“You know what gets between me and my Calvin’s? Nothing,” Brooke Shields says to the camera in her now infamous Calvin Klein ad. At just 15, Brooke became the face of the brand’s jeans in 1980, starring in a string of proactive TV and print ads that swept the world into a frenzy.
In her new documentary Pretty Baby, now available on Hulu, Brooke examines that time in her life. Though she’s addressed the controversial ads in the past, for the first time, she admits that she was “naïve” to ignore just how sexualized the campaign was. “ I jumped at the chance because it was acting,” Brooke explains in the documentary on why she and her mother Terri Shields, agreed to take the job to begin with. “It was just an exercise in memorization, in literary reference — I had to be smart to do it.”
No sooner did the first ad air or the first billboard of the teen model go up in Times Square did a flood of anger from parents and adults rise. Many insisted that the ads were overtly sexual, going so far as to call them child pornography. The documentary shows a teenage Brooke sitting in countless interviews, defending posing for Calvin and being labeled a sex kitten. In present day, Brooke looks back at that time a bit differently.
“There was nothing in me that ever had the idea it was sexual,” she says in the doc, but with a laugh, she admits, “that’s slightly naïve.”
However, the point of the documentary and the stance Brooke has taken on the campaign is that people sexualized her, she never did it to her self. While talking about the documentary with Stephen Colbert the week before, she addressed the scandal as Stephen explained that CBS, at the time, refused to run the ads.
“I was called deemed inappropriate,” she said, “ and [the Calvin ad} was just pornography and how can I talk about something coming between me and my Calvin’s? Like the phrase — that was a phrase I used all the time about my dog … my horse. I was like, nothing comes between me and my dog or me and my mommy.”
She added, “The thought that you could take that one line and have that set the precedent for what were revolutionary commercials I mean, I do this whole sort of acrobatic thing, reciting what the meaning of a gene is and how they’re fundamental and determining the characteristics of an individual and blah, blah. I had this whole thing memorized. It was a minute long. The next day I had a pop quiz. And it was what is the gene and I just recited the whole thing and gotten A+. And I was like, ‘see that the business isn’t destroying me.’ And it was amazing to me that they always seemed to, with me, pull out the lowest common denominator.”
As for the man himself, Calvin Klein stands behind having the actress-supermodel at 15 years old in the campaign fresh off two hit films, The Blue Lagoon and Pretty Baby. “Brooke has a fresh, sexy beauty,” the designer, 80, told PEOPLE. “We were launching jeans and wanted to say something new … It was fun, innocent and yes, sexy as hell,”
Brooke Shields: Pretty Baby premiered April 3 on Hulu.