Down Under

Remember him?

I’ll never forget him.

The marketing for Calvin Klein fashions and products has always been provocative, proving once again the old adage that sex sells. But on the men’s side, the company’s push to remove men’s underwear from the old, badly fitted, and horribly uncomfortable/unattractive underwear that always looked terrible after a few washes. If you see pictures of men in underwear in the 60s and 70s, it’s always high-waisted and baggy and not flattering in any way. Marooned in Kansas for the latter part of the 70s, I was very unaware of changing trends in men’s underwear, other than ads in magazines. Jim Palmer was one of the first celebrities to do an underwear ad; he was hairy and slim, pretty good shape but not exactly something to write home about. But it was a start, and when Calvin Klein decided to enter the market of men’s underwear, I’m sure people thought the company was crazy: why would anyone spend that much money for a single pair of underwear, when you could get several packs of three for that same price? But CK was onto something–sexy underwear that fit well, lasted a long time, and looked good was an untapped market, and of course the gays were all about fashion underwear.

And they used beautiful men with lean, ripped physiques to make their point for them. Surprise! It worked.

And Calvin kept selling us sex, and we couldn’t get enough of it. Obsession for Men became a must-have cologne, and they continued producing new scents that were popular and had enormously sexy ads. Other fashion companies began emulating the CK model (imitation is flattery and all that); designer underwear for men, colognes, after shaves, and on and on. And what was also happening were two things: the gay aesthetic for what is attractive in a man began to dominate the culture, and straight men began, oddly enough, to start dressing better, caring about their hair and shaving more, and their bodies…the rise of the ‘metrosexual.’ So say goodbye once and for all to those beefy, bulky, barrel-chested men with their high-waisted pants…

And then came the Marky Mark ad.

I mean, he was cute, the body was to die for, and the killer smile? And he’d already become known for dropping his pants and “performing” his music in his underwear. The Calvin Klein gig was probably a mistake for him, but he wound up with a successful film career and even was nominated for an Oscar. Goes to show, Hollywood doesn’t really care about a problematic history if you can sell tickets for them. I always had a soft spot for him, despite everything though–that first crush from seeing the video for “Good Vibrations” has never really gone away, despite knowing full well about the problematic past.

My first pair of Calvin Klein underwear changed my opinion about underwear forever. My mother always told me that the things you never skimp on–even if you have to save up money for it–are underwear, socks, and sheets. Everything else, you can buy discounted, on sale, or from bargain bins, but as long as you bought quality for those three things, they made up for everything else. Once I opened that gorgeous black and white box, and slipped them on…I was sold. I was never buying cheap underwear ever again, even if it meant having to save up money for a while to invest in the good pairs. To this day, I still wear Calvin Klein as my preference; I discovered Under Armor around 2004, but eventually went back to Calvins. I bought cheap underwear at Wal-mart after Katrina to get by until I got back to New Orleans…and regretted it. I hated the cheap socks and underwear, how they felt, how the elastic in the waistband loosened with every wear, how the material began to wear within a few weeks.

Calvin Klein introduced us to the term “underwear model” as a body type, too. Underwear model didn’t used to even be a thing; you’d only see underwear models in catalogues. Calvin Klein’s artistic spreads, with incredibly bodied models shot by the best photographers, certainly had a huge impact on culture–and certainly played a part in what I call the “gaying” of culture; in which men became sex objects in the way women always had been before.

And Mark Wahlberg’s natural progression from ‘rap’ musician who dropped his pants all the time to underwear model also changed the perception of celebrity models; if Calvin Klein wanted you for a photo spread, that meant you were fucking gorgeous–and they started including actors, dancers, and athletes to their rosters.

I can think of several celebrities I’d like to see model for Calvin Klein–figure skater Guillaume Cizeron, several rugby players, Joe Burrow, Malik Nabers–but they also do a pretty good job of finding models.

My favorite cologne from Calvin Klein was Eternity, but it wasn’t my favorite–I liked Fahrenheit and Cool Water the best, but I stopped wearing cologne after we moved to New Orleans. In this climate, for most of the year there’s really no point in wearing it anyway.