In a new series of ads for Calvin Klein, Sadie Sink – the 24-year-old Hollywood actress best-known for Stranger Things – can be seen posing in nothing but jeans and a bra. The reason I mention this is not, I promise, because I'm a grubby old man. It's because I believe that something about these ads is politically very significant.
In short: the woman in them is good looking.
When I was young, few people would have considered "Attractive Woman Hired to Model in Ad Campaign" to be front-page news. (Not that this necessarily deterred newspapers from putting the relevant pictures on the front page, but you know what I mean.) A few years ago, however, something peculiar happened. Major fashion and beauty brands started filling their ads with people who are, shall we say, less conventionally attractive.
Take Calvin Klein itself. In 2019, it ran a billboard campaign in which its jeans were modelled by a woman who was unmistakably – in the euphemism favoured by women's magazines – "plus-size". Or, as one rather less generous commentator put it: "morbidly obese".
Then, in 2023, Calvin Klein ran an ad showing a sports bra being modelled by a transgender man (in other words, a biological female). This transgender man also happened to be "plus-size". And to have a beard as big as Brian Blessed's.

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