CALVIN KLEIN’S HERITAGE AS a brand that attempts to push the boundaries with controversial, sexually-explicit advertisements has seemingly made a return this season with a campaign that serves up a well-worn narrative of ‘men act, women appear.’¹ The agenda of the brand’s new Spring 2016 campaign is clear: the trope of woman-as-objects sells, particularly through the lens of the campaign’s gritty, filmic aesthetic. It might sound like something we’ve heard before, but the reaction to the campaign – which, amongst other images, sees model Kendall Jenner presented as a collection of Polaroid body parts – has been alarmingly docile, prompting us to reignite the discussion since it’s hard to believe so little has changed when it comes to the portrayal of women in mainstream fashion media.

Released in January of this year Calvin Klein targets its youthful followers across print and digital channels by featuring names from music and fashion in the brand’s diffusions, from Calvin Klein Jeans to Underwear. The label worked with fashion photographer Tyrone Lebon for the project, a collaboration that capitalises on Lebon’s association with high fashion, through the niche publications he regularly frequents the pages of, from i-D, LOVE and POP magazines. The images which feature as portraits of each of the stars are sweaty and cinematic, evoking film scenes of downtown L.A., all emblazoned with the hash-tag of the campaign, #mycalvins. A film clip released concurrently with the print images was a mood board of models lolling on unmade beds, rappers in bathrooms, film sets, power lines, tattoos, hedonism and so forth, all aimed at a young market of music and fashion-savvy consumers.

Immediately obvious in the images is a consistent difference in the portrayal of the women in the campaign to their male counterparts. Singers (FKA Twigs) and models (Abby Lee Kershaw) are presented promiscuously, in bed, bent over, or – in the case of model Kendall Jenner – in parts. Jenner is presented as ‘woman-wearing-boyfriend’s-underwear’ in a grid of Polaroids each cropped to an element of her voluptuous body parts – lips, butt, hip – that take on a pornographic, doll-like reference. The shots put the viewer firmly in the position of voyeur, and consumer of Jenner’s dismantled figure, prompting a disruption between her as a ‘complete’ person into a collection of fetishised parts or objects. The spread, which appeared across print and online advertising channels, is underscored by the caption ‘I want to be with you in #mycalvins,’ a thinly veiled reference to Jenner’s (theoretical) availability as a sexual object.

The message is consistent across the campaign, with the texts on the women featured suggestive and provocative. Filling the gap of ‘what they do in their Calvins,’ women apparently ‘arouse,’ ‘dream’ and ‘seduce.’ Whereas the men in the campaign, like rapper Kendrick Lamar, Joey Bada$$ and Sung Jin Park, are, however, presented quite differently and apparently wear their Calvins to ‘reflect,’ ‘focus’ and ‘consider.’ They are (generally) fully clothed, deep in thought and serious, packaged as ‘complete’ human beings: thinking, cultural figures with artistic clout, in contrast to the fragmented, objectified parts of Jenner’s physique.

Reflecting on the campaign prompted us to revisit the seminal 1972 text, Ways of Seeing, in which cultural critic John Berger famously wrote: ‘One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear.’ Though referring to an age-old phenomenon in the representation of women in art, advertising, as well as self-presentation in everyday life, Berger’s thesis sadly doesn’t seem to have waned. Fundamental is the proposition that, ‘She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her.’ Though image culture becomes increasingly sophisticated, it’s a dynamic still embedded in the DNA of advertising and how men and women are presented in mainstream (fashion) media. In the cK ads Jenner’s body, pieced into bite-sized Polaroids, is packaged to be consumed by the spectator.

The rift in the gendered ways in which the different figures are presented in this Calvin Klein campaign is another shock-sell by the house, one that has often been an element of their branding strategy² – particularly for their diffusion lines more targeted towards a youthful market. From Kate Moss’ waif figure appearing across billboards and magazine pages alike in 1992, it seems Calvin Klein’s method has been to tactfully push the envelope and generate controversy, then sales. Unfortunately #mycalvins has had little impact in comparison to past campaigns, like Moss,’ in terms of critical response. The reception could be a result of the calibre of cultural figures included in the campaign – a cross-pollination of up-and-coming musicians, models on-the-make and high profile celebrities. Or it may that in the hands of photographer Tyrone Lebon the campaign is given a certain edge that places it in the realm of editorial, and less as an explicitly commercial ad campaign. In any case, though the uproar in reception of Moss’ waif figure, another case of the woman-as-object, has faded, #mycalvins would suggest not much has changed.

Laura Gardner is Vestoj’s former Online Editor and a writer in Melbourne.

1. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972. ↩

2. ‘Ad Pullback Unlikely to Hurt Sales at Calvin Klein’ by Denise Gellene for the Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1995 ↩

WE DRESS IN POCKETS. We move in pockets. We live in pockets.

Most pockets were originally created to hold a specific item; a timepiece, a shot bird. To use the pocket on many garments forces an unbecoming bulge onto an otherwise flat silhouette, yet pockets were created to hold, to be filled. Historically, fashion has often demanded a sleeker figure, forcing our pockets into a sometime-disuse. Yet, if we have a pocket – and we always have a pocket – chances are we will be compelled to fill it.

