Justin Bieber for Calvin Klein – but who would buy his pants?

Last night, Calvin Klein underwear unveiled its latest star – singer Justin Bieber. Given his teenage girl fanbase and the brand’s iconic coolness, is this a mistake?

Justin Bieber in Calvin Klein’s 2015 campaign. Photograph: Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott/Calvin Klein
After several days of drip-fed teasers, last night saw the unveiling of Calvin Klein’s newest underwear model: singer Justin Bieber.
The black and white campaign, shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, features the topless 20-year-old in various poses, staring with his familiar “who me?” look of bemusement alongside Calvin Klein model Lara Stone. Tanned, heavily-tattooed and clearly no stranger to planking, Bieber’s casting makes aesthetic sense. There’s just one issue: if the aim of the campaign is to boost sales, who is it aimed at?
We know that Bieber’s audience is primarily pre-teen and teenage girls. This suggests that the adverts are aimed either at girls with both a disposable income and a desire to turn their boyfriends into Biebers, or boys who either want to look like Bieber (unlikely) and/or please their girlfriends. This might seem sad or misguided: historically, Calvin Klein’s underwear models scream cool, whereas last year, Forbes declared Bieber one of the most overexposed celebrities in the world. But as with Kim Kardashian and her ilk, we know there’s no link between saturation point and selling power.

Bieber’s immeasurable popularity, born on YouTube and nurtured at an impressive rate by social media, has seen him become more of a brand than a singer. Short of selling tampons, Bieber has successfully endorsed everything, from bags and dolls to shower curtains and acne cream, earning an estimated $58m last year. In 2012, his Girlfriend fragrance was the best-selling celebrity licensed perfume. He is a cash cow first, artist second.
With Lara Stone. With Lara Stone. Photograph: Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott/Calvin Klein
The main issues with his casting is not his target market; rather it’s how the rest of the world sees him. In the past, Calvin Klein have cast their underwear models from one of two pools: relative obscurity or celebrities with edge. To wit, former models Antonio Sabàto Jr, Australian Travis Fimmel (who reportedly became the first male model to earn six figures for a single campaign) and Jamie Dornan pre-The Fall, alongside rapper Marky Mark (Mark Wahlberg, who appeared with Kate Moss), actor Djimon Hounsou and footballer Freddie Ljungberg, the latter appearing in one of the brand’s most successful campaigns to date.
Extremely famous and deeply uncool, Bieber is in neither camp. His recent dance with controversy, which saw him charged with assault and dangerous driving, might neatly echo the narrative of proto-Bieber, Mark Wahlberg, who had several drug and assault offences to his name by the time he appeared in his Calvin Klein boxers in 1992, but that’s where the similarity ends. Furthermore, it’s unlikely the brand would actively choose to be seen promoting or courting controversy.
In his defence, Bieber is a longtime fan of the low-rise jean, wearing logoed Calvin Kleins with shameless visibility for several years, for once suggesting this is case of product following placement. It’s just whether you’d buy underwear from a man who sings: “Stay in my backpack for ever, stay in my backpack for ever/ You know I gotta find my spaceship, my planet’s outside there waiting”, six pack or not.

Scout Willis Considers Miley and Rihanna 'Performance Artists'

