Monday, Sep. 11, 1995

WHERE CALVIN CROSSED THE LINE

By MARGARET CARLSON

YOU'VE GOT TO HAND IT TO CALVIN KLEIN: HE REALLY knows how to milk an advertising campaign, even a doomed one. First you push the envelope until it splits open by putting pubescent models in lurid poses, then plaster them on billboards and magazines-and air them on TV. If you're lucky, parents, the Catholic League and other religious groups will protest, especially over the video in which an offscreen male voice tells a girl standing alone that she's pretty and not to be nervous. Promise to withdraw the ads with an Orwellian statement about how your "positive message" was "misunderstood" and garner tons of free media exposure. Then watch your jeans, which most teens wouldn't have been caught dead in a few months ago, become black-market subversive overnight.

Klein's jeans sales had been in a slump. Now, says Alan Millstein, editor of the Fashion Network Report, who surveyed major department stores last week, the jeans are "flying out of the stores... It's more than he paid for and more than he could have prayed for."

But to make such a rebound, Klein leaped over the line, ultimately changing his image from avant-garde to creepy . These ads enter the heart of adult darkness, where toying with the sexuality of young teens is thinkable. One of the most offensive segments poses a young man alone, his face in that numb, deadened look associated with films that can be bought only in an adult bookstore. A man off-camera says, "You got a real nice look. How old are you? Are you strong? You think you could rip that shirt off of you? That's a real nice body. You work out? I can tell."

It was not conscience that forced Klein to end the campaign. Stephen Watson, chairman of Dayton Hudson's department-store division, asked that his stores' names not be associated with the ads. At least one major magazine, Seventeen, refused to carry the campaign. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association wrote to 50 retailers, threatening a boycott of their stores. Pickets were expected at the opening of Klein's flagship emporium in Manhattan on Sept. 7. That was enough for Klein to conclude that his message--"the inner worth of today's young people"--wasn't flying.

But the campaign had already done its job. Klein is the king of the promotional double bounce: the controversial ad followed by coverage of the ensuing controversy. It started in 1980 when Brooke Shields, then 15, purred that nothing came between her and her Calvins and continued with an anatomically correct underwear ad featuring Marky Mark. More recently Klein has pioneered masturbation, bestiality and violence in advertising with fashion's anorexic-looking Lolita, Kate Moss. He displayed her feeling her breasts, posing naked with a large dog and bare-chested with a black eye, holding her hand over her mouth as if she had just been hit.

But last year's shocker is this year's bore, as Benetton--which used AIDS and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia--found out. So Klein chose photographer Steven Meisel, best known for the book Sex--in which Madonna cavorts with animals--who originally recruited the host of an X-rated gay-video review show as his narrator until Klein objected. But Klein didn't rule out the use of boys. "Girls have been objectified forever. It's not shocking, sad to say," says Adweek critic Barbara Lippert. "But an old man with a gravelly voice in a basement questioning a boy, that's creepy. It's the grunge, antidesign, white-trash-chic message Klein was after."

Indeed, advertising has moved from the merely raunchy to Weimar decadent. Old men and young girls as a theme has been pretty much used up by Guess? jeans, which specializes in a rough-trade man leering at a sulking young thing; Guess? ads also broke new ground for homoeroticism with two girls acting very much in love. Even Ralph Lauren, who previously confined himself to Aryan youth on sailboats and horseback, has succumbed this fall to the aggressively sexual. Stick your nose in GQ this month and find yourself smack in the middle of a taut male torso spread across two full pages, pictured only from the region of his belly button to the region of his Polo briefs.

Critics of the Klein campaign are charging that it's not only offensive but perhaps illegal as well. The American Family Association is demanding to know the models' ages, which Klein has not divulged, and has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Klein violated child-pornography laws. A department spokesman said it was "already looking into it." Last year Attorney General Janet Reno filed a brief with the Supreme Court arguing that the law applies to the use of children in a lascivious manner, whether or not they are nude. And the New York City Council will hold a hearing this week on what standards, if any, should govern ads on city buses.

If any of this surprises Klein, whose momentarily profitable controversy may leave him with lasting damage, he must have missed the message of recent debates over rap music, the film Kids and sex on the Internet. And it's not just Republican family-values conservatives. Even the liberal baby boomers, who thought drive-by sex and drugs were fine for them but want limits for their offspring, believe there's such a thing as going too far when kids are involved. If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a First Amendment revisionist is a civil libertarian with children.

--With reporting by Charlotte Faltermayer/New York

With reporting by CHARLOTTE FALTERMAYER/NEW YORK