Jude Bellingham strips down for Calvin Klein’s new underwear campaign

Calvin Klein/Oliver Hadlee Pearch

Jude Bellingham is the new face of Calvin Klein underwear. Shot by photographer Oliver Hadlee Pearch, the campaign shows the Real Madrid and England midfielder against a completely white backdrop, wearing pieces from the brand’s Icon Cotton Stretch line, and comes with a short promotional video.

The images keep the set to a minimum. There are no props and no location, only simple framing and a white background, so the attention rests on the player’s body and on the underwear itself. The approach draws on one of the most recognisable visual codes in Calvin Klein’s advertising history, in which a single figure on a neutral background carries the whole picture and the product sits at the centre of it.

What Jude Bellingham wears in the Calvin Klein campaign

The campaign is built around several styles from the Icon Cotton Stretch line: the Boxer Slim, the Boxer Brief, the Low Rise Trunk and the Hip Brief. A fifth piece, the Icon Cotton Stretch Shine Trunk, also appears in the series.

In the video, Bellingham starts in a tank top and jeans and ends in his boxers alone. The soundtrack recalls the chanting of football crowds, linking the clip to the stadium setting the midfielder is best known for, while the styling stays as stripped back as the stills.

Who else has fronted Calvin Klein underwear campaigns

The choice of Bellingham follows a casting pattern the American label has used for several years. Some of its most recognisable recent adverts have been built around public figures whose reach goes beyond their own field, including Jeremy Allen White, Bad Bunny, Jung Kook and Alexander Skarsgård.

Sport has been part of that casting too. Before Bellingham, the brand had already worked with footballers Virgil van Dijk, Son Heung-min and Trent Alexander-Arnold on its underwear campaigns. The new campaign adds another player to that list and keeps football among the regular sources of faces for the brand’s advertising, alongside actors and musicians.