Rosalía shows us more than her underwear: when sex dictates the rules of fashion

Singer Rosalía is the latest star of Calvin Klein's now legendary underwear ads, just as Jeremy Allen White did last year, and, some time ago, Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg, among many others. Another campaign that, apart from the brand's recognizable logo clearly visible on the underwear's elastic, uses normative bodies—thin, toned, Caucasian, young, without disabilities—as a clear example of a fundamental maxim in advertising: sex sells. According to a study by the Journal of Advertising (2018), more than 60% of fashion and lingerie ads still use hypersexualized bodies to attract attention, a trend that shows that, despite some progress, the "perfect" body remains a key selling point. But when did fashion become so closely linked to sexuality?

One of the starting points is found precisely in another iconic advertisement in history, the one starring Brooke Shields in 1981, also for Calvin Klein. Richard Avedon was in charge of the photography for this piece in which Shields, wearing tight jeans, whispered into the camera: "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." The problem? The clear sexualization of Brooke Shields, just 15 years old, which many interpreted as an allusion to the world of pornography. It was the first mass-market fashion advertisement to make sex the explicit and central message, using controversy as a mass marketing tool. Despite the scandal it generated and the fact that many television networks refused to broadcast it, Calvin Klein, far from being aware of the door it opened, simply responded: "I'm a bad boy... what do you want?", encouraged by the fact that the brand's sales had soared spectacularly. Needless to say, after this ad, many brands followed suit: Benetton with Oliviero Toscani exposing a man dying of AIDS, Dolce & Gabbana with ads aestheticizing gang rape, and Tom Ford, for Gucci, normalizing the humiliation of women. From then on, scandal and remorseless provocation became the common denominator of advertising campaigns.

The next Calvin Klein ad that marked the future of fashion advertising was the one starring model Kate Moss and rapper Mark Wahlberg in 1992. Moss, just 18 years old, displayed an extremely slim body and a vulnerable gaze. A vulnerability that wasn't feigned, as she later expressed the anguish she felt in that sexualized filming environment. But it was precisely that fragility, that excessively infantilized aesthetic, and that air of defenselessness that the campaign was seeking, and thanks to it, they managed to increase interest in the brand and the awareness of the ad, selling underwear by the bucketful. These campaigns also set a precedent: although minors are no longer sexualized today, young, slim, and perfectly molded bodies are still omnipresent in advertising.

Fortunately, we've made progress: we will no longer so easily tolerate the sexualization of teenagers like Brooke Shields. But perfectly molded, sexualized bodies still dominate, as if sex were the only possible language for selling underwear. Rosalía's ad clearly demonstrates this: she controls the narrative, but the body is still the star. We may think that selling panties and bras without a touch of seduction is impossible, but we mustn't forget that the primary objective of underwear should be the wearer, not the beholder: comfort, confidence, and personal pleasure first, and then the gaze of others.