Sex sells. Just ask the fashion label Calvin Klein, whose adverts flogging perfectly white (and salaciously tight) men’s underwear have led to global pant domination. Its formula of “hunky celebrity guy du jour brooding in tiny whities” has been turning heads for decades, so you might think we’d be immune to their masculine wiles by now. Not so, as the breathless response to last week’s ads featuring the actor Jeremy Allen White proved. In the campaign video, White, best known as chef Carmy from the hit TV series The Bear, is seen wandering New York, before climbing the stairs of a building and emerging on to its roof, where he strips down to his boxers and does some half-hearted exercise (mostly stretches but he chucks in a little pull-up too). This is before he falls on to a conveniently placed rooftop sofa (no plastic covering? Doesn’t it get wet?), and we see that he had his trainers and socks on the whole time.
It wasn’t his ability to remove his shorts while walking and without taking off his trainers that got tongues wagging – or rather, panting. It was White’s muscular, toned and tanned physique. The still images show him pulling the underwear waistband down to reveal a defined inguinal crease or “love line” (the pinnacle of the male physical ideal, apparently), and lounging on the rooftop in jeans, flies open and shimmied down to show the underwear. “This is what every woman needed to start 2024 off right,” reads one comment on Calvin Klein’s Instagram. “I hope this is someone’s gay awakening,” reads another. A comment simply saying “YES CHEF” earned 1,600 likes.
