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Despite the fact that American culture is obsessed with using sex to sell anything and everything, some things—and some images—are still off-limits. At least, that’s what Calvin Klein is discovering after the company released its most recent hypersexual ad campaign.
The Calvin Klein spring ad campaign features a series of sexy shots that, for many people, are anything but appealing. There’s a picture of a woman’s hands in her underwear that reads “I pulse in #myCalvins” and another snap of a pair of jeans unzipping to show inches of booty cleavage that says “I belfie in #myCalvins.” (That’s “butt selfie” for those who were blissfully unaware that taking selfies of one’s rear end is a thing with its own neologism.)
But these aren’t the pictures that have people talking. There’s another image that has folks completely creeped out, disgusted, and actually angry—and for good reason. In it, a braless young model wearing a short dress stands over the camera with her legs spread apart, revealing polka dot underwear and a rather close-up view of her crotch. This one reads, “I flash in #myCalvins.”
The upskirt angle is rarely used for mainstream marketing because usually when a photographer snaps pictures of a woman’s crotch from underneath, the photo is for porn, not for upscale advertising. And even though the model in the Calvin Klein ad is dressed, there is still an uncomfortable pornographic tone to the photo; you almost can’t help feeling like you’ve seen too much, and from too intimate an angle.
The editors filtered the photo with a sepia lens, attempting to make it less creepy and pornographic, more artsy and vintage-y. And in typical fashion, they had the model stare completely straight-faced and solemn, without even the hint of a smile, which ends up actually making the whole thing worse. She looks unhappy, even uncomfortable and caught off-guard, with a what-are-you-looking-at? expression on her face that makes one wonder exactly that: What am I looking at, and why?
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
And speaking of looks, the poor girl looks, well . . . girlish. In fact, she looks like she could easily pass for a 13-year-old, adding a weirdly pedophiliac tone to the photo that the polka dot underwear doesn’t do much to dispel. This isn’t the first time Calvin Klein has been accused of using pedophilia-like images to market its products—the company was slammed for their “kiddie porn” campaign in the mid-1990s that caused so much outrage that the company eventually pulled the ads. And of course there’s the infamous jeans commercial featuring a 15-year-old Brooke Shields:
Although the model this year, Klara Kristin, is twenty-two and thus a consenting adult, there is something undeniably Lolita-like about the image. So it’s not just that viewers feel like they’ve suddenly violated a woman by looking up her dress; it’s that they feel like they’ve violated a child, a young girl, by looking up her dress. No wonder even MTV, which has long prided itself on pushing boundaries, called the ad “gross.”
In addition, the ad seems to celebrate something that most people find abhorrent: men who take “upskirt” photos and videos of women. As one commenter wrote, “That’s not ‘flashing’; that’s the kind of shot that women are struggling to get made illegal.” Calvin Klein is attempting to normalize what never ought to be normalized—felonious peeping Tom behavior directed at underage girls.
But there’s a silver lining to the upskirt uproar: many people are so disgusted and angry about the image that they’ve responded by promising never to buy Calvin Klein merchandise again. The backlash suggests that American consumers are becoming increasingly outspoken about what they think is creepy or inappropriate when it comes to corporate promotions and policies regarding sex. Sure, Calvin Klein’s photo won’t trigger the kind of full-blown boycott that Target is enduring over its transgender bathroom policy, but a quick scroll through the comments on Calvin Klein’s social media accounts suggests that, for a lot of people, that single shot was enough to make them say “enough.”
It’s a good reminder that consumers, not corporations, are ultimately in control and can always take their money elsewhere. After all, when a company (or photographer) stoops too low, consumers can always send their own message: “I refuse to buy #Calvins.”
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