Arnold Zwicky's Blog

I don’t usually follow the Styles section of the NYT closely, but my attention was, umm, captured by a big photo on the front page of today’s section, showing underwear model Kellan Lutz in the middle of a photo shoot; the story is “Stretching A Six-Pack: Could the Calvin Klein underwear model Kellan Lutz vault from billboards into Mark Wahlberg territory?”, by Eric Wilson.

Wilson manages to play with the tale of a young man whose career turns on his abdominal muscles and the package in the underwear he models without going overboard, but he can’t resist a few plays with language:

… Kellan Lutz, the abdominally gifted young actor [underwear models aspire to success as actors, and some, notably Mark Wahlberg, have achieved it in spades, while others (Travis Fimmel, for example) have gotten some exposure on television and in the movies; Lutz is just at the beginning of this career arc]

… to note just how far an actor can go be adhering to the simple example set forth by Mr. Wahlberg — the School of Marky Mark, if you will. The single lesson is success by six-pack.

Meanwhile, Wilson judges Wahlberg in an even-handed but over-the-top way (though probably with tongue in cheek):

… he was a terrible rapper, an obnoxious loud-mouth and, quite possibly, the greatest underwear model the world has ever known.

What an extraordinary achievement!

And with Wahlberg, homoeroticism in advertising went mainstream. (Well, it was on the path for some time, going back at least to the Marlboro Man ads.

This entry was posted on May 13, 2010 at 9:38 am and is filed under Language of sex, Language play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.