“The Billboard of New York”: How Calvin Klein Turned a Billboard Into an Icon

Last year, model Jari Jones was thrilled at the news that she had booked a campaign for H&M. But that night, when her partner asked if the H&M campaign was “the dream job,” she had a different answer. “I was like, ‘It's a stepping stone,’” she tells me. “But I would love to do Calvin Klein.’” The very next day, like magic, a talent coordinator at the brand reached out.

The H&M campaign eventually fell through, but CK stuck around, shooting Jones and a handful of others for the brand’s Pride campaign. She didn’t know where the images would appear, only that she was mostly in them alongside actor Tommy Dorfman and drag queen Pabllo Vittar, but one day in June she got a text from a friend. There was Jones, solo, plastered across the 55-by-75 foot Calvin Klein billboard on Houston Street in New York. “Oh my god,” she remembers thinking. “I have a fucking billboard.” Not just a billboard—the billboard.

In a fashion landscape that’s grown increasingly digital, the Calvin Klein billboard remains a charmingly physical relic—quite possibly the most important physical advertising space on earth. This is thanks largely to its size—like four blue whales stacked on top of one another—but also an alchemical blend of location and legacy. 

For nearly 20 years, it’s been the spot models spend a career posing, strutting, and smizing towards, as well as a rotating shrine to hunks like Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes, and rappers like Meg Thee Stallion. For those without Bieber-sized fame already, the billboard has the power to supersize careers. And for the brand, it’s a powerful weapon whether sharing either new product or new philosophies. All this in a world and industry utterly dominated by digital advertising. It is undoubtedly the most iconic billboard in the world. How did that happen? And what is that description really worth in 2021?

The team at Calvin Klein doesn’t know exactly when the brand first started using the billboard. Representatives pin its birth to sometime between 1999 and 2007, blaming a lapse in the brand’s history for the wide range of possibilities. Outfront, the company that handles the billboard space, says it’s been working with Calvin Klein for 15-plus years, meaning since at least 2006. (References to the billboard itself date back to 2004, when a threesome called the billboard home. “Too much porno already,” one passerby opined to the NY Daily News.) Since its inception, the billboard has become a “landmark for the brand,” Linh Peters, Calvin Klein’s chief marketing officer, says.

Other brands have signature landmarks—Paul Smith has its irresistibly Instagrammable pink wall in Los Angeles, Cartier its mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York—but none compare to Calvin’s. Chris Gadek, a vice president at AdQuick, a company that connects advertisers to out-of-home advertising like billboards, says there is nothing quite like the one on the corner of Houston and Lafayette. There are locations, like Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, that attract the same types of (stylish, affluent) customers; there are billboards in Cleveland and Indianapolis that “easily dwarf the size of the Calvin Klein billboard,” he says. And in terms of recognizable long-running billboards, it’s hard to beat the pun-happy billboard on a stretch of highway 95 near South Carolina for a restaurant called South of the Border. (“Time For a Paws?” one billboard reads.)

However, the Calvin Klein billboard is “the perfect formula for advertising,” Gadek says. “The stores are nearby, the affluent communities are there. There’s the opportunity to go viral because it's a large metro area. So, there are other iconic locations, but the Calvin Klein one is unique.”

With time, it’s become a fashion Mount Rushmore—if Mount Rushmore could swap in new presidents after every election. With few exceptions, the Calvin Klein billboard is changed over every two weeks. This is a godsend for the brand’s executives, who have plenty of talent desperate for 75-foot versions of themselves. Caroline Curtis, a longtime representative for the brand, says that nearly all of CK’s models and endorsers ask specifically if they can be on the billboard. “The fact that we are able to swap it out as frequently as we do is a really special thing,” she says. “Because it means that, of a campaign cast of 12 talents, more than one or two get featured.”

Models and celebrities on the billboard appreciate how unique the opportunity is in a world increasingly dominated by banner ads on websites and sponsored Instagram posts. The Calvin Klein billboard is a rare chance to be part of something bigger than you—or, to be more precise, 533 times bigger. “I was like, ‘Instead of just posting a picture of myself, let's post a picture of the picture: a picture of the billboard,’” says designer Heron Preston, whose recent collab with the brand put him on the billboard. And, as you might expect, being on the world’s most important billboard does wonders for a career.

Kellan Lutz was an international heartthrob, introduced to the world as a six-packed vampire in the movie franchise Twilight, when he starred in his 2010 Calvin Klein campaign. In his telling, a prominent role in Twilight was nice, but nothing compared to the power of a certain New York billboard. “I was blessed to have already had success in my acting career and had some level of notoriety and a fan base because of the Twilight movies,” Lutz tells me over email, “but Calvin Klein, and this billboard specifically, made me visible to the rest of the world.” For many, like Lutz, the billboard can kick a career into turbo drive.

For Jones, the billboard was “the fire that ignited everything,” she says. Jones is the first Black trans model to appear on the billboard, and her campaign arrived in the summer of 2020, in the midst of a historic civil rights movement. “We were talking about just being human,” she says of the conversations during that time, “but this is also about being celebrated, being uplifted, being empowered. Media hasn't shown that forever, especially for Black trans women, let alone just Black people in general.” She remembers protests seeing her image hovering just above crowds of protesters. “It was so powerful,” she says.

