The Christmas Eve Bizarro:
A cartoon clearly meant for me, in my guise as Underwear Guy.
A cartoon from New Yorker cartoonist Ed Frascino on a Calvin Klein theme:
The Frascino introduces the truncated expression Calvins ‘Calvin Klein underwear, specifically briefs’ (in the sense of briefs that encompasses a wide range of non-boxers men’s underwear). The expression seems to be invariably plural, though underwear is a mass noun (and so singular) and brief has a use as a type-referring count noun, which can then be singular (Here’s a brief you might like, even Here’s a Calvin Klein you might like, but not, I think, *Here’s a Calvin you might like): He was wearing only Calvins, but not *He was wearing only Calvin (meaning underwear, not a fragrance) or *He was wearing only a Calvin.
Plural Calvins has a robust life; just google on {“in his Calvins”}, and you’ll get a whole series of men in Calvin Klein briefs, from models that CK has contracted with to guys who are probably angling for a contract to just ordinary guys. I’ll give a little photo-montage in a moment, but here I note that for the moment Calvins seems to have firmly maintained its brand-name associations and so far avoided genericide, in which the expression would get used for briefs of any brand (and ultimately suffer lower-casing).
The photos begin with the great Underwear God Mark Wahlberg. From AZBlogX on five underwear models:
Mark Wahlberg began his public career at age 13, as one of the founding members (along with his older brother Donnie) of New Kids on the Block, but soon abandoned bubblegum pop for something rougher, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, as a sneering rapper. Calvin Klein saw the erotic potential in the kid, and sold a ton of underwear through him. Here’s Marky Mark in two CK boxer-brief guises, the nasty in-your-face rapper doing a crotch grab (all the photo lacks is him giving us the finger) and the cute guy with the hot basket (and smiling).
My X Blog piece also shows CK model Travis Fimmel as an Underwear God. Later CK gods have included retired Swedish footballer Fredrik Ljungberg:
and Beninese-American actor and model Djimon Hounsou:
and now Twilight actor Kellan Lutz:
Plenty of hot images of a brooding Lutz available on the web. I like this one for its approachability.
And then there’s Brazilian model Thiago Ximenes (Mister Brazil 2012) jammin’ in his Calvins:
As far as I can tell, Ximenes is still a free agent, but I’d vote for him if CK is taking a poll. (CK might possibly insist on better-defined abs.)
So that’s Christmas Eve in the comics. Coming soon: Zippy weirdness for Christmas Day.
December 25, 2012 at 11:36 am |
I recall hearing that the Calvin Klein underwear people tried to sue Calvin College for copyright infringement.
Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan is an excellent, very strict religious institution (no underwear ads there) belonging to the Christian Reformed Church, a Dutch Calvinist denomination. My wife’s parents both graduated from there, and her grandfather was its near-legendary professor of organic chemistry.
July 1, 2013 at 7:36 am |
[…] photo in that posting, but then Lutz reappears, in his Calvins and nothing else, in a 2012 posting on models in their Calvins, where I noted that there were plenty of hot images of a brooding Lutz, […]