyFans, thirst traps, and IG Baddiesm brands don’t really set the sex standard but rather search out their brand in the sex that’s already selling. And in Klein’s case that’s attaching their name to just about any micro influencer that’s selling a hint of it, or any young and tired Milleniazoomer celebrity that could be attached to the “now”. They’re no longer in the business of helping make icons like Kate Moss but in an inverse. are trying to find their original branding intent in the world around them, to diminishing returns. Now I’m not out here saying that I was rubbing one out to the old school ads of Calvin’s past… besides the Marky Mark ones.. BUT I WILL say that they definitely defined in a lot of was what a certain kind of sex appeal was to me, it shaped the kind of consumer I became for better or for worse. Calvin Klein ads nowadays seem to be stripped of any actual sensuality at this point. Opting to basically highlight thought leaders from general fandoms across music and tv with the occasional pride campaign that tends to highlight whatever influencer carries the visual and bodily signifiers of “otherness” or transgression of sexual norms… which even for a person who falls into that category is just not sexy visually a lot of the time.

Now I’m not requesting some sort of rejection of multifaceted sexual modernity and the return to heroine chic tradition. That obviously comes with its own baggage. I guess my question is, what is the kind of, if any, sexuality that Clavin Klein is trying to sell in these ads and what is its purpose at this point as a brand in 2022? Because if we’re being honest there is definitely a differentiation between peoples multifaceted desires, anyone can desire anything I suppose, but when you’re in the art of selling sex there’s a clear cut idea of what that is. And that doesn’t have to be a warped, retrograde perspective of what that could be like 1990s black and white photos of skinny white girls. But, what it NEEDS to be is risque, telling of the desires of the time, and pushing a sort of generational idea of what sex can be to a young person. When looking at these ads anymore they signal to me a stripping of sexuality for this generation, a bit of a castration of the actual act of sex. These images no longer request from us sexual satisfaction or even approval. And that’s the most frustrating thing about looking at these larger than life ads, they’re selling me nothing. I’m not getting a suggestion of lifestyle, just a celebration of the idea of celebrity itself. And when it lacks any sort of aspiration, I tend to turn my head in the other direction.