Calvin campaign comes clean

Here is a depressing thought for the day: it is exactly 20 years since the gorgeous, pouting, teenage Brooke Shields eased herself into a pair of Calvin Klein jeans and asked the American public: 'Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins?' The suggestive answer ('Nothing') made advertising history, as did the ensuing production rate of 50,000 pairs per week.

Accusations of child pornography and heroin chic, plus much nudity, have tended to characterise subsequent campaigns, so that little piece of 1970s naughtiness now has the quaintness of the nursery. How endearing, in this era of the Starr Report and the videotaped presidential confessions, to think some television stations back then refused to air Shields' babbling impertinence.

Now the original white-label Calvin Klein jeans have made a comeback. In what is described as 'a worldwide limited-time anniversary re-launch', they appear in a new autumn advertising campaign starring Kate Moss.

Moss, however, does not pose the infamous question; apart from anything else, Klein has gone on to design a whole range of underwear and a potentially updated reply ('Nothing - except my white Calvin Klein knickers') would not have quite the same punch.

In fact, the campaign has an unusually healthy, bucolic flavour. Gone are both the grim sophisticates with their glassy stares, and the precocious adolescents of whom even United States President Bill Clinton was moved to say: 'It's wrong to manipulate these children, to use them for commercial benefit.' Instead, Moss and her pals, including supermodel Christy Turlington, indulge in such rural pursuits as hiking, potato-picking and tugs-of-war. As the accompanying photograph shows, Moss occasionally feels the urge to strip off but at least it is in the middle of a field.

'The real big change for me is that I feel everything is prettier, healthier, cleaner, attractive,' Klein told The New York Times. 'It's no longer the downtown, hip kind of thing. I think it's a fresh and clean kind of sexy, which seems sexier now than another dirty-looking model.' 'It's shocking in its cleanliness and freshness,' Linda Wells, editor of the US beauty magazine Allure, was quoted as saying of the advertisements.

Inspired by this gasp-worthy Calvinist purity, therefore, the designer's people in Asia have come up with a novel concept to promote the new old-look jeans. Combining two favoured Hong Kong pastimes - strolling in malls and having one's photograph taken - customers are invited to be snapped in a pair of Original Calvins in the renovated Pacific Place store.