Calvin Klein underwear ads have always traded on the gap between the garment and the person wearing it. The choice of Calvin Klein underwear models is part of that argument. Strip the image to its minimum and place someone culturally legible at the center, and the celebrity’s public meaning fills the frame.
Mark Wahlberg in the early 1990s replaced the campaign’s aspirational tone with something more physical and confrontational. Freddie Ljungberg brought a different weight to the images, his soccer career adding a physical credibility the brand used to expand into a new audience.
Justin Bieber turned the campaign into a generational moment, his pop fame pulling the brand into a conversation that extended well past fashion. Bad Bunny gave the campaign a different cultural scope, his position in Latin pop music making the brand’s minimal image feel directed at a global audience. These underwear ads are arguments about which bodies the culture wants to see, and what it assumes those bodies represent.
Calvin Klein Underwear Model List
The casting logic for Calvin Klein’s underwear has shifted across decades. Jeremy Allen White brought the 2024 campaign into a specific cultural moment, his profile from The Bear at its peak giving the images a reach that extended well past fashion. Travis Fimmel’s debut in the early 2000s came before his acting career gave him any public profile, and the images placed his physical presence where the celebrity’s cultural meaning usually sits.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Aaron Taylor-Johnson fronted Calvin Klein’s spring 2023 campaign during the period when his name was circulating most heavily in the next-Bond conversation, cultural speculation that turns an actor into a body-and-charisma debate before any role has been confirmed. Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott shot him in tees, jeans, underwear, and the trucker jacket, the images running under the “Calvins or Nothing” concept.
The campaign also extended into video, with Taylor-Johnson dancing to Clash by The Blaze. The choice of motion over static poses fit his lithe, dancer-like physicality. The video gave the brand a way to test him as a leading-man sex symbol the same way the Bond speculation was testing him in public.
Anthony Ramos
Anthony Ramos appeared in Calvin Klein’s spring-summer 2021 Blank Canvas campaign, the casting drawing on his profile from Hamilton and the In the Heights film that arrived later that year. The campaign placed him alongside Jacob Elordi inside the brand’s core essentials lineup, photographed by Mario Sorrenti.
Ramos’ presence in the cast brought the casting argument toward Latin musical-theater talent, a different lane than the brand’s typical pop-music or athletic Latin casting plays.
Antonio Sabato Jr.
Antonio Sabato Jr. came to Calvin Klein’s 1990 campaign from General Hospital, his daytime television profile giving him a mass audience that extended the brand’s reach into a new demographic. The images fit the spare, body-forward visual language CK had developed through the 1980s.
Nearly three decades later, Sabato Jr. ran for Congress in California in 2018. Of all the trajectories the brand’s models have taken since the 1990s, his remains the most unexpected.
Bad Bunny
Bad Bunny fronted Calvin Klein’s 2025 underwear campaign for the Icon Cotton Stretch collection. Mario Sorrenti shot him against mirrors and pale backdrops. The reflective setup multiplied his body into a series of repetitions, each one landing as a separate argument. His tattoos and his standing as the most-streamed Latin artist of the decade gave the imagery a cultural specificity the brand has spent years pursuing.
The campaign continued his pattern of using fashion to question the visual codes of conventional masculinity. This time he did so inside one of the most established formats in American advertising.
Brandon Flynn
Brandon Flynn appeared in Calvin Klein’s Pride and holiday 2023 campaigns, his profile from 13 Reasons Why placing the casting in a generation that came of age with prestige streaming television. The Pride campaign paired him with Amandla Stenberg for the “This Is Love” collection, photographed by Karim Sadli.
Rainbow motifs, color-blocking, and mesh panels turned the standard CK underwear silhouette into a Pride-specific product. The casting reinforced what the design was already doing, with Flynn and Stenberg both publicly out and both connected to audiences for whom the collection was specifically designed.
Flynn returned for Calvin Klein’s holiday 2023 campaign, photographed by James Brodribb. The back-to-back casting kept him in the brand’s seasonal rotation past Pride, framing his presence as part of the year-round commercial program.
His public profile as an LGBTQIA+ actor extended the brand’s inclusion argument into the holiday season, which is the harder commercial test.
Carlos Alcaraz
Carlos Alcaraz fronted Calvin Klein’s “Calvins or nothing” underwear campaign at 19, having recently taken his first Grand Slam title and the world No. 1 ranking. Gray Sorrenti shot him in black-and-white across stills and short video.
The casting placed Alcaraz in the brand’s longstanding pattern of using elite athletes to argue for the body as the product. His tennis profile gave the images physical credibility, and his fame in Spanish-speaking markets gave the brand an audience already in place.
