Calvin's World

In the Water Tower Place Mall in Chicago last week, Jennifer Marks and her mother. Clara, had a Calvin Klein problem. His ads were "absolutely" pornographic said Clara. 41. "They're exploiting children." It was the day after Klein had announced that he was pulling his controversial new ad campaign, and Jennifer and Clara were debating one of the posters. Against a backdrop of cheap paneling and purple pile carpet, the ad showed a very young-looking girl in a skimpy tank top, her jeans pushed below her bellybutton. "Where are the parents who are allowing their child to do this?" asked Clara. They had come to the mall together, Clara and Jennifer. And now here they were--in the juniors department of Marshall Field's--at opposite sides of a cultural divide. "I wouldn't allow my daughter to dress like that." said Clara. "And she knows it."

But to Jennifer, 15, the image had a different meaning. "I think she looks cute there," Jennifer said. "All my friends wear pants down past their underwear." In her school, she said. Calvin Klein was the most popular designer, though boys were always stealing her Victoria's Secret catalog. "I don't think they're exploiting her at all," Jennifer said of the gift in the ad. "She's got the body to wear it. Why not? I can't believe there's a controversy over this."

To veteran watchers of Calvin Klein, Inc., it had seemed like just another marketing splash. For the last 15 years, Klein has built a fashion empire largely by tapping both the charge and the cultural unease about youthful sexuality. In the early '80s, when feminists like Gloria Steinem protested his crotch shots of a 15-year-old Brooke Shields cooing that nothing came between her and her Calvins, and some TV stations refused to air the spots, Klein simply banked the controversy. "F--k off," he said to Steinem (through a later interview in Playboy); with Brooke's pouting, his jeans sales nearly doubled. Since then, as he erotiecized the nubile bodies of Marky Mark and Kate Moss, Klein refined the formula. When the current ads for CK Jeans rolled out in early August--discomfitingly intimate snapshots of very, young men and women in provocative states of undress--they carried the shock of the old. In a NEWSWEEK interview last month, Klein likened the ads to Warhol. Shot by top fashion photographer Steven Meisel, the campaign was nearly identical to a pictorial by Meisel in the Italian magazine L'Uomo Vogue--right down to the paneling and carpet. Klein said matter-of-factly: "I'm sure they're going to be controversial." It was vintage Calvin. Says Bob Garfield, ad critic for Advertising Age, "He discovered long ago what Benetton and Al Sharpton discovered. If you make a small amount of the right kind of noise, the media will deliver you tens or hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of free publicity."

But as the free publicity mounted--the front page of New York's Daily News howled THIS ADS UP TO PORN as it dutifully showed off one of the offending ads--the circus took a different turn. Even for people who shrug off Madonna videos and the Fox TV network, these ads were creepy. The kids looked too young, the situations too intrusive. In the TV spots, the largely nonprofessional models squirmed as an off-camera older man asked leering questions or gave directions: "Take your jacket off. Let's check out the results." The ads drew comparisons to child pornography. The company says that most of the models "are adults, as old as 29."

Some retailers rebelled. Dayton Hudson. the giant Midwestern retail conglomerate, urged Klein to pull the ad campaign. "Our company's point of view is that the ads were offensive," said Dayton Hudson vice president Mary Hughes. "This is the '90s. We just culturally don't deal with children." Protesters threatened to picket department stores like Macy's and Wal-Mart. One New York City councilman even called for a boycott of the designer's products.

The scandal also threatened to cast a shadow over Klein's three imminent corporate megamoves. After a decade of paying down debt. Klein is on the verge of a major expansion that he hopes will raise his international stature to the level of Ralph Lauren. Yves Saint Laurent and Giorgio Armani (Chart, page 66). On Thursday, the company will open a 20,000-square-foot flagship store on New York's Madison Avenue. The same week. he unwraps Calvin Klein Home. a $10-to-$1,575 line of sheets, towels and tablewear likely to provoke the question: how much is too much for a no-frills beige bedsheet? (One answer: $80.) After that, he'll launch cK one perfume worldwide, trying to duplicate the spectacular success of last year's U.S. introduction. The fragrance grossed $60 million in its first three months, by many accounts the richest debut in perfume history. But his real goal is to push his menswear, womenswear, jeans and underwear to Europe and Asia.