Calvin Klein has faced backlash on social media after a woke advertisement resurfaced from its Pride 2022 campaign. The promotion featured Bappie Kortram from the Netherlands, who claims to be a woman. Kotram can be seen with a beard and chest hair while wearing a Calvin Klein bra and underwear. According to Kortram’s advertisement agency Bappie is “a trans man who has not had top surgery yet.”
Danish physician Dr. Anastasia Maria Luopis tweeted a picture of the promotion with the caption, “Calvin Klein wants to go broke.”
Kortram said in a social media post, “There aren’t enough words in any language to describe how much I love Jamilla and how much this shoot means for us both. The fact that we were selected for the pride collection of Calvin Klein makes us proud on many intersecting levels. We were both about to enter new chapters in our life. Jamilla and her gastric sleeve and my upcoming top surgery. These are beautiful memories ( and mammories! lol ). To showcase unapologetic fat love, fat pride, fat cis bodies, fat trans bodies, fat joy.”
One Twitter user, commenting beneath Loupis’s post, said, “What do they think they are achieving by replacing unrealistic beauty standards with unrealistic ugly standards Just more evidence that we don’t live in a ‘free market’ as our rulers say, but in an ideological oligarchy.”
Another user said, “This is the equivalent of abstract art for the fashion world. They have giving up on the beautiful and instead now present to you what you could find at any trailer park.”
After ensuing backlash the company responded with a statement on the promotion. “We embrace this platform as an inclusive and respectful environment for individualism and self-expression. At Calvin Klein, we tolerate everything except intolerance— any intolerant commentary will be removed, and any accounts issuing hateful statements may be blocked,” the company said.
This is far from the first time Calvin Klein has gone woke with its ads. It did so as well in an infamous “pregnant man” ad in May of 2022, as Steven Crowder mocked on Twitter, saying:
We have a huge baby formula shortage! The Left says men are the root of all problems, so it’s only fair to blame pregnant men right? I wonder what Calvin Klein has to say about this. #calvinklein
What’s happening with the shortage is hurting many mothers and children, forcing them to overpay for something so vital. If this keeps up, children may die… We’ll be going over why this may be happening on the show today.
Similarly, Alejandro Avila joked, in an article for Outkick, “The marketing team at Calvin Klein believes that men can get pregnant, so it must be true.”
Continuing, Avila said, “Social media was quick to point out that Klein’s posturing new poster was catering to a rare few, meaning it was probably made for brownie points with the woke mob.”
"*" indicates required fields
