Monday, November 5, 2007

You, too, can be an ass!

What is up with the giant Calvin Klein billboard on the northwest corner of Lafayette and Houston?
This particular billboard spot has belonged to Calvin Klein for as long as I can remember into the recent past. I often glance at it as I dash into the Broadway-Lafayette subway stop after work, and I've noticed that the CK folks switch up the image maybe every 2-4 weeks (or maybe not that often, but I do feel like I've seen lots of different pictures on that spot recently - CK jeans, CK underwear, CK fragrance...)

This evening I looked up and noticed a new image had been placed on the giant board, a new image that I found both amusing and disturbing: a teenage(?) girl is reclining, her head in the lap of a teenage(?) boy. Both are fully clothed in CK gear, and the boy's hand is resting on an exposed portion of the girl's waist.
It was the expressions on the faces that got to me. The girl appears completely bored out of her mind (or maybe drugged), and the boy is staring into the camera, looking confused and/or pissed off, as if he has nothing but scorn for all the little New Yorkers walking around below him.

I gotta ask: how does this image help to sell CK clothing? I, for one, do not want to wear anything that heightens any sense of 1) boredom, or 2) superiority over others. Do other people want these things? Am I missing something?

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