Issues@Hand
AFA initiatives, Christian activism, news briefs
October 1995 – Within two weeks after Calvin Klein began a national advertising campaign using teenage models in sexually suggestive poses, AFA’s efforts to end the campaign paid off.
Immediately after learning of the ads, AFA President Donald E. Wildmon wrote to 50 of the leading clothing retailers asking them to put pressure on Calvin Klein to end the campaign. In the overnight letter, Wildmon promised that if Calvin Klein refused to end the campaign and the retailers continued to sell Calvin Klein jeans, AFA would put pickets in front of the retail outlets and call for a boycott of their stores.
Among those retailers AFA wrote was the Dayton Hudson Company. The Wall Street Journal reported: “Retailers were putting pressure on the designer. Stephen Watson, chairman of the department-store division of Dayton Hudson in Minneapolis, which includes Marshall Fields, Dayton and Hudson stores in nine states, says he urged Mr. Klein to pull the ads.”
Within a week of AFA making the letters public, Calvin Klein took out a full page ad in the New York Times announcing their cancellation of the campaign. Klein said that his campaign had been “misunderstood” by AFA. However, others saw the issue differently.
“Klein didn’t end the campaign because it had been misunderstood. He dropped it because it had been clearly understood. He was producing extremely explicit sexually oriented ads using teenage models and appealing to the base instincts of young teenagers and preteens,” Wildmon said.
“The dialogue was very suggestive and it was clear the models were kids,” said Bill Bradley, director of sales at WCCO-TV in St. Paul-Minneapolis. Bradley refused to air the ads.
U.S. News & World Report said the ads featured “denim-clad teenagers in provocative poses.” The Boston Herald described the ads as “showing scantily clad young teens in come-hither poses” which “bordered on child pornography.”
The Herald went on to say that Klein “... bowed to a burgeoning boycott campaign, led by groups like the American Family Association and the Catholic League...Way to go, Family Association. Way to go, Catholic League. We hope your success breeds imitation.”
Wildmon said that because of AFA’s effectiveness in promoting boycotts in the past, and because of wide-spread disgust with Klein’s advertisements, their actions were effective. “The retailers did not want AFA supporters standing at their door passing out leaflets stating that the store was participating in the profits from Klein’s sexual exploitation of children,” he stated.
Oddly enough, NBC’s Dateline was prepared to do a story on AFA’s efforts. The network sent a crew to AFA’s offices to do an interview with Wildmon, but upon learning that AFA’s efforts had been so effective that they forced Klein to drop the campaign, they decided not to do the story. “We were told that since Klein dropped the campaign, there was no story. NBC was prepared to do a story until they learned that our efforts had succeeded,” he said.
AFA has asked U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate Calvin Klein for violation of the federal child pornography laws. AFA Director of Governmental Affairs Pat Trueman hand delivered the letter asking Reno to make the investigation. AFA has established that at least one, and possibly more, of the models in the ads was under 18 years of age. Federal law does not require that the models be nude in order for the law to apply.
In fact, it was reported that pedophiles were already trading some of the ads on the Internet. The New York Post reported: “Calvin Klein pulled the plug on his controversial new ad campaign featuring underwear-baring teens when it became clear that the photos were pornographic – at least to the aficionados of ‘kiddie porn.’ The pedophiles who buy underground magazines and surf the Internet were said to be collecting and trading the posters plastered all over city buses earlier this month.”
Reno had not, at press time, responded to AFA’s request for an investigation of Klein. AFA asked Klein to make the ages of the models public, but Klein had refused to do so at press time. AFA urges supporters to write Reno and urge her to investigate the possibility that federal child pornography laws have been violated. The address is: Attorney General Janet Reno, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC 20530. 