And a placement like that has the power to permanently reorient a career. Since her month-plus on the billboard last summer, Jones says she’s gotten more jobs and better pay specifically because of her former prominent perch. “My managers use it as leverage,” Jones says. “When they're talking to other clients, they’re like, ‘She just had a billboard.’ Even after a year, it's still prevalent.”

It doesn’t always work so smoothly. Reid Rohling was working as a model to make ends meet in New York when he was cast in a Calvin Klein campaign in the mid 2010s. Without even realizing it, he became one half of the first-ever gay couple to appear on the billboard in 2015, when his campaign with then-boyfriend Ethan James Green went up at the corner of Broadway and Lafayette. This should have been the moment Rohling’s fame skyrocketed, but he had a different experience with the billboard—and the way it was used to the brand’s advantage, not his. “It was a very good opportunity to increase my visibility but visibility isn't pay,” Rohling says. “I remember at the time thinking, ‘Wow, Calvin's pay is pretty low for this global campaign’ and asking my agent about it.” According to Rohling, his agent relayed that the pay doesn’t have to be great, “because no one's gonna say no to a Calvin Klein campaign.” Rohling’s since stopped modeling but he concedes that moment of his short-lived career is immortal. “I always think if I ever die in a weird, tragic way very young that [campaign’s] going to be the opening line of my obituary,” he laughs.

Nothing about a physical billboard screams innovation. But over the past five years, Calvin Klein’s made the billboard a platform to broadcast firsts: the first gay couple, the first Black trans woman in Jones, and as the first plus-size woman (the rapper Chika, featured in a campaign that purposefully echoed Kate Moss’s iconic CK photos).

The brand sees the billboard as a way to make a larger statement—one that may just so happen to translate to selling more of those undies. “It's really important to understand who our customer is, and understand from a cultural standpoint what's happening,” Peters, the Calvin Klein executive, says. There is really no better way for Calvin Klein to insert themselves into that conversation than the billboard. It is a 75-by-55 foot canvas for the brand to “show support for the things that matter to our customer,” Peters says.

The scale of the billboard means that it lands like a comet, causing tremors across the modeling industry. Jones reports that not only has she been getting more modeling offers, but that she’s seen an increase in Black trans models across important fashion campaigns. That’s no doubt been inspired in part by brands finally seeing the beauty (and profitability) in diversity in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, but Jones holds up her campaign as proof-positive that inclusivity doesn’t have to cut into the bottom line. “I feel like it was such a ripple effect, not only for my own career, but for a lot of Black trans women who have been trying to tap into this industry,” Jones says. “I want people to see that we can do it and see that it's a good business move as well.”

But over the years, the billboard has also been the center of controversy. In 2009, members of the American Family Association got all wound up by a campaign that featured a potential foursome. In 2016, a setup that described model Klara Kristin as a “seducer” and rapper Fetty Wap as a “money maker” led to accusations of sexism. As far as Kristin was concerned, the response meant mission accomplished. “What I remember the most is the media hysteria where I found myself in the middle of a sexism debate, which I did not expect at all,” Kristin says now. “To see a debate on Fox News about a photo of me was pretty strange. I guess the campaign did its job.” Peters understands how previous campaigns can seem purposefully provocative, but thinks of the billboard's role a little differently. The magnitude of the billboard means it can “challenge the status quo,” Peters says, “and I feel like anytime you do that as a brand, it might be labeled as provocation.”

Provocateur, boundary pusher, star-maker, mammoth canvas—whatever you call the billboard, the sum of its parts is what makes it one of New York’s most enduring landmarks. “Of course the most famous thing about SoHo is Houston Street, and I believe that the most significant landmark of Houston Street is the Calvin Klein billboard,” says Ronnie Fieg, the founder of Kith. “It serves as a beacon to people to let them know they have officially entered SoHo. As a native New Yorker, that billboard has been ingrained in my life for as long as I can remember. Whether you’ve been here or not, you’ve seen it in a movie or a show or a magazine. That significance still rings true to me.” Fieg’s flagship store is just down the street; Kith collaborated with Calvin Klein on a collection and campaign that went up on the billboard last September.

The billboard’s success is a testament to the power of endurance in a city where constant changeover is the standard. The SoHo fixture has been around long enough to become nostalgic—and, more practically, a landmark to navigate the neighborhood. “When people ask our location, we usually give our address and if customers are still confused, oftentimes we say, ‘That building with the Calvin Klein ads,’” says Helen Chiu, an executive with Win Restaurant Supply, the business that occupies the building directly underneath the billboard. “It is nice to be associated with the Calvin Klein billboard.”

A place like New York isn’t exactly lacking for landmarks. Still, Calvin Klein has managed to carve out its spot in the city—a tourist attraction in the heart of downtown New York. “That's our Times Square,” designer Heron Preston says. “I moved here in 2004, skating down Houston Street, dodging traffic. It really just has this location and it has this presence on the street. That Calvin Klein billboard is the billboard of New York.”