In the dim light you can discern a body. It’s crumpled, contorted. There seems to be white powder in its hair, white makeup on its skin. It rises to pose in bent shapes. At times it also moves quickly. But then it sinks back down and the lights go out.
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
That’s a description of the first section of Andrea Miller’s “Blush.” With more bodies, it could be a description of several other sections of this hourlong dance. Created in 2009, it was revised for a run at BAM Fisher that started on Tuesday.
In it, six members of Ms. Miller’s company, Gallim Dance, crawl and drag themselves across the floor. They squat and splay their hands by their stomachs or under their chins, as if to say, “Here are my guts,” or “They might spurt out.” There is something bestial about them, as they move in packs and fling one another around. Sometimes looking hunted, they more often look wounded, sick, wasting away.
In 2009, criticism of “Blush” focused on its similarity to the work of the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, a mentor to Ms. Miller. The derivativeness is still evident, but a deeper problem is the sense of young dancers playing dress-up in someone else’s affectations.
Occasionally, a more genuine quality peeks through. A long duet of wrestling by Austin Tyson and Dan Walczak is relatively free of mannerisms. Their running in circles and the music to which they do it — Arvo Part’s “Fratres” — are the opposite of original, but the struggle persuades through humble means. Later, a Wolf Parade anthem brings out cathartic smiles in the cast, as if everyone were happy to stop pretending to be diseased.
Ms. Miller clearly believes in sweat, and as the vigorous dancing progresses, the white makeup gets splotchy and blood rises under the dancers’ skin, an effect that makes them look like victims of sloppy sunblock application. Like the dancers’ effort, the red coloring isn’t fake, but too much about “Blush” is.
Gallim Dance continues through Sunday at BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Place, near Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn; (718) 636-4100, bam.org.
Etienne Chognard/Tandem
“Crossing Lines” on NBC, with Donald Sutherland, is among the shows coming this summer to small screens, at home or on vacation.
When it comes to television, we’re in a bull market for doomsayers. It’s the end of the broadcast networks, as their signals are pirated and their quality is eclipsed by cable and online shows. It’s the end of commercial TV, as the advertising dollars move to the Internet. It’s the end of entertainment, as attention spans shrink to the length of a YouTube video.
And yet the shows keep coming. The 2013 summer season, which got under way this week, presents worthwhile options even beyond the 34 new and returning series, mini-series, movies and online originals listed in this preview.
The season may be relatively low in the kind of flashy, aspiring water-cooler fare that draws attention these days — of the new shows on the list, only Showtime’s “Ray Donovan” and “The Bridge” on FX truly fit into that category — but it’s relatively high in shows that promise stylish and smart entertainment. USA’s “Graceland,” BBC America’s “Broadchurch” and NBC’s “Crossing Lines” may fit that description, and returnees like Showtime’s “Dexter,” BBC America’s “Being Human” and HBO’s “Newsroom” have already shown that they do.
Striking a seasonal note, two of the summer’s most highly anticipated new shows allow us to spend a significant amount of our couch time at the beach: “Graceland,” set on the Southern California coast but filmed in Florida, and “Ray Donovan,” set in the Los Angeles basin with frequent forays to the expensive sands of Malibu and Santa Monica.
The dominant theme of the summer, though, may be goodbyes, as high-profile series like AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Showtime’s “Dexter,” USA’s “Burn Notice” and Comedy Central’s “Futurama” begin their final seasons. But that’s probably just a reflection of what are actually boom times for TV: with more shows being made than ever before, there are more leave-takings that deserve notice.
LONGMIRE (A&E, Monday) This dark modern western starring Robert Taylor as a burned-out Wyoming sheriff was one of last summer’s pleasant surprises. As Season 2 starts, Walt Longmire and his combative deputy, Vic Moretti (Katee Sackhoff), are as amusingly irritated with each other as ever.
PRISONERS OF WAR (Hulu, Tuesday) The second season of the Israeli series that inspired one of the best shows on American TV, “Homeland,” becomes available online.
