Just Looking

Calvin Klein’s campaign is Kendall Jenner, A$AP Rocky, and Shawn Mendes in their underwear, photographed by Glen Luchford. It’s transparent what they’re doing.

You want to look at attractive people. That’s the starting point. Give you different bodies and faces, different types to want - the model, the rapper built like a weapon, the pretty boy. Let your eyes land on what pulls at you. Then sell you something that might make you feel that way about yourself when you look in the mirror.

It’s crude, but honest in that crudeness. Most brands wrap sexual appeal in meaning and lifestyle and cultural importance. Calvin Klein just puts hot people in expensive underwear and trusts that you’ll look. That you’ll feel something. That you might want to buy the same thing. The press material about authenticity and bold vision is just noise around a simple fact: sex sells.

This is what’s happening. The brand knows it. The celebrities know their job includes being attractive and desired. So why dress it up as something else? Why pretend the transaction is about progress or identity when it’s about bodies and desire and appetite?

There’s a kind of respect in that directness. No false modesty, no pretense of meaning beyond the obvious. Just: here’s what you want to look at, here’s how they’re packaging it, here’s what they’re selling you. You already knew that.

The campaign will work because people will look. Because these are people worth looking at, and because everyone runs on desire more than they want to admit. Calvin Klein just isn’t hiding it.