Calvin Klein Underwear

Calvin Klein Underwear is the intimates line of the New York fashion house Calvin Klein, launched in the early 1980s and usually dated to 1982. It sells men's briefs, trunks and boxer briefs and women's bras, bralettes and briefs, most of them marked by a wide elastic waistband woven with the designer's name. Since 2013 the line has been owned outright by PVH Corp., the American apparel group that bought Calvin Klein in 2002.

Before the briefs: the house and the jeans

Calvin Klein founded his company in 1968 with his childhood friend Barry K. Schwartz. It began with coats and suits. Jeans came later, and they made the brand famous: in 1974 Klein designed a tight-fitting signature jean that grossed $200,000 in its first week.

The jeans also set the house's tone in advertising. In 1980 Richard Avedon photographed the 15-year-old Brooke Shields for a denim campaign. In the best-known spot she announced that nothing came between her and her Calvins. Some television stations refused to run the ads. The controversy did the brand no harm. Underwear, launched a couple of years later, inherited both the attention and the method.

The pole vaulter on Santorini

The image that introduced the men's underwear was taken by Bruce Weber on the Greek island of Santorini. His subject was Tom Hintnaus, a Brazilian-born American pole vaulter, standing in white briefs against a whitewashed chimney. American Photographer magazine later listed it among "10 Pictures That Changed America," and it is often described as the defining image of the male body as an object of desire in 1980s advertising.

Hintnaus had a dry view of the result. He said he had worked to be the best pole vaulter in the world and ended up better known for putting on a pair of briefs.

The garment itself was simple. What changed was the presentation: men's underwear photographed with the care usually given to perfume or couture, on an athlete rather than a catalog model, with the name on the waistband in plain view.

1992: boxer briefs, Ritts and Wahlberg

The next turn came under John Varvatos, head of menswear design from 1990 to 1995. Calvin Klein promoted the boxer brief, a cut that combined a boxer's leg with a brief's close fit, and in 1992 hired the rapper Mark Wahlberg, then known as Marky Mark, to wear it. Herb Ritts shot the first black-and-white print ads. The campaign later moved to magazines and television, sometimes with Wahlberg alone and sometimes paired with a young British model named Kate Moss. The boxer briefs promotion has been called one of the great apparel revolutions of the century, which is a big claim for a pair of shorts, but the cut did become a men's standard.

Kate Moss and the women's line

Moss's work for the house began in that 1992 pairing. Her first solo Calvin Klein campaign followed in 1993. In 1996 a set of black-and-white images of her slight frame helped push the phrase "heroin chic" into general use and drew criticism over the look it promoted. For women's underwear the effect was lasting: the soft, unpadded cotton bralette and matching brief became a Calvin Klein staple, a contrast to the molded push-up bra that dominated mall lingerie in the same decade.

Who owns the waistband

Calvin Klein's commercial history is a story of licences. From 1997 the jeans, underwear and swimwear businesses were controlled by the Warnaco Group, the American apparel maker. In December 2002 Calvin Klein Inc. itself was sold to Phillips-Van Heusen, now PVH, for about $400 million in cash plus stock and future royalties. For a decade PVH owned the brand while Warnaco made and sold the underwear under licence.

That split ended in February 2013, when PVH bought Warnaco for $2.8 billion. The deal brought Calvin Klein's formal wear, underwear, jeans and sportswear under one owner for the first time in years. The licence terms that had governed the underwear ran far into the future, through at least 2044, which helps explain why PVH preferred to buy the licensee than wait.

The logo as the product

The visible waistband was the real invention. The elastic was meant to show above low trousers, and it did, from the 1990s onward. Many labels later copied the device, from sportswear brands to luxury houses, and the logo waistband is now a standard feature of men's and women's basics at every price. Readers comparing cuts can see the women's equivalents in our bralette and hipster entries, the two shapes most associated with the women's line.

Last updated October 7, 2026