The Lascivious, Decades-Long History Behind That Calvin Klein Ad

“You don’t own me/I’m not just one of your many toys/You don’t own me/Don’t say I can’t go with other boys.” It’s a strange choice to drape this song, Lesley Gore’s ode to female empowerment, over slowed-down footage ogling the actor Jeremy Allen White, whose roles have imbued him with the kind of bad-boy swagger women often associate with their own misspent youth. But in the latest commercial for Calvin Klein’s men’s underwear, Gore smolders as we watch White roll down a Manhattan street, pop up to a rooftop, strip down and ascend, muscles bulging like some half-nude Greek god, to the peak of his own personal Mount Olympus, which in this case is an ugly orange couch.

A phrase popped into my head as I watched: beefcake gravitas. It’s a phenomenon particular to fashion, with its penchant for exalting the superficial. Beefcake gravitas is an attempt to elevate the physical form — the muscle and meat so often associated with the boorish and unrefined, the meat-headed — in order to paper over the shame of being attracted to it. Forever seeking to transcend this disconnect, fashion reaches as far back as classical antiquity, when both a beautiful mind and a beautiful body were considered features of human perfection and so-called heroic nudity produced statues of young, athletic bodies to show the human form at its most divine. Later, during the Renaissance, sculptors like Michelangelo would pay homage to their Greco-Roman predecessors in the beefier form of works like David. I can joke that White is godlike — like a latter-day David on whom a pair of pants has been graffitied as a gag. But from the start, Calvin Klein’s billboards have offered an underwear-shilling update on precisely this kind of art, which the designer himself has said he collects.

These ads are older than White is. They date to 1982, when Bruce Weber — known, as the critic Vince Aletti once noted, for “turning jocks into demigods” — photographed the Brazilian pole-vaulter Tom Hintnaus from a low angle, his bulge bright as the sun, leaning against a whitewashed structure in Santorini, Greece. Weber brought a kind of purity to the body, stripping it of clothing like Renaissance statuary. Later, Herb Ritts and Mario Sorrenti would further strip it of color, too. Instead of standing in the Uffizi, though, Hintnaus would tower over New York, transforming mere undergarment promotion into pop iconography. White grew up in the city seeing such ads, which have featured bulked-up celebrity hunks like Mark Wahlberg and Michael B. Jordan. “You couldn’t help but look at the billboard,” he told GQ. “It’s so massive. I always associated it — and still associate it — with New York City itself.”

White’s breakout role was in “The Bear,” starring as Carmy, a shambolic chef de cuisine who returns home to Chicago to run his family’s sandwich shop. But you might remember the way he looks in the show as much as his performance — specifically, the bicep-hugging white shirt that acts as his uniform. Or, perhaps more specific, its appearance in a still image that quickly became an internet meme: a shot of Carmy in a back room, having a heated conversation. His carotid bulges, his hair is a tousled mess and he looks as if he stinks, but the shirt hugs his arm so well. “I’m too scared to watch The Bear because I’m actively in therapy to stop falling in love with men who look like this,” ran one popular tweet. As another pointed out, “This screenshot did more for the bear than any advertising could.” This is the reputation White’s ad exploits: a sleepy-eyed dirtbag radiating sex but also wrapped in prestige and highbrow critics’ praise. The statue himself collected a statue of his own this month — the Emmy for outstanding lead actor.

Calvin Klein has always trafficked in high and low — in classic all-American athleticism, shot through with an untethered primal lust. The unease of this combination animates the brand’s most famous ads, from a too-young Brooke Shields saying nothing gets between her and her Calvins to Mark Wahlberg — still, back then, the hip-hop star Marky Mark, fresh off a rough youth of violent, racially motivated attacks and a Rolling Stone photo shoot featuring peekaboo Calvins — grabbing his junk and laughing like the boy next door. (Wahlberg’s acting pivot would eventually take him to an Oscar nomination; that’s what gravitas can give a beefcake.) Justin Bieber, emerging from his own child-star antics, also sported Calvins on the cover of Rolling Stone (headline: “Bad Boy”) before all but begging for a billboard, using the newly launched #mycalvins social-media hashtag in 2014. He got his wish, appearing with rippling muscles and prayer hands — his single “Sorry” was released that year — and prompting much discussion of his robust bulge.