Ava

Brooke Shields was 15 in the Calvin Klein jeans ads that TV stations banned in 1980. She's said for years that if her lines had a double meaning, nobody explained it to her. This February, Calvin Klein, now 83, told a Vogue podcast, "We knew exactly what we were doing with Brooke." He walked through how it got made. Richard Avedon directed and Doon Arbus wrote the scripts, and Klein says the three of them sat down and mapped out every detail, from the voice to the look to the clothes. So you had three adults at the very top of their fields working the innuendo out line by line, and then handing it to a high school kid to say on camera. The only person in the room who didn't know what the ad meant was the one saying it. And the ban helped. CBS and ABC stations pulled the spots in November 1980, and within a year Calvin Klein was selling roughly 400,000 pairs of jeans a week. Klein's company went back to that well twice more. In 1995 a jeans campaign with models critics took for minors set off an FBI child exploitation probe (the models turned out to be adults), Klein pulled the ads, and the jeans sold anyway. In 1999 a kids' underwear billboard meant for Times Square got cancelled the day after the newspaper ads ran. That's three campaigns in 19 years, every one of them banned or pulled, and the brand walked out of each one more famous. So when somebody says "age controversy aside," they're asking you to set down the one part Klein says was planned.