WIZARDS VS. ALIENS (the Hub, June 1) Russell T Davies, the driving force behind the modern “Doctor Who,” is a creator of this children’s series about two 16-year-old British boys — one a wizard — battling aliens who look like a cross between Klingons and members of the “Cats” chorus.
THE KILLING (AMC, June 2) A co-production deal with Netflix saved the show from cancellation, and so Season 3 begins a year after the conclusion of the Rosie Larsen case, with the former detective Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) working on a ferry dock. Among the central cast, only Ms. Enos and Joel Kinnaman, as Linden’s once and future partner, Holder, return.
THE FOSTERS (ABC Family, June 3) The producing team behind the flight-attendant reality series “Fly Girls” turns to fiction with this new teenage drama about lesbian moms raising a family of foster and biological children. Teri Polo and Sherri Saum play the mothers; Jennifer Lopez is an executive producer.
MISTRESSES (ABC, June 3) In this prime-time soap, based on a British series that ran from 2008 to 2010, extramarital sex is the premise rather than a bonus. Alyssa Milano, Yunjin Kim (of “Lost”), Rochelle Aytes and Jes Macallan are the quartet of friends in this third- or fourth-generation descendant of “Sex and the City.”
BURN NOTICE (USA, June 6) Season 7 will be a wrap for this long-running (by cable standards) spy dramedy.
GRACELAND (USA, June 6) This heavily hyped new series is a crime show that combines “The Real World” (seven strangers in a design-catalog beach house) with “Point Break” (uptight rookie and Zen-master veteran sharing surfing lessons and bonfires). Created by Jeff Eastin, creator of USA’s “White Collar,” it’s based on a sand grain of a true story about undercover agents from different federal agencies sharing a Southern California house.
PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD (Syfy, June 8) This Canadian spinoff of the British series “Primeval” moves the angry-time-traveling-dinosaur action from England to Vancouver, British Columbia, and has an almost entirely new cast, led by Niall Matter, who played the bad boy Zane on Syfy’s “Eureka.”
SAM & CAT (Nickelodeon, June 8) Sam Puckett (Jennette McCurdy) of “iCarly” and Cat Valentine (Ariana Grande) of “Victorious” get their own show in this double spinoff. The preternaturally mature Sam and the ditsy Cat will meet, become friends and start a baby-sitting service.
KING & MAXWELL (TNT, June 10) Jon Tenney, so dapper as an F.B.I. agent in TNT’s “Closer” and “Major Crimes,” goes scruffy to play a former Secret Service agent turned Washington-based private eye on the channel’s latest lightweight summer crime series (not to be confused with “Rizzoli & Isles”). Rebecca Romijn plays his partner-antagonist.
PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER (HBO, June 10) HBO’s summer documentary series begins with Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin’s film about the Russian punk band and cause célèbre, which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Anyone who has ever confronted a dissertation deadline with blank pages and a paralyzed mind will identify with “Nancy, Please,” a darkly comic psychodrama about academic pressure and irrational paranoia.
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Eléonore Hendricks as Nancy.
Focusing on Paul (Will Rogers), a floundering Yale Ph.D. candidate, this tricky, articulate debut feature from Andrew Semans (written with Will Heinrich) weaves a sturdy story from the flimsiest of premises. Having moved in with his no-nonsense girlfriend (Rebecca Lawrence), Paul discovers that his annotated copy of “Little Dorrit” has been left behind at his old apartment.
Convinced that those notes are critical to his work, Paul asks his former roommate, Nancy (Eléonore Hendricks, simply perfect), to return the book. But Nancy — who, we have already gathered from throwaway remarks, may be less than sweet — seems reluctant to help. Is she crazy or just crabby?
Maintaining a tone that’s precisely balanced between terror and farce, Mr. Semans refuses to answer, directing our attention instead to Paul’s mental state as he conducts an increasingly alarming campaign of retrieval. Friends and career languish on the back burner as he spirals downward, and the film erupts with omens.
It’s a brutally unsympathetic portrait of situational anxiety that withholds comfort from Paul and viewer alike, and Mr. Semans refuses to relent. He understands that those squirrels scurrying in your walls and that bug floating in your coffee are easier to deal with than an angry adviser and an uncertain future, but don’t for a moment expect him to commiserate.