What looks best when not performing its function? Pockets, in some cases. And in some cases, places. Take Palm Springs. The desert isn’t meant to enliven green plants, hold numerous pools per capita or keep people excessively cool when outside temperatures boil. Yet we love it partly because it is founded on fantasy, a staunch and lavish insistence that a place looks best with its two extremes shoulder to shoulder. Places are pockets. Pockets are part of place. Writing a letter assumes the pocket, creates a secret lining, presses something to the world’s body of air separated by a thin piece of parchment.

The nature of the pocket is not limited to a garment, as our real reasons for dressing ourselves (pocketing ourselves and filling our pockets) never are.

To quantify a day, we break it into digestible portions, draw lines around the empty space therein, create rooms, pockets, to hold the time that will hold us, as we dictate or allow others to dictate.

Memory is something we’ve pocketed, much like a good luck charm or extra change. We either chance upon the fifty cents gladly when we come up short or it rattles loudly to the floor and interrupts an otherwise welcome silence. The contents of our pockets break and bulge in ways we want and don’t want.

My friend Jack believes that women don’t have enough pockets. He sees pockets functioning as a status symbol of sorts. I interpret this to mean the more pockets you have the more power you have, because you have a life that allows you to hold more things in ways specifically suited to do so. To not have enough pockets is a kind of oppression.

The poet Mark Strand writes:

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

Pockets, like Russian dolls, stacked in time.

Pockets are representative of a present absence or of an absent presence. Of a sometimes-unbearable state of knowing where something could or would go, or did go.

Valleys are great open pockets; they hold differently depending on the hour and the angle of the sun. The valley at 1.15pm and the same valley at 6pm when it’s time to go home, or if staying, to change our relationship with it, are different places entirely. In Palm Springs the valleys come alive with misters when the mercury reaches a certain degree. In Oregon, the valleys lose their direct light and suddenly you are in a different room. The urge to create a shelter from the night valley rises up as do the clicks and chirps of birds and insects, coming alive in the cooler weather to feed. In Norway, northbound in late summer, the light lingers and fades only so far that it’s still silvery against the mountain peaks. That kind of light seems as if it’s balancing a place on a precipice. Holding it just barely, making the marble statues glow in the garden as the moon does when it is at its most bright. There, one may as well be in a space unattached to the rest of the world if only for the fjord, a kind of artery and highway. Pockets are an entire world, or a void of it.

Does a pocket hold a certain temporality? Does it remind us of our fleeting chance at being a certain way? Those ways one can only be when held by certain variables? Skins, jobs, friends, lovers, walls… Do we create space, emptying and filling it, so that we can keep living in cycles of motion?

John Berger, in his book The Shape of a Pocket, offers up pockets as spaces of resistance created by acts or works of art and the artists’ lives themselves. The pockets in question are those spaces created when two entities come together and create a new space for engaging, or a platform, in the form of a painting or sculpture or letter. An entry point, found space, a place where perhaps one is able to explore subversion, in a culture or society rubbing up against the idea, or just not quite able to integrate it. These spaces are held to do and think something beyond the cultural norm.

Does a pocket resist? Or accept? If a pocket looks best when functioning as it’s not meant to then it can be seen both as accepting and resisting, simultaneously. Is a pocket then a kind of yin/yang space? A place where we both refuse and accept what it is meant for? And where such a refusal creates a kind of creative acceptance? Where it means rewriting function for the body? The personal body, the private body, on display but not publicly for display. The pocket rests in between.

The bathing suit creates pockets of air and water on the body, without asking to. In a landscape where there shouldn’t be room for pockets, there are. It stretches to create them. This suit with no pockets expands and contracts with the body, allowing air and water into spaces between the skin and the fabric, creating for itself a temporary, fleeting, transitional pocket, a pocket not given over to its status as such but resisting so that it will eventually return, because of gravity or pressure or movement, to its original shape, flush against the body.

Pockets then are transitory spaces we fill and empty depending on gravity, on pressure. A pocket evokes images and feelings of suspension. A pocket also is protection, it’s the womb, it’s an offering, a hand, cupped, palm side up. It’s a cocoon, not meant to hold or preserve but to usher along, to transport, to protect for a moment until whatever it is inside is called upon for its intended use or disposal.

Scars, a kind of pocket in their own right, leave a hardened space below the body’s surface, which I sometimes think of as hollow. A hollow hardened space of air. Like some artefact stuck in feigned life in an amber sphere. A place we walk gently upon with someone else who matches its weight. The platform for the partner.

In this way, a pocket is never the heart, it’s the floating exit sign.

Veronica Martin is a poet, writer and photographer based in Portland, Oregon.

Patrick Tosani is an artist based in France, all images shown here are from his 2002 series ‘Territoires’.

bury me in this   wed me in this dance   with me in this   and for what?

each allegation goes on smooth      and changes       with every costume

my cloak              slips               meanwhile, in the garderobe

the   heaviest bird     is stilled     it was just a guest pillow     a guest light

our throats open to another era like fool’s colour like breakable only softer

half in                                                                                          half in

where will we wear our many hearts?

I choose to travel  in and out of everybody  and slip back into the cloak

I wore to come here     but the lip doesn’t fit     anywhere anymore

button holes so aberrant     fingers slipped through     instead of the silver needle

we can see faces only if they look at us, says Berger

we can make artificial mountains          recalcitrant               humour me

the tag does     it’s at least a place to put a signature     package of decibels

a slow fray               a grey flag               a boat in the round

Veronica Martin is a poet, writer and photographer based in Portland, Oregon.

Poppy Skelley is a UK based illustrator and graduate of the Cambridge School of Art.