Jeans are Sex

             The abundance of bare flesh is the last gasp of advertisers trying to give redundant products a new identity. Calvin Klein. When Calvin Klein began a new advertisement campaign for his label "redundant" jeans in "95, he embarked on a new wave of advertising that put a drastic spin on the old phrase that "sex sells". No longer did gorgeous female models with their trademark long hair and long legs suffice for an advertising campaign. Instead, young men with rippling six-packs and dark, thick hair modeled as the new norm of fashion advertising. Photography styles altered too, where advertisements no longer exhibited typical features, such as catchy slogans or well-dressed models, which dominated the advertising world of the early "90s. Instead, Klein's advertisements pushed the boundaries of the fashion photography, where some photo shoots seemed more like porn sets.
             Take the image of the model in the advertisement. The model's clothing signifies sex, mainly from the way they wear sneakers and underwear. Why would someone take off their pants, leave on their underwear, and put their shoes and socks back on? Another implication of sex appeal is the model's young age and physical appearance. All models are almost certainly between seventeen and his early twenties, the have hair on their legs, but no hair on face or chest, all denote late-adolescence early-adulthood stage of development. The model's have long hair, hairless bodies with delicate facial features, all signify an air of androgyny too, where tattoos, a masculine feature, are mixed with fingernail polish, a feminine feature, both add to the difficulty in determining model's sexuality. However, a model's appeal as a genderless male is only important because the mixture of masculine and feminine traits forces the viewer, to ask whether the model being presented as gay or straight. Therefore, since the models, and not the clothing, are the focus, it is clear that Klein's method of advertising that "jeans are about sex" is a way of participating in the homoerotic address of the fashion industry.