Djimon Hounsou
Djimon Hounsou fronted a Calvin Klein Underwear campaign in 2007, photographed by Peter Lindbergh. The casting drew on Hounsou’s profile from Blood Diamond and Amistad, work that brought him two Oscar nominations by the time of the shoot.
Lindbergh’s documentary-style photography pulled the campaign away from the high-gloss approach the underwear category typically uses. Hounsou’s casting placed him among the actors the brand has used to expand the visual definition of who its underwear is for.
Dominic Fike
Dominic Fike appeared in Calvin Klein’s fall 2021 campaign, photographed by Renell Medrano alongside an ensemble cast. His profile from Euphoria and his music career gave the casting an internet-native pull the brand was actively chasing.
The fall 2021 work pulled away from the brand’s standard underwear playbook. The cast wore CK essentials in residential settings, and an accompanying video collage paired voice overs in a poetic mode over reflective footage. The campaign added an emotional layer to the body argument, treating the model’s inner life as part of the product story.
Evan Mock
Evan Mock fronted Calvin Klein’s holiday 2021 campaign, photographed by Quil Lemons. Mock came to the casting from skateboarding, social media, and the Gossip Girl reboot, paths the brand had increasingly used to widen its model pool.
Mock returned for the CK Everyone fragrance campaign opposite Eliot Sumner, shot by Glen Luchford. The fragrance was positioned as the brand’s first “clean, gender-free, and environmentally conscious” scent, and it ran in the same window as the CK ONE genderless underwear and jeans collections.
The casting of Mock and Sumner placed two figures with public gender-fluid profiles at the center of a product line designed around the same idea.
Fernando Verdasco
Fernando Verdasco fronted Calvin Klein Underwear’s 2010 launch of the Calvin Klein X line, photographed by Mikael Jansson in New York. The campaign ran across print, outdoor, and digital, with a dedicated microsite extending the rollout into the brand’s early multi-channel period.
Verdasco’s casting set a pattern the brand would return to with Carlos Alcaraz a decade later, using a Spanish tennis pro to argue for the body as the proof of the product.
Freddie Ljungberg
Freddie Ljungberg started his Calvin Klein Underwear contract in 2005, then at the peak of his Arsenal career during the club’s “Invincibles” era. The campaign placed him on billboards across global cities, the images turning the Swedish midfielder into a recognizable visual property well past the football audience.
Ljungberg also fronted campaigns for Nike, L’Oreal, and Puma, but the Calvin Klein work is what gave him his commercial second life. His CK casting marked the moment when the brand began running the athlete-as-underwear-model pattern with the same scale it had previously reserved for movie stars.
Hidetoshi Nakata
Hidetoshi Nakata fronted Calvin Klein Underwear’s X range in 2010, four years after retiring from professional soccer. The casting drew on Nakata’s rare position as a Japanese athlete with serious post-career fashion credibility, having spent his playing years in Serie A and the Premier League and his retirement years front-row at the major European fashion weeks.
The CK contract gave the brand a direct line into the Japanese market, where Nakata’s fame extended past his playing career and translated into a fashion-side following the brand could plug into directly.
Jacob Elordi
Jacob Elordi fronted Calvin Klein Underwear campaigns in 2019 and 2021, the first arriving as Euphoria began turning him into a leading-man prospect. His later work in Priscilla and Saltburn confirmed the trajectory the casting had bet on.
The 2019 debut paired Elordi’s height and cleaner-cut profile with the minimal visual language the brand has used to define itself since the 1980s. The casting placed him in the brand’s longer pattern of catching young actors at the moment their cultural stock starts climbing.
Elordi returned for the spring-summer 2021 Blank Canvas campaign, shot by Mario Sorrenti. The work covered Calvin Klein’s core essentials of white tees, denim, and monogrammed underwear, placing Elordi inside the brand’s most identifiable product categories at once.
Jamie Dornan
Jamie Dornan fronted Calvin Klein Underwear’s 2009 campaign, shot by Steven Klein in Palm Springs. At the time, Dornan was a working model still six years out from the Fifty Shades of Grey leading role that turned him into a household name.
The casting fits the brand’s longer pattern of using models whose acting careers are still ahead of them, and Dornan’s later run on The Fall and the Fifty Shades trilogy bore that pattern out.
Jeremy Allen White
Jeremy Allen White fronted Calvin Klein’s spring 2024 campaign at the peak of his cultural moment, with The Bear in the height of its critical run and his Iron Claw physical transformation fresh in the public conversation. Mert Alas shot him against the New York City skyline, the same photographer who had handled the brand’s biggest celebrity casts for the previous two decades.
