Calvin Klein's Spring 2024 Jeremy Allen White campaign — launched January 4, 2024, generated $74M in media impact value and a 30% week-over-week underwear sales lift

January 4, 2024: the campaign that broke through

Calvin Klein launched the first installment of its Spring 2024 men's underwear campaign on January 4, 2024. The campaign featured Jeremy Allen White — at the time the breakout star of FX's 'The Bear,' which had just won the Golden Globe for Best TV Series, Musical or Comedy two days earlier — in a series of stills and videos shot by Mert Alas on New York City rooftops. White's role in 'The Bear' (playing chef Carmen 'Carmy' Berzatto) had been generating significant cultural attention; pairing him with Calvin Klein's signature underwear photography (the brand's iconic black-and-white style rooted in Mark Wahlberg's 1992 campaign) was the strategic pairing of the moment. The result was extraordinary: Launchmetrics data quoted in Fashion Dive and Business of Fashion reported $10.4 million in media impact value within the first 48 hours and $74 million in total media impact value, with underwear sales lifting 30% year-over-year in the week following launch.

The PVH+ Plan: Stefan Larsson's strategy context

PVH Corp had been operating under CEO Stefan Larsson's PVH+ Plan since 2022. The plan focuses on brand desirability and consumer loyalty for Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger as the two flagship brands, with a stated target of growing PVH global revenue to $12.5 billion by 2025. The Spring 2024 campaign was the first major external marketing moment of the plan under Larsson — designed explicitly to demonstrate that the company could generate brand-attention at scale. Q1 2024 marked the first quarter since 2022 when Calvin Klein North America revenue increased, lending real operational support to the marketing-momentum narrative.

Why the campaign worked structurally

Three structural factors made the campaign break through. First, talent-timing: Jeremy Allen White's cultural moment was at peak intensity in early 2024 thanks to 'The Bear' Season 2 and the early-January Golden Globe win. Second, visual-language continuity: the campaign deliberately referenced Calvin Klein's iconic 1980s-90s underwear photography (Brooke Shields 1980; Mark Wahlberg 1992), which made the campaign immediately recognizable as a Calvin Klein cultural moment. Third, social-media virality: rooftop photos of a hot actor in white briefs are exactly the format that performs well on X/Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, so the campaign achieved organic distribution at scale without requiring proportional paid-media investment. The combination is rare — most attempts to engineer viral marketing-moments fail on at least one of those dimensions.

PVH followed up, but the brand needs more than this

PVH and Calvin Klein released a second Jeremy Allen White campaign for Fall 2024, plus additional Calvin Klein campaign extensions with other talent throughout the year. The follow-on campaigns generated coverage and engagement but did not replicate the breakout impact of January 4, 2024 — which is structurally expected. Business of Fashion's 'Why Calvin Klein Needs More Than Jeremy Allen White' analysis pointed out the structural issue: while viral campaigns can generate short-term sales lifts and brand attention, they don't address the longer-term product-portfolio, pricing, and distribution decisions that drive sustained category-leadership in apparel. The Jeremy Allen White work is a successful brand-marketing-moment; the broader Calvin Klein revival is a multi-year project that requires more than viral campaigns to fully execute.

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