Brooke Shields has spoken candidly in a new documentary about how “naive” she was when she modeled for suggestive Calvin Klein ads as a teenager in the 1980s.
“There was nothing about me that ever had any idea that it was anything sexual,” the actor and model, now 57, said of the ads, adding, “It’s a little naive.”
Shields’ new Hulu documentary, “Pretty Baby,” takes its name from the 1978 film in which she played a 12-year-old girl forced into sex. The documentary came out on Sunday.
In his controversial Calvin Klein ads, the teenage Shields delivered pun-heavy puns and posed suggestively in the brand’s jeans. ADVERTISING It featured Shields reading, doing math, and joking while sitting, lying down, or showing off her flexibility. “You want to know what’s going on between me and my Calvins? Nothing,” he famously said in an announcement.
The campaign was pitched to Shields as a “cinematic commercial series” that was meant to be “a play on what jeans are,” he said in the documentary.
“I jumped at the opportunity because he was playing,” Shields explained. “It was just an exercise in memorization, in literary reference, and I had to be clever to do it,” she added.
Lynn Goldsmith via Getty Images
The shields have spoken to Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” last week about the controversy surrounding the Calvin Klein ads.
“I was deemed inappropriate and [the Calvin ad] was it just porn and how can i talk about something that comes between me and my calvins? Like the expression… it was an expression I used all the time about my dog… my horse. I told myself that nothing comes between me and my dog or between me and my mom,” she said.
she told Vogue in 2021, who had no idea the phrase had a double sexual meaning when he shot the ad.
“If they meant a double entendre, they didn’t explain it to me,” Shields said. “If he explained to me, why? Would he have understood otherwise? It did not bother me; it just didn’t get into my kind of psyche because it’s something obviously sexual, sexualized in a way.”
He added that people thought it was “much more skilled than he ever really was.
The opening of the new documentary focuses on how the “Lipstick Jungle” star was objectified from a young age, thanks to a successful career as a child model and the films she made between the ages of 11 and 15: “baby price” and 1980’s “Blue Lagoon,” a steamy survival film based on Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s 1908 novel of the same name.
In the documentary, Shields’ childhood friend and actress Laura Linney described the films as ones you “couldn’t make” today, adding that they would be considered “soft porn” or “pimping”.
With Shields’ early successes centered around her looks, it’s understandable that the teenager would be eager to star in an ad campaign she believed would showcase her intellect.
“I think the hardest thing for me was knowing who I was,” Shields explained at the start of the documentary.
“I had this thing about not looking in the mirror,” she added. “I was just born with this face. And so I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to think about things I could control, things that could have happened without beauty.
