Calvin Klein knows their recipe for success — it’s the same simple formula they have been using since the 1970s. The fashion brand does not avoid accessorizing its iconic logo and undergarments with a lot of skin. Most recently, “The Bear” star Jeremy Allen White sparked excitement with his appearance in the recent 2024 Calvin Klein campaign.
By setting the ad in downtown New York City, Calvin Klein gets intimate with White’s upbringing in Brooklyn. As White climbs fire escapes, moves around the rooftop and poses with the skyline behind him, cameras capture the recent Golden Globes winner’s physique and stoic expressions in nothing but a pair of boxers.
Posted to YouTube on Jan. 4, the campaign has grossed over two million views. This outshines past campaigns with celebrities such as Jacob Elordi and Michael B. Jordan. Though the views on YouTube are successful, it’s safe to say that, like most trends these days, the majority of the excitement surrounding this ad is on TikTok.
Since the campaign’s release earlier this month, Calvin Klein has posted five TikToks (@calvinklein) featuring clips of White’s ad, earning a cumulative total of 54.3 million views. Independent TikTok users are also joining the conversation, sparking even more engagement with the campaign.
TikTokers cannot get enough of White in his tighty whities. People are leaving comments on Calvin Klein’s post, begging for other users to interact with their comments so they can be “reminded to watch.” Other commenters refer to his role in “The Bear” by leaving comments like “yes, chef.”
And it is not just the views that are exploding. According to Launchmetrics, within 48 hours of the ad’s release, the campaign accumulated $12.7 million in media impact value, which measures the engagement of a post necessary to understand the brand’s performance.
So, if Calvin Klein stuck to their formula with its most recent campaign, why is the internet going crazy?
Though “The Bear” is a popular show accredited by major award shows, there is little correlation between the show’s success and ad. People are obsessing over this campaign for its artistic qualities that paint White as a life-like Greek God sent down from above… Or rather, that’s just what people on social media say.
A fashion photographer, Mert Alas, directed this campaign and successfully captured the male body cinematically. The combination of aesthetically warm lightning and exquisite camera angles allows viewers to soak in the fluid-like movement of White’s sculpted body. What works is the absence of stillness and stiffness of the camerawork and modeling. Even when White poses on the couch in the final shot, there’s still movement with the doves soaring into the sky. And with that, the product being advertised is highly represented.
With this ad, Calvin Klein went back to basics. Yes, they kept the formula of showing off someone’s body in underwear, but the logo is not the main focus like in past campaigns. Instead, by capturing White’s movement, there’s something different from previous campaigns: the human body in motion.
Rather than putting White in a pair of underwear and telling him to stand on a marker and flex his muscles only to overlay the video in a black-and-white filter, Alas and the rest of the crew told a story that molded discussion and the urge to purchase a product.
It is safe to say that this campaign will go down in history as one of the best advertisements, potentially landing a spot next to Brooke Shields’s iconic 1980s ad. This campaign is truly “chefs kiss.”
