Rivet April 2020

58

FAME I

t took just one line to change the way denim brands would forever market their jeans, when in 1980, Calvin Klein tapped then-15-year-old rising starlet Brooke Shields to utter: “Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

The provocative commercial did exactly what it intended to do. It shook parents and was banned from major television markets, but Calvin Klein—and jeans—emerged on the other side of the bad publicity and into a new echelon of fashion.

Calvin Klein was selling more than jeans now—it was selling sex. And in the process, it made young women want to look and dress like Shields.

“Denim and celebrities have always gone hand in hand as a marketing mix,” said Stacy Jones, CEO of Hollywood Branded, a Los Angeles-based product placement and influencer marketing firm. “They truly are together the epitome of pop culture.”

Hollywood has long been an epicenter where fashion trends thrive and die, but denim became an instant Hollywood classic when films in the 1950s began dressing strong characters in jeans as a sign of their fight against societal expectations, she said. Jeans defined James Dean’s rebel mystique, Marilyn Monroe’s girl-next-door sex appeal and John Wayne’s rugged persona.

And young cohorts of the time took note.

“The trend—on screen and off—only continued to grow with denim becoming the primary wardrobe of the 1960s and 1970s, of the youth movements replicated on movie screens across the nation and worn by celebrity protestors in the news,” Jones said. As a result, denim-clad celebrities “became billboards of dreams for millions of youth.”

Denim brands have long-relied on the buzz of celebrity ad campaigns, but a new type of stardom is taking shape. w ords_____ A N G E LA V E LA S Q U E Z