- Brooke Shields thought she "failed" when Calvin Klein didn't keep her on after her controversial ads.
- She later learned she was let go because people started calling the pants "Brooke Shields jeans."
Brooke Shields opened up to comedian Marc Maron about her controversial and iconic 1980s Calvin Klein ad campaign in which the then-teenaged Shields stated that "nothing" came between her and her Calvins. The ads were banned from airing on the CBS Network.
At about the 51-minute mark of the April 3 episode of the "WTF with Marc Maron" podcast, Shields said that she thought she'd "failed" because her contract was meant to be for two years, but she wasn't picked up for the second year after the controversy over her ads.
"I didn't get renewed for the second year, and my feelings were really hurt. I thought I'd failed," she said.
Shields told Maron she later learned from Klein that he attributed her campaign with changing his career in a positive way and that he had to let her go because she was too good at selling the jeans. She said Klein told her people were going into stores and asking for the "Brooke Shields jeans," which defeated the purpose of the ads for his namesake brand.
Maron called the campaign, featuring Shields delivering monologues related to her life and how it related to the evolution of jeans, "an atomic bomb" that "changed the world."
But it sparked controversy because Shields was a young teenager saying lines that could be interpreted as sexually suggestive. Plus, the commercials, directed by prominent photographer Richard Avedon, featured shots that lingered on her thighs and her butt at times.
In Shields' Hulu documentary "Pretty Baby," which explored how Shields was sexualized at a young age without knowing it, Klein laughed about being a "bad boy" for casting the young teenager in provocative ads in archive interview footage.
But Shields, now 57, told Maron she doesn't regret doing the campaign at all. It helped her and her mother Teri Shields, who was also her manager, afford multiple properties and cars. She's also proud of the work, which allowed her to combine modeling and acting.
"The copy was beautiful," the "Endless Love" star said. "The hidden meaning in all of it was so smart to me." She added that the commercials were a "revelation" to her because she was able to be intelligent and sell a product at the same time.
"Did I clock that the camera was panning up my thigh? It was for jeans," she said to Maron, noting that she always knew she was selling a product. She said that in retrospect, she knows what people are talking about when they criticize the ads, but said that Klein knew he was "provocative" and never tried to be anything else.
In an earlier March 2023 interview with Stephen Colbert, the model also addressed why she thought the "uproar" about saying "nothing" comes between her and her "Calvins" in the ad was unnecessary.
"It was a phrase. It wasn't 'I'm not wearing underwear' or 'come' wasn't spelled differently, it was c-o-m-e, I was like, 'what's the problem?'" she joked, calling the backlash "ludicrous."
Shields' documentary "Pretty Baby" is streaming now on Hulu.