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
Tony Britten was writing commercial jingles when he got the job to compose the Champions League anthem.
LONDON — The song does not have a catchy hook, mostly because its lyrics are in three languages. The song is not particularly original, mostly because it was inspired by a piece written nearly 300 years ago and originally intended for use at the coronation of a king known for having numerous mistresses and an ill-tempered personality. The song has never spent a day on Billboard’s Top 100 (or any other chart, for that matter), mostly because it is not available for purchase or download and has never been a part of the rotation on any significant radio station.
Despite these obstacles, the Champions League anthem — officially titled “Champions League” but known to many as that song that is always on during important European soccer television broadcasts — will be played at a final for the 21st time this weekend. Two decades after its introduction, it remains one of the most recognizable sports songs in the world.
So while there will be plenty of stars on the field at Wembley Stadium Saturday, top players like Arjen Robben and Bastian Schweinsteiger and Robert Lewandowski, for the millions of fans watching around the world the most recognizable feature of the match between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund may be the music.
That is not a slight on either team. After all, the anthem is everywhere: fans have made videos of themselves playing the song, including one who attempted it (with remarkable clarity) on a vuvuzela. A bride in Spain surprised her groom by eschewing a wedding classic like Pachelbel’s Canon and having the choir break into the anthem instead (the groom stood and bowed at the end).
“I have to say it’s all a total surprise to me how long it has lasted and how popular it has become,” Tony Britten, the anthem’s composer, said in an interview. “To be honest, when I got the job to do it, it was just another job to me. The whole thing from start to finish took maybe a month or so.”
Britten composed the anthem in 1992 after being suggested for the job by his agent, who had a connection to the marketing company that European soccer’s governing body had hired to help brand its annual elite tournament. Craig Thompson, the former managing director at T.E.A.M. marketing, recalled the negative perception of European soccer at the time — “there had been a lot of hooligan incidents, fan disasters and all that,” he said — so the aim in creating the Champions League was to “class it up,” Thompson said.
“We knew we wanted to use music, and everyone thought we should use Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions,’ but we really wanted something classical,” he added.
Britten, who was working in film and television and writing commercial jingles, said he sent half a dozen snippets of classical pieces to the marketing executives to see what appealed to them. He was not surprised something operatic was chosen because the Three Tenors — Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti — were touring together and very popular at the time.
“But they also told me, ‘We don’t want just solos, we want something with a choir,’ ” Britten said. “So that’s what I did.”
The classical selection that T.E.A.M. asked Britten to work off was “Zadok the Priest,” one of four anthems written by Handel for the coronation of George II of Britain in 1727. Britten seized upon the rising string phase in the piece, infused it into his own composition and, in his words, “just got busy with it.”
For lyrics, he had been instructed to incorporate English, French and German — the official languages of UEFA, European soccer’s governing body — and so he began by writing down a long list of superlatives and translating them into the other languages to see what words might work well together.
The chorus, which even casual fans recognize because it is played continually on broadcasts of every Champions League game, is unforgettable: “The champions!” the choir sings, as if paying homage to some sort of heavenly body wearing shinguards.
There was a moment or two, however, in which “The champions!” could have been something else. Britten said that other possibilities included the greatest, the finest, the most exciting and, in what Britten conceded was probably a stretch, the most significant.
“In retrospect, some of those would have been a disaster,” he said.
Thankfully, he settled on “the champions” as the featured line and interspersed lyrics in the other two languages like eine große sportliche Veranstaltung (“a major sporting event”) and ce sont les meilleures équipes (“these are the best teams”). Britten recorded the original track at Angel Studios in Islington, London, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields chorus.
The anthem made its debut at Champions League matches in the fall of 1992 and was featured at its first final in the spring of 1993.
The FX network announced on Wednesday that it was bringing the comedy star Billy Crystal back to television in a pilot for a new situation comedy.
If additional episodes of the show are produced, as is highly likely given Mr. Crystal’s profile, they would be the first regular television work for Mr. Crystal since he was a cast member on “Saturday Night Live” in 1984.
