It's been a good twelve hours or so for the leading men of Moonlight. Yes, everyone is still talking about the Oscars screw-up (and will be for a while), but envelope snafus aside, the Barry Jenkins–directed flick did win Best Picture, and Mahershala Ali took home a statue in the Supporting Actor category. The victories are reason enough for the crew of talented actors—Ali, Trevante Rhodes, Alex R. Hibbert, and Ashton Sanders—to celebrate right now, but Raf Simons wanted to give them one more source of pride this morning: their own Calvin Klein Underwear campaign.
The news follows Rhodes, Hibbert, and Sanders rocking Simons CK designs on the 89th Academy Awards red carpet last evening. Shot by longtime Simons collaborator and lensman Willy Vanderperre, the four actors show off classic CK staples, from briefs to basic tees and—true to Calvin Klein Underwear–campaign form—some skin in the series of photos titled "Revelation." It's Simons's first underwear-specific project for the iconic American label and follows his initial ad campaign and well-received Fall-Winter 2017 runway show as our first look at just what the chief creative officer plans to do with the CK reins in his talented hands.
And one of Simons's first big changes was to swap out the CK logo for a fresh all-caps version from art director and graphic designer Peter Saville, but it looks like he's keeping the old one where it's most often seen: on the elastic band of the brand's underwear (for now at least). The underwear category is a cash cow for the house and the most mass-market of all its many, many wares, which only makes this casting more impressive. To have four African-American men as the faces of a brand as big and far-reaching as Calvin Klein isn't the norm, even in 2017. Then again, having a movie about the gay-black-male experience win a Best Picture Oscar isn't the norm, either. (Something that is very normal for a Calvin Klein Underwear ad: giving guys ab anxiety—and we now have Trevante Rhodes to thank for that.)
