The girlfriend gaze

Calvin Klein's new campaign starring Jeremy Allen White understands a little something about the boyfriend experience, and about a woman watching a man who watches her.

Aug 29, 2024

He’s drinking coffee on a misty morning in the Los Angeles hills while shirtless and wrapped in a wool blanket. A cozy sip. Then he looks over at you. So begins a video from Calvin Klein’s new campaign starring Jeremy Allen White.

The brand’s Instagram account called it a “sun-drenched daydream.” Indeed, the whole ad seems shot through a “romantic memories” filter and the soundtrack is a cover of a 1968 song featuring a woman singing about love.

Every frame caters to the fantasy of dating this man. It’s all giving the boyfriend experience.

The viewer is placed in the POV role of significant other. It’s like we’re right there with him as he reads a script, takes an afternoon nap, and plays with his German Shepherd. Just a regular weekend at home with your very famous actor boyfriend. Again and again, he looks into the camera, at the viewer, with a “hey, you” kind of vibe. There's a lot of squinting.

Every squint somehow curiously conveys desire. It is “c’mere” in a look.

The campaign, shot by Mert Alas, has broad appeal; he could be anyone’s boyfriend. There isn’t any particularly heavy heteronormative signaling, aside from the soundtrack, which starts with a woman’s breathy sigh, and perhaps hints more specifically at “the girlfriend gaze.”

The gaze is present, shared, and relational; there’s a mutual seeing and being seen. It’s like a mix between romantic POV thirst traps and the genre of TikTok fan edit that pilfers fleeting moments of sexiness and romance from Hollywood films to create an endlessly looping dream, a pornographic gif for the heart, mind, and loins.

There is little sense of this romantic fever dream in the accompanying still photographs, which feel more like traditional advertisements for clothes and underwear. One exception: Alas posted a photograph to his Instagram account that zeroes in on a thick pink scar that cuts across White’s upper back. It’s the kind of “imperfection” often edited out of images like these, and it gives a sense of closeness and tenderness.

This new campaign doesn’t have any of the swagger of White’s last break-the-internet ad for Calvin Klein’s Spring 2024 collection, where he strutted down a city street, bounded up a staircase, burst onto a Manhattan rooftop, and peeled off his clothing to do pull-ups in his underwear. But that ad had none of the intimacy of the new one: he looked into the camera a couple times but it was with the flavor of “what are you looking at?”

The soundtrack of the old ad also featured a woman singing, but with lyrics that had a totally different emotional bent: “You don’t own me, I’m not just one of your many toys.” Heather Schwedel argued in Slate that the song gave “women and others permission to own their thirst, to luxuriate in it.” I think it also signaled that, though you were watching this man doing a nearly-naked rooftop workout, you didn’t own him; he was mysterious, intriguing, and fundamentally unpindownable. A little Peter Pan, a little Bad Boy.

He was, most definitely, not your boyfriend. But now here he is squinting and smirking at you, and doing something that produces this facial expression:

For all its sweetness, there’s a definite horniness to the ad. White drinks water and misses his mouth, as the camera—your eyes—trail down his dripping wet torso. The spot moves easily between “boyfriend experience” snapshots and ever-so-brief gestures toward the pornographic.

Both of White’s Calvin Klein ads in their own way negotiate with the gender politics of a man—a heterosexual man, specifically—being looked at. Of course, the art critic John Berger famously said, “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” In this new ad, assuming a “girlfriend gaze,” you could say that, all at once, a man watches himself being looked at and a woman, the viewer, watches herself being looked at.

Does the subtle musical suggestion of a mutual hetero gaze neutralize his object-ness? Does it protect his masculinity in the same style of the swaggy, “what are you looking at,” “you don’t own me” signaling of the last ad? I wonder.

I wonder and I look.