In the show, which is called “The Comedians,” Mr. Crystal plays a once-great comic who tries to keep his career going by pairing up with a younger comic in a late-night sketch comedy show.
Larry Charles, well known as a writer-director with such credits as “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and the movie “Borat,” is one of the creators of the series, which is based on a show that originated in Sweden. Mr. Charles will also direct the pilot.
FX has recently split its programming genres into two separate channels, with one devoted to comedy. The network already gained a reputation for innovative comedy with shows like “Louie” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
May 22, 2013By Joanna Nikas
Eric Wilson discusses the de-sexing of men’s underwear ads, including recent commercials featuring a less buff, more approachable man.
Paula Lobo for The New York Times
New York City Ballet Jonathan Stafford and Sara Mearns with others of the company in Balanchine’s “Serenade,” the opening work on Tuesday night at the Koch Theater.
To see New York City Ballet perform “Serenade” is to give a gift to yourself. The first ballet George Balanchine created for American dancers, the work, which officially premiered in 1935, is set to Tchaikovsky and reveals all of the hallmarks of his choreography — fast footwork, voluminous attack within classical positions, and the fusing of music and movement in such a profound way that you can’t always distinguish between what you’re watching and what you’re hearing.
But it’s also about the emotional force unleashed by beautiful visual design — when, say, a row of female dancers in pale blue tulle form a diagonal line and, one by one, peel away to rush into the wings. Within Balanchine’s formations are unknowable dramas. (One of its three female leads dances with a man, lets her hair down and falls to the floor.) Despite its Russian roots, the ballet captures the American spirit: as forthright as we seem, there are also secrets.
On Tuesday at the David H. Koch Theater, City Ballet showcased a “Serenade” featuring two of its most powerful ballerinas: Sara Mearns and Ashley Bouder. The speed and lightness of Ms. Bouder is astonishing; during a turning passage, she slipped, but just as quickly — as is her way — she recovered and moved on.
Ms. Mearns’s daring was more resonant in the dexterity of how she played with the music by drawing out one note with a lingering arm or punctuating another with a kind of immortal force. After turning in Jonathan Stafford’s arms, she suddenly stopped, and her arm shot up with a flexed wrist mirroring the ballet’s iconic opening position.
But not all the casting was so ideal. Adrian Danchig-Waring, catching women as they leapt onto him, looked as if he was bailing hay, and Rebecca Krohn, the third lead, was undermined by tentativeness.
“Red Angels,” by Ulysses Dove, made for a jarring shift. The 1994 work epitomizes the bland aggression of so much contemporary ballet. Set to “Maxwell’s Demon,” an electric violin piece by Richard Einhorn performed by Mary Rowell, the dancers use their bodies as instruments, reacting to the music in fits and starts.
Teresa Reichlen, Amar Ramasar, Jennie Somogyi and Jared Angle walked in and out of spotlights, or perhaps cages, to perform prickly movement that encompassed torso wiggles, deep lunges, slowly descending backbends and grand pliés with one foot on point and the other flat. It’s short and cheap, a dance with more flourish than content.
After a robust performance of Balanchine’s 1960 virtuosic “Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux” by Megan Fairchild and Andrew Veyette, the program ended with “Firebird.” Dedicated to Maria Tallchief, the originator of the 1949 title role who died in April, this “Firebird” showcased the tall and lissome Maria Kowroski, whose balletic line is nothing short of electrifying.
But her performance was more subdued than mysterious; bird or not, there are times when Ms. Kowroski could use more heat. And Mr. Stafford’s wan Prince Ivan didn’t help.
At the end, though, Ms. Kowroski turned it up: slowly disappearing into the shadows, with her back arched and her head thrown back, she glittered more than she had all night.
The New York City Ballet’s spring season continues through June 9 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 496-0600,
Clay Enos/Warner Brothers Pictures
Henry Cavill stars as Superman in the new Warner Brothers movie, which will be released on June 14. More Photos »
BURBANK, Calif. — In a dimly lighted editing suite here on the Warner Brothers lot, blinds drawn for maximum secrecy and walls decorated with signs and posters celebrating “Star Wars,” Indiana Jones and “Game of Thrones,” Zack Snyder was discussing his philosophy on the totemic character who arguably gave rise to every fantasy series of the last 75 years: Superman.
