THE NATION : THE CULTURE WARS : A Matter of Class: The Ultimate Fashion Taboo

Suddenly, after 15 years, something comes between us and our Calvins. And it’s a cold reality. An angry plebiscite contravenes fashion’s sheer audacity in the decision to withdraw the Calvin Klein Jeans advertising featuring young people.

The decision is more than surprising, given Richard Avedon’s 1980 photographs of Brooke Shields alone with her provocative declaration, “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.” Shields was only 15 years old, the same age as, if not younger than, the amateur models of the current Klein campaign. Of exposed underwear, we have grown accustomed to Kate Moss and Marky Mark with underwear tops showing, if not bottoms.

Fashion, Klein included, has long seduced the middle class with visions of high-society, high-style glamour. Fashion is often the dream or aspiration of social status and the privilege of splendid clothing. Hollywood, especially in the 1930s, made fantasies extravagant (Busby Berkeley) and stylish (Adrian). Generations have identified with their “betters” through clothing.

Even Klein’s history of sexy advertising for jeans, underwear and fragrance has always been about dream and desire: the supremely idealized bodies; the Surrealist-inspired white rooms of cryptic discourse, and the youthful exuberance. Klein has, again and again, “pushed the envelope” and made advertising with a cutting-edge sexuality.

The August advertising hit the culturally sensitive issue of children’s sexuality, a hot-button topic of ‘90s culture. Ironically, Klein’s avowal that he constructed his advertising as positive is plausible: A longer view reminds us that Lewis Carroll’s attraction to young girls could become a matrix for dream stories never to be forgotten. The young people of the August campaign are not appreciably younger than the cK-one parade of kids in partial undress. Those scruffy silhouettes on a white background seem like a Parthenon frieze, a teen-age pilgrimage to Tower Records, where the product sold in fantastic volume. Klein’s propensity to voyeurism and youth are familiar. Why was this campaign different?

Because here Klein represented class, the taboo subject. The insolent, indifferent kids of the August campaign parallel the young people of Larry Clark’s photographs and recent film “Kids.” Klein was not concocting a dream in utopian physique or sun-drenched paradise. He led us away from fashion grandeur to trailer-park trash, the rude and surly kids of their own abject world. No one may admit that there is class, much less a lower class, in supposedly classless America. Who is staying home watching trash television? The tacky faux-wood paneling shows us the tawdry world of lower-class kids in America today.

In these ads, Klein projects no false hope of “Our Town” white-bread proprieties or buffed physiques favored by the middle class, but instead a raw reality of disenfranchised life, bored, contentious and listlessly disestablishment. One day, these Klein images will be the poignant testimony of our Jenny Jones Show time, akin to the Farm Security Administration photographs of the 1930s.

Klein capitulated. “Some people,” said the statement, “are taking away a different perception of the ads. We have been taken aback by that perception, in part because it differs sharply from our intended message.”

Advertisers do not cave in. Klein has been resolute in the past, even amid controversy. Fashion house Benetton was admonished by the German supreme-court decision this summer that labeled its advertising “morally offensive,” and banned it. But Benetton has not been contrite. Rather, one ad launched here in August for Benetton SportSystem features an Olympic black-power salute juxtaposed with a Third Reich Olympic salute. Another features an appropriated image of the Crucifixion. Benetton knows the moral advantage of being consistent.

In July, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, denounced Valentino’s ads of nude men accompanying dressed women as “ethically reprehensible.” Did the censure stop ads in the works? On the contrary, the Roman designer defended his ads. Even the otherwise-frivolous Joe Camel persisted in selling Camel Cigarettes in the wake of vehement protest of the cartoon’s phallic profile and his incentive to young people to smoke. In our culture, tobacco companies stand firm, even against newscasts.

Advertising is not a negotiation. It is a declaration. If the advertising was the designer’s message, how can it be rescinded by haggling with the customer? Of course, some advertising invites a bargain between the designer and client. As the advertising arena is public space, literally in the case of Klein’s bus and billboard placements, images may be in some way accountable to public taste. Indeed, many critics have been more offended by these Klein placements than the print ads directed at readers of fashion magazines--already a moral lost tribe.

Proposed boycotts of Calvin Klein Jeans and the letter to retailers from Donald E. Wildmon of the media-savvy American Family Assn. of Tupelo, Miss., promising picket lines are intimidating, but Klein has steadfastly withstood appeals to withdraw earlier ads when they seemed controversial. Most protesters inveighed against “child pornography” with practiced incantation.

In fact, this decision may be gateau and gustation, Dole and desire, controversy and conciliation denouement: These ads were destined to finish at the end of this month, in any case. Klein published his images. Later, he got to show the softer side of soft goods, and met an angry public halfway. Klein yields to the tenor of the times and assumes the role of appeaser and hypocrite, rather than the leadership position he has held since 1980 as our chief icon-maker. One wonders if he can ever again resist protests.

Klein’s compromise is as apt for fashion today as it is a sign of our cultural vacillation. Fashion has become a vast cultural system, not the mere selling of a few dresses. Klein creates clothing for men, women and children at several price ranges; he oversees design for the home; he is in retailing, launching a new store on Madison Avenue this week; he directs enormous licensing businesses in underwear and jeans. French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky recently claimed, “Consumption as a whole now operates under the sign of fashion.”

The leading American fashion designers--Klein, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan--head conglomerates functioning under the identity of individuals. Klein’s act of commercial surrender on his jeans advertising may be governed by other interests. Reportedly, Klein was loathe to have the gala opening of his Madison Avenue store spoiled by protesters. In fact, the patrons of an up-scale Calvin Klein store may be unlikely buyers of his jeans, but an opening surrounded with malice could turn Klein’s retailing into HIStory. Fashion today is economically complex and culturally multifarious. It may be that skirting the newest controversy has more to do with Klein’s expensive skirts than with his jeans.

Fashion is not an art of sovereign independence. We don’t expect Vincent van Gogh’s misanthropic isolation. We expect fashion to guide and innovate, yielding extraordinary images in an ordinary world. But we also expect fashion to arbitrate, giving us security and comfort where we need them most--on our bodies and in our body politic.*