‘Bargain bin’ Calvin Klein underwear is cool again (yes, really)

It’s the shot that promises to break the internet a second time over: the actor Jeremy Allen White splayed on an armchair, abs bare, his waistband bearing the immortal words “Calvin Klein”. The actor’s latest shoot for the brand follows his triumphant debut earlier this year – images that spawned a New Yorker thinkpiece, and numerous viral TikTok videos describing his image on a Times Square billboard as a national landmark. When, last week, the actor Greta Lee’s shoot for the brand was unveiled, the messaging became clear: Calvin Klein is cool again. Or at least it really, really wants to be.

These new hires are likely designed to detract from the fact that the 56-year-old company is now more likely to be found in Sports Direct bargain bins than on the catwalk. “Calvin Klein’s appeal has dwindled in recent years,” explains Chloe Collins, the head of apparel at GlobalData. “Its apparel collections have always been overshadowed by its underwear, and they still lack the fashion credentials to convince shoppers to buy.” Revenue fell by $930 million last year. With boxers retailing at £22 per pair, Collins adds that the price point at the likes of M&S, where a pair of men’s pants costs less than £6, currently means more to buyers than a few extra letters on a waistband.

Calvin Klein first put his name to a coat shop in a New York hotel in 1968, filling its rails with outerwear and dresses. In the first year Klein, along with his co-founder Barry K Schwartz, grossed $1 million in business. By 1975, he was in the pages of Vogue to tell the world that his clothes were “loose, easy and sexy”. Annual revenue hit $30 million in 1977, before their first decade of trade was out. Klein made the cover of Newsweek, described as America’s foremost fashion designer.

Things ramped up with the launch of Klein’s intimates range in 1982. “In no time at all, Calvin Klein underwear became part of the fabric of American culture,” writes Lisa Marsh in the book The House of Klein – this in spite of the fact that the creator himself would spend much of the decade battling alcohol and drug abuse, and teetering dangerously close to bankruptcy.

Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, a fashion historian, says that the brand’s strength was in turning staples such as jeans and underwear into style statements. “Nobody thought about them as fashion; [Klein] really made them high fashion,” she says. The prospect of underwear being proudly displayed – with a brand name to boot – was until then unheard of. “There is a long history of sexuality in women’s undergarments, and men were just buying underwear in the department store. It wasn’t a thing, and he made it a thing,” she says. “He made it sexy in ways that really were not done before him.”

Having already garnered a reputation as “America’s undisputed pacesetter in turning out erotic ads and commercials,” as per Time magazine in 1985, the brand would hit the stratosphere seven years later, thanks to a campaign fronted by Mark Wahlberg. ‘Marky Mark’ gurning to camera while grabbing his bulge became iconic – the analogue version of breaking the internet – and triggered a wave of copycat ads (to such a degree that the New Yorker immortalised the trend on its cover two years later). A then-fledgling Kate Moss, who appeared in the same campaign, seemed to be rising in tandem with the brand, each helping the other to become a household name as the decade wore on.

Sex was the perennial subtext, and it sold – the endless billboards and opening of a flagship 20,000 sq ft store on the corner of Madison Avenue in 1995 further illustrating how prominent Calvin Klein had become.

Along the way, shifting consumer habits and a string of controversies have dented its stature. Moss said that she felt “vulnerable and scared” during her topless shoot (she was 17 years old); Brooke Shields was 15 when she starred in a jeans campaign, tagline: “Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” (The ad was promptly banned across American television networks.)

More recently too, its overtly sexual sell has fallen foul of regulators. When FKA Twigs – another edgier recruit for CK – appeared on a London billboard in 2023, with half her breast and buttock exposed, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) canned it, on the grounds that it was “irresponsible and likely to cause serious offence”. (The ban was revoked this year, though the ASA maintains that the image is “not suitable for display in an untargeted medium”.) Pictures of Kendall Jenner from the same campaign – lying on the ground in her underwear with her jeans around her thighs – were allowed to remain.

Jenner has worked with the brand since 2014, when Calvin Klein attempted to appeal to millennials anew via a #MyCalvins Instagram campaign, and scored names like Justin Bieber. But while there is still cachet in becoming the face of CK smalls (presumably beyond the pay packet), the company’s fashion arm has been nosediving behind the scenes.

When the brand was sold to apparel conglomerate PVH for $400 million in 2002 – the same year the New York Times dubbed Calvin Klein “one of the world’s most recognisable brand names” – Klein himself stepped back from his role as designer. To some, that signalled the start of its move away from a world where the brand was a regular fixture on red carpets and on catwalks, and more firmly into the mass market. Its runway division was discontinued in 2019, the red carpet atelier shuttered the year before.

But with an unstereotypically sexy new cohort in situ (plus Cara Delevingne, another recent recruit), and a new creative director taking the helm of clothing for 2025, all is not lost for CK. Come next year their garments will return to the runway under the creative direction of Veronica Leoni (most recently creative director of The Row), whose minimalist style is hoped will usher the brand back to successful simplicity.

That, along with the current Gen Z trend for reviving Nineties garb – branded pants visible above low-slung jeans included – might just help make Calvin Klein underwear an appealing choice once more.