For too long, said Mr. Snyder, the director of “Man of Steel,” a new Superman movie that Warner Brothers will release on June 14, modern-day interpretations of this DC Comics superhero had been apologizing for the outdatedness of his origins; they sought to conceal him in contemporary trappings instead of embracing an essential mythology that, he said, was as bulletproof as the character himself.
“When they try to dress him up,” Mr. Snyder said here a few weeks ago, “put him in jeans and a T-shirt or a leather jacket with an S on it, I go: ‘What? Guys, it’s O.K. It’s Superman. He’s the king daddy. You should all be bowing down to him.’ ”
What his film tries to do, he said, is “respect the S.”
At this point, Deborah Snyder, Mr. Snyder’s wife and producing partner, had to correct him on one fundamental detail they had updated for “Man of Steel.” “It’s not an S,” she said with a laugh. “It’s a symbol of hope.”
Warner Brothers Pictures
Mr. Cavill in “Man of Steel.”
Hope is a quality that Mr. Snyder, a director of comic-book adaptations like “Watchmen” and “300,” and his colleagues have been clinging to as they finish work on “Man of Steel,” an entrant in the crowded summer-movie arms race more than two years and $ 175 million or more in the making.
Yes, “Man of Steel” is the latest effort to rejuvenate a decades-old pop-culture franchise and, in doing so, renew both the fortunes of Warner Brothers as it searches for new blockbusters and the career of Mr. Snyder after recent misfires. But it is being built on the back of a character who, for as often as writers and filmmakers have lately tried to reinvent him, has proved particularly unsusceptible to attempts to make him more relatable. Audiences seem to want him to be grounded, at the same time that they want to believe he can fly.
It is strange that Superman, the smiling, soaring Moses-Jesus hybrid who ushered in the era of superhero comics, should be struggling at the multiplexes in an age when every other studio movie seems to feature a man in a cape, a mask with pointy bat-ears or a high-tech suit of iron. The qualities that have made Superman timeless have not necessarily made him relevant to this particular time, with its roster of ironic and loudly violent protagonists, but it was this paradox that made Mr. Snyder eager to take him on in “Man of Steel.”
Clay Enos
Zack Snyder, the director of “Man of Steel.”
“He’s a really cool mythological contradiction,” said Mr. Snyder, who is still boyish and scruffy at 47. “He’s incredibly familiar Americana and alien, exotic, bizarroland, but beautifully woven together.”
He added: “All of us, in a weird way, are that same kind of contradiction — no one’s that simple.”
His film stars Henry Cavill of “The Tudors” as Kal-El, a survivor of the destroyed planet Krypton who on earth becomes the costumed champion Superman but disguises himself as the all-too-human Clark Kent.
“Man of Steel” retains traditional elements, like Superman’s tension between his natural Kryptonian father, Jor-El (Russell Crowe), and his adopted earth dad,Jonathan Kent(Kevin Costner), and his attraction to the perpetually imperiled Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams).
The film also emphasizes the world of Krypton before its annihilation — a bleak, utilitarian planet with sophisticated if downright creepy technology — and the treachery of the Kryptonian villain Zod (Michael Shannon), who finds Kal-El on earth. The result is an unapologetic science-fiction spin on Superman, and while that may shatter audiences’ expectations for pure, unalloyed realism in “Man of Steel,” Mr. Snyder said this approach was built into the DNA of the character.
“If you follow him back logically and try to understand him,” he said, “you end up at a sci-fi solution.”
This was the same conclusion reached by Christopher Nolan, the director whose hit “Dark Knight” films have modernized Batman for the paranoid post-Sept. 11 era, and the screenwriterDavid S. Goyer when they first conceived of “Man of Steel” while puzzling over the plot of”The Dark Knight Rises.”
Though Mr. Goyer grew up admiring the Norman Rockwell-esque charm of the 1978 “Superman” movie, directed byRichard Donner and starringChristopher Reeve, he never felt much connection to its hero.
