Brooke Shields Says She Was “Naive” Not to Think Her ’80s Calvin Klein Commercial “Was Sexual in Nature”

Brooke Shields confessed that when she filmed her now-infamous Calvin Klein commercial back in the ’80s, at just 15 years old, she was too innocent to actually understand the double entendre of what she was saying.

Over 40 years after the release of the campaign, the model reflected on that formative experience in a video for Vogue, recalling, “I was away when they all came out, and then started hearing, ‘Oh, the commercials have been banned here, and Canada won’t play them.’ And paparazzi and people screaming at me and screaming at my mother, ‘How could you?’ It just struck me as so ridiculous, the whole thing.” For the shoot, Shields posed in various contorted positions while delivering different lines. One of those statements—“You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”—had a very different, and much more salacious, connotation to the public than it did to the teen saying it.

Shields explained, “They take the one commercial, which is a rhetorical question. I was naive, I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t think it had to do with underwear, I didn’t think it was sexual in nature. I would say it about my sister, ‘Nobody can come between me and my sister.’” She said that she was shocked by the public’s reaction to the campaign at the time, which would often result in her being “berated” in public by viewers who thought she had done it intentionally. “I think the assumption is that I was much more savvy than I ever really was,” she confessed. “If they had intended on the double entendre, they didn’t explain it to me. If they’d explained it to me, why? Would they have wanted me to say it differently? It didn’t faze me, it didn’t come into my sort of psyche as it being anything overtly sexual, sexualized in any way.”

Following the outrage sparked by her Calvin Klein ads, Shields was sent on a press tour in an attempt to mitigate the damage. “I feel like the controversy backfired. The campaign was extremely successful,” she said. “And then, I think the underwear sort of overtook the jeans, and they understood what sells and how to push the envelope. There’s an appeal to it that is so undeniable, and they tapped right into it. They knew exactly what they were doing, and I think it did set the tone for decades.”

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