Advertising: What's It All About, Calvin?

Jeans genius Klein pumps lots of cash and controversy -- but not many jeans -- into a magazine supplement

"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...

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