“I used to imagine that I was Batman,” Mr. Goyer said, “but not Superman.”
His thinking changed when he looked at Superman in his earliest incarnation, written and illustrated by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the late 1930s. Here was a character whose fundamental mythology was still in flux — even his signature power of flight was not yet established, and he instead leapt great distances — and whose most transformative quality had seemingly never been seized upon.
Ed Fitzgerald
Henri Dutilleux, around 1959. His style was less extreme than that of his contemporaries.
Henri Dutilleux, a French composer known for his superbly fashioned and exquisitely expressive orchestral music, died on Wednesday in Paris. He was 97.
His death was announced by Schott Music, his publisher.
Mr. Dutilleux’s position in French music was proudly solitary. Between Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez in age, he was little affected by either, though he took an interest in their work. Ravel, Roussel, Bartok and Stravinsky clearly mattered to him, as did big-band music. But his voice, marked by sensuously handled harmony and color, was his own.
Mr. Dutilleux was a moderate modernist. While he gradually moved away from regular tonality in favor of a richer harmony, he maintained a powerful sense of direction. In form, too, his music evolved, from closed and abstract symphonic patterns toward open-ended, atmospheric stretches within a continuous unfolding of melodic transformation.
“I can understand why the young musicians of the next generation wanted more rigor, but things went too far,” he told The New York Times in 1986, referring to Mr. Boulez and his modernist disciples. “I don’t support aesthetic terrorism.”
He composed slowly and with periods of reflection, devoting himself primarily to orchestral music. His Second Symphony, subtitled “Le Double” (1956-59), written for the Boston Symphony, was the first of many commissions in the United States. It was also the first work in which he experimented with changing the makeup and layout of the musicians, writing for a classical orchestral formation plus an ensemble of 12 soloists.
Though he exerted himself in Parisian musical life as a teacher, radio administrator and concertgoer, his aesthetic reserve seemed to carry over into his personal life. He remained somewhat aloof from Paris society. The apartment he shared with his wife, the pianist Geneviève Joy, was set apart, too, on the Île Saint-Louis, the exclusive enclave in the middle of the Seine.
Henri Dutilleux was born on Jan. 22, 1916, in the city of Angers in western France, the youngest of five children, and brought up farther north in Douai. He had artistic encouragement at home: his father was the grandson of Constant Dutilleux, a printmaker and friend of the painter and printmaker Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot; his mother’s father, whom he knew as a boy, was Julien Koszul, director of the music school in Roubaix and a teacher of Roussel.
While still in secondary school Henri studied with Victor Gallois, the head of the Douai Conservatory and a winner of the Prix de Rome. Mr. Dutilleux himself won that award at the end of his training at the Paris Conservatory (1933-38).
After serving in World War II, he returned to Paris and worked as a pianist, teacher, arranger and choir conductor before becoming head of music production at French state radio in 1945. He held that position, until 1963, supervising recordings and broadcasts of classical music while developing as a composer.
The work he regarded as his Opus 1 (although it was not the first piece he wrote) was his Piano Sonata (1946-48), written for Ms. Joy, who at the end of World War II formed a duo-piano partnership with Jacqueline Robin. Ms. Joy and Mr. Dutilleux were married the year he finished the sonata and remained together until her death in 2009. No immediate family members survive.
From 1961 to 1970 Mr. Dutilleux was on the faculty of the École Normale de Musique, where his pupils included the composer Gérard Grisey. He also taught abroad, notably at Tanglewood.
In the 1970s he produced two important works for smaller groupings: “Figures de Résonances” (1970), for the 25th anniversary of his wife’s partnership with Ms. Robin, and the string quartet “Ainsi la Nuit” (“So the Night,” 1975-76), commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation for the Juilliard Quartet.
His only important later chamber work was the enigmatic “Les Citations” (1985-2010), for oboe, double bass, harpsichord and percussion, incorporating quotations from works by two contemporaries he admired, Benjamin Britten and Jehan Alain, and from the Renaissance master Clément Janequin.
Otherwise he concentrated on the orchestra, dividing his time between Paris and a summer home in the ancient Loire village of Candes-Saint-Martin.
