On the first of September, Calvin Klein released the second chapter of its autumn campaign. Sadie Sink, a pair of jeans, shot by Aidan Zamiri. A perfectly ordinary denim advert of the sort that brand has made for forty years, with a young thin woman modelling in it.
What is interesting for culture war observers like me is that there is a huge change within the ad, or perhaps more aptly, a return to days gone by. And yet if you had not looked up at billboards or ads for the last ten years, or perhaps awoken from a coma, you’d think nothing had changed at all.
For the first time in a long time, the model is slim and female. Ads showing overweight gender neutral models in underwear have suddenly disappeared. The brave and progressive new world of diabetes and heart attacks being the manner in which Calvin Klein elected to sell underwear seems to have ended. Did someone come to their senses? Did a doctor give advice? Or was this progressive virtue signalling just what it took to sell jeans at the time, and ever since Sydney Sweeney proved concept with her boobs out in the American eagle Jeans ad, companies are realising it might be safe to dip their toe back into the skinny white girl water, and are diving in.
Because the truth is, that for the better part of the last ten years, most companies were terrified to photograph anyone without very clearly explaining why that person was being photographed, what it meant, and of course, what liking the photo said about you. Every ad was a position. Companies weren’t just selling us clothes, they were wearing clothes- political clothes- and assigning moral attributes to them. And wearing their clothes proved you adopted those attributes, and of course, boycotting those clothes was a demonstration too. But in the end, we now see that it was all theatre. As Sydney Sweeney put it well herself; ‘they’re just jeans’.
But denim and underwear weren’t the only things we had to endure at the altar of performative corporate progressivism, and what did the decade of moral earnestness actually deliver? Apple and Facebook offered in 2014 to pay women to freeze their eggs, not to build a crèche, but to postpone a woman’s biology so she could keep working. International Women’s Day arrived every March with a panel, a pink cupcake and silence on childcare, or maternity leave, or anything useful. On International Women’s Day 2024 this State asked Irish women what it could do for them and came back with a proposal to change the wording of the Constitution — to strive to support care — and Irish women rejected it by seventy-four per cent to twenty-six.
The common feature of all of this, is that in truth it is not, and never was an ideology. It’s just disingenuous corporate connivance and actually a moral cowardice. These companies were staffed by executives who had concluded that this was what one was now supposed to say in order to market things, and who were frightened of being the last ones to say it. That is why the gestures were always the cheap, or the ludicrous — you do not spend real money on a position you do not hold. A cupcake costs nothing. A constitutional amendment costs a lot less than childcare, real changes all cost money. It seems they were all just doing what NGOs told the board was expected, at the lowest price the CFO could stomach.
If the Calvin Klein ad was the only evidence, this would be wishful thinking. It is not. Since 2025, Amazon, Meta, IBM, Disney and others quietly buried the diversity commitments they had spent five years advertising because of the results of an election.
What collapsed in 2025 was a marketing position that stopped testing well, discontinued exactly as fast as any other underperforming campaign. It was never a moral awakening, and instead of admitting that. They’ve just quietly slotted the skinny white girl back into the Calvin Kleins.
Nothing has been learned and nobody has grown a backbone, we just don’t have to pretend that obesity is beautiful for a while. What is ending is not an ideology or a cultural revolution. It was a fashion, and fashions change.
So, I for one am happy with the new jeans ad. Not because a thin girl in denim is a triumph, but because nobody attached a moral position to it. Nobody is marveling at how brave, or progressive it is. Nobody is taking a political position by liking it. Calvin Klein are doing what I want most large companies to do; say nothing, sell the clothes, and if you want to do something for women, pay them properly and fund the things women actually need. The frozen eggs are still out there in some nitrogen flask, but the rest was always for them, not really for us.
SR
The division of labour is clear: McGuirk does the man boobs, Ryan the lady ones.
I deplore the politicised ads as much as anyone, but I’ve just had a horrible thought: in ten years, many people will probably look back with a certain nostalgia at those fat people in ads compared with the salacious ads that replace them. It wasn’t so bad, they’ll say; it meant well; is it really any better than ads that make you feel ugly? I fear that even if we can defeat woke, there will always be a nostalgia for it, like with communism.
On whether companies were cynically buying into woke, I think we let activists off the hook if we say companies were just in it for the money. We allow the activists to cast themselves as victims. Because, actually, the companies *did* care about the cause. They were staffed by innumerable progressives (mostly women) who self-righteously believed they could change the world without in any way sacrificing their careers. I highly doubt their proposals were backed up by hard-nosed financial projections. The reason the companies are abandoning it is not that they’ve plundered all they could and are now moving onto another target so much as that they now stand to lose money unless they do. The activists deserve no sympathy for making their cause so toxic that companies that have stuck with them through a lot of controversy are finally having to cut the cord.
"The brave and progressive new world of diabetes and heart attacks being the manner in which Calvin Klein elected to sell underwear seems to have ended"
My chair almost threw me off. Brilliant 😀