Excited for The Beguiled and finding the two months before its release a little too much to handle? Rest easy (or easier): there’s several minutes of new Sofia Coppola-directed material for you to take in; it’s just not exactly what you probably expect. Putting her stamp further on the culture and earning what’s likely a nice paycheck all the while, she’s directed the spring campaign videos for Calvin Klein’s women’s underwear line, reuniting with Kirsten Dunst (of The Beguiled and The Virgin Suicides) and Rashida Jones (of A Very Murray Christmas) while bringing along a slate of models to fill out this ensemble-of-sorts.
Says Coppola:
“I wanted young women to have something that treated them with respect and understanding. I just love Calvin Klein’s whole very American idea of women—and men, too,” she says. “The old Avedon commercials with Andie MacDowell, the ’90s images of Kate Moss…I feel like those images made a big impression on me in my formative years.”
Further, Calvin Klein claims the director “feels proud to fit into the brand’s storied tradition of scantily clad iconography.” Those looking for some eye candy will get scantily clad iconography, though the sort shot through her distanced, Euro-inspired aesthetic, a particular approach emphasized by this campaign’s numerous interview segments. Perhaps not an essential addition to the canon, but a nice addition is certainly better than nothing.
Watch below:
No one shows us women in quite the same way Sofia Coppola does. Beginning in 1999, with her adaptation of “The Virgin Suicides,” the writer-director has made a series of unique, deeply atmospheric films filled with characters the likes of which none of us had ever seen before. “I wanted young women to have something that treated them with respect and understanding,” Coppola says. And in her stories that speak to the meaningful moments of adolescence and young adulthood — a first crush, a first kiss — all appointed and photographed in accordance with her elegantly pop aesthetic, she has done just that.
It is with this same mission and style that Coppola has created the new Calvin Klein underwear campaign celebrating women — one which she feels proud to fit into the brand’s storied tradition of scantily clad iconography. “I just love Calvin Klein’s whole very American idea of women — and men, too,” she says. “The old Avedon commercials with Andie MacDowell, the ’90s images of Kate Moss…I feel like those images made a big impression on me in my formative years.”