Allan Kozinn contributed reporting.
By Joanna Nikas
Shift in Men’s Briefs Ads: Eric Wilson discusses the de-sexing of men’s underwear ads, including recent commercials featuring a less buff, more approachable man.
Five middle-aged men were seated in a clinical gray conference room to discuss the latest advertising campaign for 2(x)ist, an underwear label famous for plastering aggressive images of hyper-ripped, nearly naked men on bus shelters and phone kiosks just about everywhere.
Among them were Joey Harary, the president of the Morét Group, a company that acquired 2(x)ist in 1995 and is to skivvies what LVMH is to couture; the designer Jason Scarlatti; two marketing executives; and James LaForce, whose fashion public relations firm has been hired to take the label in a direction that is “more aloof” and “not so intimidating.”
A video playing in the background showed behind-the-scenes moments from a recent photo shoot, where a lithe young man, Lasse Hansen, described his journey from serving in the Danish Navy to landing a big-time modeling career in New York City.
“I like the quiet life,” he said. He wears a robe in most of the scenes, his modesty intact.
“We describe it this way,” said Mr. Scarlatti, a winsome, precisely scruffy designer who also works part-time as a comedian. “We are going for something a little more statuesque, and a little less steroid-y.”
Mr. LaForce interjected, “We are giving the models an identity, so they are not just a piece of meat.”
Vic Drabicky, the founder of January Digital, who is consulting on the company’s online business, got to the point: “We are taking the focus off the crotch shots.”
It should be emphasized, right up front, that 2(x)ist is a company that has long held a strict “no stuffing” policy when it comes to advertisements. Only last October, the company staged a runway show of hot guys in their underwear, hosted and ogled by Jenny McCarthy.
Sex sells, you know, and nowhere is this truer than in the booming business of briefs, where the imagery has followed an ever-more-provocative and chiseled trajectory since Marky Mark dropped trou for Calvin Klein in 1992. Things have become so raunchy now that the marketing for a sizable niche of underwear brands bears a marked resemblance to gay pornography (see, or please don’t if you are prudish, labels like Andrew Christian, Papi, Baskit, Rufskin and, for a very particular man, Nasty Pig).
At 2(x)ist, and elsewhere in the underwear market, there was a growing sentiment that the models were getting to be, well, too sexy, at least to be relatable to a new breed of fashion customer: the average heterosexual man.
Thus, the change in campaign direction, which shows models (still attractive, shirtless and depilated, mind you) in lifestyle situations like exercising on a beach, often turned slightly away from the camera. The company is also creating a series of online videos that show the products in a more artistic light, including the one with Mr. Hansen, and another using dancers from the Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet.
The focus here, it should be noted, is more on the packaging than the package. And that is also the message coming from some new underwear brands, like MeUndies and Mack Weldon, that are hiring models of less conventional beauty. Reacting to what is perceived to be a case of abs fatigue among male shoppers, these companies are resisting the notion that a model has to look like Matthew Terry, the one from the Calvin Klein Super Bowl commercial, to move products off the shelves.
Flint and Tinder, another new collection taking an artisanal approach, rarely uses models in its marketing, which is more focused on the fact that the underwear is American made. “You don’t need to see a picture of a half-naked man to get a feeling of how a product is going to work for you,” said Jake Bronstein, its founder.
Who’d have guessed that a lot of men are uncomfortable with underwear shopping these days? “They don’t want to see only those plucked-chicken models,” said Michael Kleinmann, the editor of the blog The Underwear Expert. “They want models who are somewhat aspirational, and they want to look like the guy in the pictures, but every model can’t be blond, hairless and perfect.” The most common feedback Mr. Kleinmann has heard from readers recently is that they want to see more diversity, including guys with tattoos and guys over the age of 40.
WHETHER UNDERWEAR models are generally getting less sexy, though, depends on your definition of sexy.
“I think a lot of these brands have segregated themselves a bit, and the models they pick are indicative of their targeted demographic,” said Gregory Sovell, the creative director of the nearly decade-old label C-IN2, and before that the founder of 2(x)ist.