The campaign featured the Intense Power Micro Boxer Brief and the Micro Mesh Cooling Low Rise Trunk, but White’s profile gave the shoot its cultural weight. He arrived as a critical favorite, a physical transformation, and a cultural conversation at once. The images circulated across timelines for weeks, placing the campaign in the brand’s small group of underwear ads that have crossed into viral events on their own.
White returned as the face of Calvin Klein’s fall 2024 campaign, the back-to-back booking confirming the spring shoot’s commercial heat. The repeat casting kept the brand inside the cultural moment its earlier campaign had opened.
Justin Bieber
Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott shot Justin Bieber and Lara Stone for the spring-summer 2015 Calvin Klein Jeans campaign. The pairing put Bieber’s pop superstar reach next to Stone’s high-fashion editorial standing, a casting logic that gave the campaign two audiences at once.
The Bieber underwear campaign reached saturation levels that turned the brand’s marketing into a comedy target. Saturday Night Live parodied the ad in January 2015, with Kate McKinnon impersonating Bieber in the same near-naked pose the campaign had run across billboards worldwide.
Bieber returned for a 2016 Calvin Klein campaign, this time during the Purpose album cycle that had remade his public profile from troubled teen to credible adult pop star. The repeat booking placed him among the small group of Calvin Klein figures the brand has kept on through a major reputation shift, treating his cultural arc as a long-term commercial asset.
The 2019 anniversary campaign paired Bieber with his wife, Hailey Bieber, marking Calvin Klein’s 50th year and Bieber’s third campaign with the brand. The shift from solo casting to couple casting tracked Bieber’s own public turn from single pop star to a high-visibility marriage that had become its own ongoing media event.
Bieber’s CK work extended into 2020, making him one of the longest-running celebrity tenures in the brand’s underwear advertising. The arc from 2015 to 2020 traced his shift from teen pop ubiquity to married adult artist, the brand using each campaign to mark where he sat in the public conversation at that point.
Kellan Lutz
Kellan Lutz fronted a Calvin Klein Underwear campaign during his Twilight peak, the casting tying the brand directly to the franchise’s young female audience. His muscular build fit the underwear category’s athletic-bodied aesthetic of the period, and the franchise’s commercial reach gave the campaign immediate visibility across markets that CK had been actively chasing.
Maluma
Maluma fronted Calvin Klein Underwear’s 2020 campaign at the height of his Latin pop run, the casting taking the brand into Spanish-speaking markets a half-decade before Bad Bunny would extend that strategy further. His “Pretty Boy” persona, already a marketed product in his own work, slotted directly into the underwear advertising format.
Mark Wahlberg
Mark Wahlberg fronted Calvin Klein Underwear’s 1992 campaign as Marky Mark, the casting pulling a hip-hop crossover star into a category that had previously been the territory of male models and movie stars. Herb Ritts shot Wahlberg alongside Kate Moss, the pairing of his muscular Boston-Irish frame and her waifish profile producing the visual contrast that came to define the brand’s 1990s output.
The campaign became the template the brand would run for the next three decades. Wahlberg’s casting also redirected his career from music into acting, with Boogie Nights arriving five years later as confirmation of the public profile the underwear shoot had handed him.
Mehcad Brooks
Mehcad Brooks fronted the US side of Calvin Klein’s 2010 X line campaign, the global rollout that paired him with Hidetoshi Nakata in Asia and Fernando Verdasco in Europe. His True Blood profile gave the casting an immediate cable-television audience to address.
The shoot kept Brooks’ tattoos in frame, a small departure from the brand’s standard underwear model up to that point. The choice positioned Brooks as a different kind of body in the same product context, adding ink and acting-world identity to the X line’s visual mix.
Michael B. Jordan
Michael B. Jordan fronted Calvin Klein’s spring 2023 campaign for the brand’s revived 1996 line, shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. The casting placed Jordan, then in the same year as his Creed III directorial debut, at the center of a product revival that referenced the Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg era of the brand’s 1990s output.
The shoot kept Jordan’s lean, defined build in the foreground, the styling treating his body the same way the original 1996 campaign had treated its models. The choice of a Black leading man for that specific revival ran the brand’s nostalgia program through a different visual reference than the one the 1996 line had originally produced.
Odell Beckham Jr.
Odell Beckham Jr. appeared in Calvin Klein’s #MYCALVINS IRL fall 2019 campaign, the brand’s effort to translate its underwear advertising into the candid, home-set visual language of Instagram. He shared the campaign with Naomi Campbell and Bella Hadid, the cast filmed watching television and dancing in domestic settings designed to feel like phone footage.