Photo: Getty Images
The tabloids are right! Celebs really are just like us—at least when it comes to stalking their kids online. “My dad [Bruce Willis] doesn’t have any social media presence, and my mom [Demi Moore] doesn’t any more, either,” Scout Willis said this weekend at Art Basel. “But they’ve figured out how to follow me anyway. They know what I’m doing,” she confirms, referring to her topless #FreeTheNipple photos on Twitter. “Believe me,” she said with a laugh, “they know!”
Okay. But what do they think? “They’re totally behind me,” she said. “They support me 100% in whatever I do, which is such a gift. But I’d be lying if I said they didn’t question my methods sometimes.”
23-year-old Willis was visiting the week long art festival to help Glenn O’Brien host his famous TV Party, a annual ritual that began a decade before she was even born. “When he asked me to come, I didn’t really know what ‘TV Party’ meant,” she admitted, “so I started researching it. And the more I discovered, how Debbie Harry and The Ramones were part of it, but so were modern artists and random people off the street, the more I loved it. It was an honor to be part of something so historical and also so punk rock—but still something so rooted in art.”
Willis also considers megacelebrity to be a kind of art, especially when it defies social norms. “I grew up in the [Hollywood] culture, and it’s always been weird. But lately, celebrity has gotten pushed to a place of such absurdity because of the way we can consume images 24/7. So the cool thing is that now it’s become a kind of performance art, where certain celebrities—especially young women—are taking ownership of the invasiveness that comes with fame, and they’re turning it on its head. Rihanna’s a good example. She’s like, 'I’m gonna do whatever I want,' and that’s cool. People like her, and like Miley Cyrus, they’ve been told they have to play into this role of being a ‘glamorous’ young woman, and they get shit on with this madonna-whore complex. And if they refuse to play the game—be a perfect, prim, good girl and have your shit together and wear what your stylist tells you—then you’re labeled crazy, like Miley.”
“So this reaction against looking perfect, wearing perfect runway looks on the red carpet—there’s obviously a hunger to push against that ideal in a public, visual way. And so Miley and Rihanna have become performance artists, they’ve become surrealist artists, they’ve taken ownership of their own image back. In a much smaller way, I guess, that’s what happened with me and #FreeTheNipple. I made my Instagram public because I wanted to have a little ownership of my public image. Other people had been writing about me and my family for my whole life. And the stories out there—they didn’t sound like me. That moment on social media was the first time I ever made myself public about something I believed in. And I’m really impressed by celebrities like Rihanna and Miley because they’re doing that on a much bigger scale.”
Someone else who impresses Willis: Kim Kardashian. “I admire her a lot,” Willis said earnestly. “Not necessarily from an art perspective, but definitely as a businesswoman. I really do. To parlay being friends with Paris Hilton into making every single member of her family individually famous for basically nothing—you can’t knock that hustle even if you want to.”

Director Jennifer Kent on Her Sundance Horror Hit 'The Babadook'

Photo: Courtesy of Company

Heading home from any big film festival, you can't help gnawing your manicure, knowing that you must have missed something amazing. At Sundance this year, for me it was The Babadook, pegged as a horror film and repeatedly shown at midnight. When I caught up with it later, I just had to talk to its Australian writer-director, Jennifer Kent, if only on the phone from Sydney.
I love this line from your director's statement: "Despite its horror, The Babadook is a love story, a mother moving through the center of hell towards her child."

I wanted this film to be scary and have an emotional quality, but also be quite beautiful.

Is the mother in this story based on an actual woman?

I had a friend who was finding it very hard to love her son. She just couldn't connect with him, didn't like him. I felt he was killing her in a lot of ways emotionally, and it was really having an effect on him. He was seeing what he was calling a monster man everywhere, and the mother found that the only way to deal with it was to see it as real. And then I had this thought—Well, what if it was real?

How are audiences responding to this theme?

I thought maybe I'd be criticized for showing a mother in this light, but I've encountered the opposite reaction. Women have been relieved and grateful to see a complex female character up there who's struggling with motherhood and many other things.

Essie Davis is amazing as the mother, and Daniel Henshall, the boy, is extraordinary. So much is conveyed in his eyes, and you don't expect that from a child.

Davis is a highly skilled, extremely talented actress, but she's not yet someone you'd call a star. And Henshall is a very deep soul. On the set, his mother once asked him why he was so focused here but not at school, and he said, "Well, this is important."

Your movie is singular, in that most horror movies offer up a kind of cookie-cutter menu of brutality and terror.

Horror is a very underrated genre, and it's seen by a lot of people as trash, but when you look at films like Werner Herzog's Nosferatu remake, or the original one, there's a lot of beauty. I think horror gets a bad rap. Its origin lies in fairy tale—these dark, dark stories that were myths, really, and that's why they still survive. They have the power to reach us all.

This article appears in the November 2014 issue of ELLE magazine.

Angelina Jolie Sunglasses Fashion Trends

Angelina Jolie is an American actress and director. She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards, and was named Hollywood's highest-paid actress by Forbes in 2009 and 2011.

For most people, sunglasses protect the eyes from the sun, but Angelina Jolie sunglasses are an accessory, taking an already glorious face and simply adding an exclamation point. Like many celebrities, Angelina tends to wear the grand, face covering sunglasses more to cover than to simply set her eyes from that urge hour glare, but she also is known to buy a pair of shades that can be smart, classy, and revealing. Whether it's on the site or hanging out with her family, she always seems to catch the perfect get for the moment.

