The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...

The Bully in the Mirror
advertising whose genealogy follows a risque and decidedly homoerotic lineage.
In the slow male striptease known as men's fashion advertising, there have been
plenty of landmark cultural images in recent years. Calvin Klein, which until
recently developed all of its advertising in-house, has been pushing the boundary
of taste navel-ward and beyond ever since 1980, when a 15-year-old Brooke
Shields teasingly announced that nothing came between her and her Calvins.
There was Bruce Weber's photo of the model Jeff Aquilon splayed on a boulder
for Calvin Klein in 1982 and Mark Wahlberg (then known as Marky Mark)
prancing in Calvin Klein underwear in 1992. But the ad that made sociologically
explicit what had been implicit all along is what detractors have called Calvin
Klein's "basement porn" campaign of 1995.
These television spots -- they were, almost incidentally, for jeans -- featured a
deliberately cheesy, amateurishly lighted basementlike setting with cheap wall
paneling. They began with an adult male voice posing questions to youthful and
shirtless boys. The models were, of course, beautiful, but only in retrospect do
you realize how toned and buff their bodies were -- and how the ads made sure
you noticed. In one commercial, the off-camera voice says: "You have a lovely
body. Do you like your body?" In another, a boy who has both the looks and
indifferent demeanor of a young James Dean sits on a ladder, wearing jeans and
a white T-shirt.
"You got a real nice look," an adult male voice says off-camera. "How old are
you?"
"Twenty-one," the boy says.
"What's your name?"
"August."
"Why don't you stand up?"
When the boy complies, the man continues, "Are you strong?"
"I like to think so."
"You think you could rip that shirt off of you?" The boy pulls down on the
T-shirt with both hands and suddenly rips it off his body, revealing an extremely
lean and well-developed chest. "It's a nice body!" the man exclaims. "Do you
work out?"
"Uh-huh." The boy nods again.
"Yeah, I can tell."
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