Established in the 70s, Calvin Klein Australia is the purveyor of all that is contemporary, chic and simple. A brand that shot to superstardom and found its permanent place in the mainstream consciousness in the 1980s, it achieved this with a series of campaigns that informed culture. The brand’s notoriety stemmed not from any season or collection, but from its advertisements – amongst them, one featuring a young Brooke Shields which garnered plenty of attention and controversy but which undeniably boosted the Calvin Klein Jeans brand, and allowed its image to grow across America and the rest of the world.
It was in 1982 where the brand changed forever though, with the announcement that they would move into underwear with a $500,000 Bruce Weber-shot campaign with the iconic branding across the waist. Projected onto Times Square, the brand’s very first underwear campaign was a legitimate success, presenting Olympian Tomás Hintnaus on a roof, an image more about the male form than underwear, but one that would establish the notion that underwear needn’t be just about underwear, and that it can have a far greater reach than that.
Calvin Klein underwear really needs no introduction, with a host of timeless and unforgettable images reaching back to the 80s to this day. A topless Kate Moss, a topless Mark Wahlberg – the brand never really focused on the product, and still doesn’t. Rather, the power is in who is wearing them, which in turn empowers those who buy the underwear. They turned underwear from purely functional to a marker of status, which in turn allows each of us to live as Kate Moss, to feel like Mark Wahlberg. Its underwear – men’s and women’s – still sells so strongly to this day because of how it makes us feel and eventually became synonymous with the brand, and the line of which meant more to which became blurred. To this day, that’s still a fair argument.
At General Pants we are fully behind the #mycalvins campaign, fronted by today’s most loved: Gigi Hadid, Justin Bieber, Lara Stone, and more. The #mycalvins hashtag is one of the most used, well-documented social media movements in recent times, which is testament to the brand’s longevity. Of course, the brand is known for more than underwear, and we have a solid range of jeans and other apparel that stays true to the simplicity that the brand has always protected.