Another pair you may collect in the Angelina Jolie sunglasses wardrobe is the Camila by Tom Ford. The plastic frame with a steel bar on top takes that aviator watch Angelina seems to like and converts it into something else. While it does camouflage her eyes more than the Strummer, the frame screams classy, while not throwing a party out to distract you. In a simple, no-nonsense inspect, the Camila takes a different come at the "spacious perceive" sunglasses to veil without making you see like an extra in a bee movie. The last thing anyone wants is to lose their identity with a pair of sunglasses.

Angelina Jolie loves to mix up her sunglasses, but she keeps the same inspect at the same time. Sometimes though she takes a different come, like when she wears her Josephine 2 sunglasses from Christian Dior. It's a more conservative gawk than the aviator glasses, and the D logo is not intrusive. Angelina's strong cheekbones aren't overshadowed, but the glasses stand out, creating the perfect blend and a classic leer. She can wear sunglasses with style, without losing her possess air of class. Check out our website for more about Angelina Jolie sunglasses preferences as well as those of other famed people.

Adele Rocks Rolling In The Deep For 2012 Grammy Performance

Adele swept the 2012 Grammy Awards, there is no doubt about that. She won Best Pop Song and Best Album along with everything in between, the gentleman who produced “Rolling In The Deep” won Producer of the Year. I mean, Adele won everything and before she received the biggest award of the night from one of the biggest divas in the world, Diana Ross herself, she received a standing ovation from the entire audience at the show. See her performance of “Rolling In The Deep” below which elicited that crowd response thanks to Just Jared. So sorry it’s so bootleg, but no one’s got the sexy clip up yet.The stars from the world of music got together on February 12, 2012 at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles to give away the awards for the best of the year that just passed.

British singer Adele, who made her come back with the major event, walked away with six of the awards for which she was nominated, which included Song of the Year, Coveted Album of the Year for her hit ‘Rolling In the Deep’, Best Pop Vocal album and Best Short Form Music Video.
Kanye West took three awards out of the seven categories for which he was nominated, but the rapper skipped the show this year and wasn’t there to receive the award. West won Best Rap album for ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’, while leaving behind Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Lupe Fiasco and Jay Z. Kanye also claimed Best Rap song and Best Rap Collaboration.
The other major winners for the night included Foo Fighters, who took home five Grammys that included Best Rock Album for ‘Wasting Light’, Best Rock Performance for ‘Walk’, Best Long Form Music Video for ‘Back and Forth’ and Best Hard Rock/Metal performance for ‘White Limo’.
American indie folk singer Bon Iver won the award for Best New Artist and the album claimed the Best Alter native album leaving behind Radiohead, ‘Death Cab for Cutie’, ‘My Morning Jacket’ and ‘Foster the People’.
The Grammys night was also lucky for Skriller, who won three Grammys for Best Dance/Electronica album, Best Dance Recording and Best Remix Recording.
Late singer Amy Winehouse and Tony Bennett’s duet ‘Boy and Soul’ won the Best pop Duo/Group Performance.
Bruce Springsteen won Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package for ‘The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town’.
Arade Fire, who were last year’s big winners also won Best Recording package for their film ‘Scenes From The Suburb’.

Kristen Stewart Wanted To Play Snow As A Badass

Kristen Stewart, who stars as the warrior Snow White in Snow White & the Huntsman, opening June 1, has said that she wanted to play Snow as a “badass.”

And that’s just what she does. Her version of an empowered and proactive Snow White doesn’t spend a moment cooking, cleaning and keeping house for a bunch of dwarves. Neither does she idiotically keep letting an old woman giver her poisoned hair pins and an apple which she stupidly eats.

No, Kristen Stewart‘s Snow White realizes very quickly that if anyone is going to defeat the evil Queen Ravenna and take back her rightful throne, then it has to be her. She’s not one to wait around for Prince Charming to rescue her either.

Like the other courageous film heroine who stormed the box office this spring – Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games, Kristen Stewart’s Snow White is a leader of men… and other women.

Stewart revealed that she was "destroyed" by the part, which she said was the most physically demanding role of her career.

Co-star Hemsworth admitted he had suffered from Stewart's strength after he was struck with an accidental "big right hook" from the star while filming.

Just as Katniss defended her fellow Hunger Games contestant, Peeta, Snow White even steps up to save the life of the Huntsman.

Kristen Stewart hits the red carpet for the "Snow White and the Huntsman" screening at the Westwood Village Theater where she talks with Access about playing a strong female character and overcoming her fear of horses for the movie.