Beckham’s casting drew on his standing as one of the NFL’s most fashion-active players, a regular fixture at New York Fashion Week and Met Gala red carpets. His presence in the campaign tied CK to the cross-section of sports and fashion that was becoming a dominant cultural format.
Omar Ayuso
Omar Ayuso appeared in Calvin Klein’s 2021 #ProudInMyCalvins campaign, his profile from Elite as one of the show’s openly gay leads making him a direct fit for the Pride positioning. The campaign placed him in CK underwear, denim, and pieces from the Pride capsule.
Ayuso returned for a 2022 campaign shot by Alexandra Leese, the styling pulled into neutral and natural tones with flesh-colored underwear at the center of the imagery. The repeat booking placed Ayuso in the small group of openly LGBTQ+ figures the brand has continued to cast across multiple seasons, extending the Pride relationship into the year-round rotation.
Oscar Emboaba
Oscar Emboaba fronted Calvin Klein’s first dedicated Brazilian campaign in 2014, the brand’s combined Jeans and Underwear push timed to the FIFA World Cup hosted in Brazil that summer. Daniel Jackson shot the campaign in London, with the styling pulling green, yellow, and blue from the Brazilian flag into the underwear product itself.
Emboaba’s casting drew on his role as an attacking midfielder for Chelsea FC and the Brazilian national team, the dual profile reaching both Chelsea fans in Europe and Brazilian national audiences at home. The campaign ran across outdoor placements, in-flight video, and print, the multi-channel rollout giving CK a Brazilian launch that matched the scale of the World Cup window itself.
Romelu Lukaku
Romelu Lukaku appeared in Calvin Klein’s “Calvins or Nothing” underwear campaign, photographed by Gray Sorrenti in black and white. The casting placed Lukaku alongside Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Carlos Alcaraz in the brand’s same campaign cycle, the lineup pulling its three faces from football, film, and tennis to argue for the body across three different professional contexts.
Lukaku’s frame, at 6’3″ and visibly the product of professional football, fit the campaign’s pattern of casting bodies the audience would already see as athletic before any styling entered the frame.
Shawn Mendes
Shawn Mendes appeared in Calvin Klein’s 2019 #mycalvins campaign, the casting placing him in the brand’s longer pattern of booking pop stars during their teen-idol peak. The boxer brief shoot ran during the same period as his self-titled album cycle, with both feeding the same Gen Z audience.
Mendes’ presence in the campaign tracked closely with the Bieber playbook the brand had run four years earlier, taking a young pop star at maximum cultural visibility and putting him in the most identifiable underwear product the brand sells.
Son Heung-min
Son Heung-min signed on as Calvin Klein Underwear’s brand ambassador, the deal pulling the brand’s biggest contemporary Asian football casting since Hidetoshi Nakata fronted the X line in 2010. His captaincy of the South Korean national team and his forward role at Tottenham Hotspur gave the brand a single figure with both Premier League visibility and full national-team weight in Korea.
The 2023 campaign placed Son in the 1996 Micro Trunk, the same revival product cycle the brand had also run with Michael B. Jordan that year. In September 2023 the relationship extended further, with a limited-edition capsule of hoodies, sweatshirts, and a denim trucker jacket that worked his shirt number seven into a custom version of the CK logo.
Travis Fimmel
Travis Fimmel fronted Calvin Klein Underwear’s 2001 campaign more than a decade before Vikings made him a globally recognizable face. The Times Square billboards from the campaign reportedly caused traffic disruption, the size and visibility of the images becoming part of the campaign’s actual press story.
The 2001 imagery shows Fimmel clean-shaven, before the long hair and beard that would define his on-screen presence in Vikings. The casting placed him in the brand’s small group of underwear models who arrived as pure physical selections, the campaign running on his face and body before any acting profile gave it cultural framing.
Trevante Rhodes
Calvin Klein cast the Moonlight ensemble across its 2017 advertising in the months after the film’s Best Picture win, the booking landing during Raf Simons’ run as the brand’s chief creative officer. Trevante Rhodes appeared in cotton stretch hip briefs, the casting placing him in the underwear category alongside the campaign’s wider engagement with the Moonlight cast.
The decision to organize a campaign around the cast of a film about queer Black masculinity, six months after its Oscar win, fit Simons’ broader project of using the brand to engage directly with specific American cultural moments.
The Legacy of Iconic Calvin Klein Models
Each Calvin Klein underwear campaign doubles as a timestamp. Mark Wahlberg dates 1992. Bad Bunny dates 2025. The Calvin Klein underwear models in between are the brand’s clearest record of which fame, which body types, and which cultural arguments were marketable in the year the images were shot.
