Advertising: What's It All About, Calvin?

By ALEX PRUD''HOMME

"Jeans," intones Calvin Klein, "are about sssexx."

He first discovered that truth in 1980, when 15-year-old Brooke Shields cooed that nothing came between her and her Calvins, "nothing." That ad campaign ruffled a lot of feathers, sold a lot of jeans and spawned a hypothalamus-numbing host of imitators.

Though Klein has since been distracted by selling perfumes with names like Obsession and Escape, he's once again focusing on the jeans war, and his opening salvo is a 116-page ad supplement that accompanies the October issue of Vanity Fair. It is touted as the largest ad supplement for a consumer magazine in U.S. history, and industry sources say Klein spent more than $1 million to produce and place it.

Totally textless, utterly black-and-white, the thick, glossy portfolio photographed by Bruce Weber is a jumbled pastiche of naked bodies, black leather jackets, Harleys and tattoos, with cameo roles by a crying baby and a urinal. Biker chicks straddle their "hogs" and rough up their men. Rippling hunks wield electric guitars like chain saws, grab one another, sometimes themselves. Oh, yes, there are even a few incidental photographs of jeans, most of which are being wrestled off taut bodies or used as wet loincloths.

"The book," says Klein, "is a fantasy about a rock concert. You see the band onstage, backstage, after the show. The wild and crazy groupies. The people living in the motorcycle world. It's about excitement. Hot and sweaty rock 'n' rollers who wear nothing but jeans and skin. It's about denim. People love it."

It's also about money. And troubled retailers and advertising executives love that. Women's Wear Daily reported that Klein plans to spend about $10 million on jeans advertising this year alone. Last week he staged his first all-jeans fashion show -- based on the supplement and featuring a fabric dubbed "dirty denim" -- in New York City. Magazine publishers, buffeted by an industry-wide decline of 10.4% in ad pages, are also heartened. Images from the supplement will be appearing as ads in various magazines for months to come.

The idea of attaching advertising supplements to a magazine with plastic wrap caught on in the mid-1980s, though the number has waned because of expensive postal regulations. Even Klein's booklet will be wrapped with only 250,000 or so copies of Vanity Fair (out of a total circulation of about 850,000), and will not be available at newsstands except in Southern California and metropolitan New York.

Is Klein's splash going to grow into a full-blown trend? "I'm sure there will be imitators," says Ronald Galotti, publisher of Vanity Fair. "But we probably won't do it again." Fashion magazines, however, have been hard hit by the recession, and are likely to be inspired. Elle slapped a videotape, a scented card and an order form for Estee Lauder's SpellBound perfume onto 14,000 copies of its September issue in 10 cities. "It's terrific. The excitement factor works," says Elle's publisher, Lawrence Burstein, who says he's working on similar ideas for the future.

Not everyone is enthralled. Some find the material offensive, the message obscure, the numbers questionable. "Are sales going to offset the cost of Calvin's 116 pages? I suspect not," says a magazine-publishing executive. "His supplement is more of an ego piece." But Klein has no doubts. "People get the message," he says enthusiastically. "It's big, it's sexy and it's so right."