I chose a Calvin Klein advertisement from 1992. The ad features Mark Wahlberg, the man on the left, who is currently a Hollywood actor and producer, and Kate Moss, the woman on the right, who is the very famous British model.
The advertisement does portray some traditional gender roles, but also defies some of them through the clothing. The man being topless is traditionally accepted, but a woman being topless is beyond the traditional concepts of gender and sex since breasts are a secondary reproductive organ, and they tend to be kept private. The clothing on both the models are the same but just because the body or the sex is different, the perception of the concept of the ad changes. The woman’s toplessness somehow adds this sense of masculinity and strength to the woman in the picture, and it even challenges the traditional acceptable wear for women, which includes covering your breasts.Underwear lined up above the pants was traditionally something men had been doing. And here, the woman is too wearing her pants low with the underwear showing, which adds this sense of cool neutrality between the two people, who are of different genders. Kaiser, in Fashion and Cultural Studies, says that “the timing of the 1990’s and 2000’s discourse coincided with (a) heightened visibility of men in visual culture, including media body exposure,” and in this advertisement we see something similar to that; the studies into men’s and masculine fashion had an impact on the concepts of masculinity and femininity in women’s clothing too. The underwear that is visible on both the man, and the woman, despite of them wearing jeans, also shows this idea of clothes just being clothes, regardless of who is wearing them, which is actually something that Calvin Klein was initially known for, purely the fit and the quality of clothes.
Calvin Klein does a lot of ads related to sexuality and gender; the brand sometimes challenges the traditional concepts, and sometimes goes with them. If we purely think about the clothing that we can see in the advertisement, and not think about the bodies that are wearing them, the difference between both the sexes would cease to exist; but the bodies are there, and the context of there sexes and genders is too. Body is something that makes clothing interesting, and this Calvin Klein ad seems to achieve that interest.
Bibliography
Kaiser, S. B. (2012). Fashion and Cultural Studies. A&C Black.
