On January 4th of this year, when Calvin Klein dropped its new spring 2024 campaign with a shirtless Jeremy Allen White wearing the brand’s signature underwear, it set the internet ablaze. Social media feeds flooded with reaction videos and media outlets covered the campaign widely. The following week, Calvin Klein saw a 30 percent year-over-year increase in underwear sales.

While the brand could never have predicted the gigantic response the campaign would generate, Calvin Klein’s chief marketing officer Jonathan Bottomley says the brand did everything it could to put the strategy in place for it to do so.

“In a culture that's very flat, how do you create those spikes … we adopt what we call an entertainment mentality,” said Bottomley on stage at the BoF Professional Summit in New York.

This week on The BoF Podcast, BoF founder and editor-in-chief Imran Amed sits down with Bottomley to unpack Calvin Klein’s marketing strategy and how they cut through the noise to create cultural moments.

Key Insights:

• Calvin Klein’s entertainment mentality can be broken down into three main parts. “Firstly, we put a lot of focus on creating stories and creating content that people are going to want to spend time with. The second thing is we think really hard about the talent, not just in terms of reach of engagement, but the opportunity to create a cultural character, show them in a way that maybe you haven't seen before,” Bottomley explains. “And then the third thing is media. We work with real intention to blend the media mix, to try and game the algorithm and and really to cut through.”

• Bottomley stresses that the brand does not aim to court controversy. “There's an authenticity to what we do, which is partly the DNA as a brand. This idea of sensuality and empowerment, they go together,” he says. “It's much more to do with partnership, creative expression, and this idea of a character that we feel is going to work, but that our partner really believes in.”

• On balancing brand marketing and performance marketing, Bottomley believes the two are intertwined. “The way we think about it is that everything is brand and everything is performance. … The imperative of a brand is to lead and to say from within the confines of where culture is going, ‘how can we step outside that and excite people with something?’”

Additional resources:

• Calvin Klein, Levi’s and the Real Value of Marketing
• Why Calvin Klein Ads Still Get People Talking
• Calvin Klein’s New Strategy: Don’t Market the Dream, Market What Sells

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For more than 30 years, photographer Willy Vanderperre has been fascinated with youth. Vanderperre has carved a niche for himself in the fashion industry, capturing the youthful essence of models like Julia Nobis and Clément Chabernaud for fashion houses including Dior, Prada and Givenchy.

“It would be bordering on pretentious to say that I understand youth. I am 53 years old and I am fully aware of that. It's impossible to understand youth nowadays. I can just have an interpretation of what I think youth is through my eyes and through the experiences I have with those kids,” says Vanderperre.

Ahead of the opening of his exhibition “Willy Vanderperre Prints, Films, a Rave and More…” at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp, Vanderperre sits down with BoF editor-at-large Tim Blanks to discuss this approach to image-making his creative collaborations with Raf Simons and Olivier Rizzo, and more.

Key Insights

• Whilst studying photography at Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Vanderperre first encountered the friends who would become his closest collaborators: Raf Simons, Olivier Rizzo and Peter Philips. “We all grew up in different parts of Belgium, we all have very different backgrounds, we also come from different subcultures, so I think it's also that that linked us together at one point.”

• A rave and hedonistic subculture is an essential component of his body of work. “Of course we had to include the rave. My main focus has always been youth, and it will always be. I am from that generation of Belgian kids that when the rave scene was big, I was young and I indulged in that lifestyle,” he shared.

• Vanderperre views challenge, both for himself and his audience, as a defining characteristic of his work. “What is a beautiful picture? Does it always have to be beautifully lit or perfectly lit? … Technique is important, but it's a means and I think we should play with that,” he explains.

• As for his work philosophy, Vanderperre keeps it simple: “I like the idea of observing, creating and bringing that character to life and being genuinely interested in that person in front of the camera” he says. “I think the last three decades we’ve just been trying to translate youth through our eyes.”

Additional Resources:

• Willy Vanderperre: ‘Youth Is an Emotion. Youth Is the Breaking Point’
• Willy Vanderperre Has a New Instagram Project

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Prosper and Martine Assouline’s business began with a passion project: A book dedicated to their love for La Colombe d’Or, a boutique hotel in the South of France; Martine produced the images and Prosper was responsible for the text. But since publishing that first title 30 years ago, Assouline Publishing has gone on to capture the history and visual memory of places like Ibiza and Jaipur, industry icons such as Estée Lauder and Valentino Garavani, as well as fashion houses like Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton.

“The idea was to make a book about the spirit of a place, … to mix the past, the present, the people, and all the DNA,” says Martine.

“I always say to my team in the art department that when a book is finished, we need to start it. … You think it's finished but it’s just beginning,” says Prosper.

This week on The BoF Podcast, founder and editor-in-chief Imran Amed sits down with the Assoulines to learn how this fixture of fashion publishing was born and how they intend to maintain that original creative spark while growing it into a global lifestyle business.

Key Insights:

• While Assouline may be a leading luxury publishing house today, Martine and Prosper were outsiders without prior experience or contacts in this world. They had to learn along the way. “We learned that it was a real job. A real industry, a club where everyone knew each other,” said Prosper Assouline. “We learned while doing - everything,” added Martine.

• Prosper Assouline says the process of creating a new book is architectural and the magic lies in the details. “We didn’t just want to do books because Amazon is full of proposals and other publishers are full of proposals.”

• For Martine, the continual consumption of culture and arts is a key ingredient in Assouline’s formula. “You have to eat culture. You have to go to a museum. You have to see films of today, of yesterday. You have to look at magazines, hear music, all kinds of different books. It's very important.”

• In the Assoulines’ view, what they’re doing is much bigger than simply publishing books. “The idea was not just to make books, it was to create a luxury brand on culture,” said Prosper Assouline.

• Looking towards the future, the luxury publishing house is narrowing its focus on lifestyle. “Lifestyle is the project. It’s our way to live and work, it has always been our direction,” said Martine Assouline.

Additional Resources

• In Age of Online Inspiration, Fashion Creatives Still Love Beautiful Books
• The Business of Fashion Books

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