God Bless the CK Waistband

For anyone who’s needed something to jerk off to but can’t be bothered wading through badly lit amateur content from the internet’s darker corners, Calvin Klein has produced a more aspirational option. The new underwear and denim campaign has something for everyone. Kendall Jenner, half-naked and lit like a Flemish painting, for those whose tastes run that way. A$AP Rocky’s torso, which looks like it was designed by someone with a strong aesthetic agenda and unlimited time, for those who appreciate male architecture. And Shawn Mendes—who is, for the record, a fully grown adult man regardless of what your eyes keep insisting—for those of us who had to pause and run a quick mental calculation before proceeding.

Glen Luchford shot the whole thing, and he has a talent for making stillness feel charged—for finding the exact frame where famous face plus very little fabric becomes an argument you can’t counter. Beyond the main three, there are less recognizable faces in the campaign, none of them less worth looking at. The brand’s official line about itself involves words like "provocative" and "authentic" and "bold progressive ideals," which is press-release language for the same thing they’ve always done: make people want to look, then make them slightly uncomfortable that they can’t stop.

Calvin Klein understood before almost anyone that advertising could function as genteel soft-core for people who needed plausible deniability. It’s not pornography. It’s culture. It’s fashion. It just also happens to be the thing you’re staring at over your morning coffee with a complicated expression on your face. Fifty years of the same move, executed with enough skill and casting instinct that it keeps working. Respect where it’s due.