At first, when I saw the new Kardashian-Jenner Calvin Klein campaign, I didn’t think anything was weird. We’re so used to seeing the five famous sisters huddled together—hands clasped around one another’s waist, lips puckered up for a kiss—that nothing seemed out of the ordinary. In fact, their physical closeness is one of the things that makes them so fun to watch on screen. In a culture of for-the-cameras relationships, these siblings (some half, some full, some decades older than others) seem irreducibly, even aspirationally, close.
And then I gave the images a second look.
Once you strip away all the fast-take headlines practically embedded in Belgian photographer Willy Vanderperre’s images—Whose Bump Is Hiding Behind Whom? When, Dear GOD, Were These Pictures Taken? Who Was Photoshopped Into a Bratz Doll?—there is only one thing left: raw sexuality. Between sisters.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CALVIN KLEIN/WILLY VANDERPERRE
I was instantly reminded of that 2015 V magazine editorial with Gigi and Bella Hadid. In it the sisters, then 18 and 19 years old, pose for 49-year-old photographer Steven Klein in a series of compromising positions: sisters spooning in knee high-boots and cut-out body suits, their legs intertwined; sisters holding hands in mesh dresses; sisters standing and sitting with their legs spread. The headline? “Double Trouble.” (Also worth mentioning: the just-about-to-kiss body language in Kendall and Kylie Jenner’s 2015 Balmain campaign. Kylie was only 17 when the campaign, shot by Mario Sorrenti, then 43, was released.)
Of course, suggestive, women-only kincest imagery isn’t new to the heteronormative canon. Encoded in pictures and headlines like these is the lamely sexist suggestion that two female siblings in their underwear might just—whoops!—blur the line between sisterly love and lust.
Unfortunately (and perhaps expectedly), this fantasy doesn’t cut both ways. Don’t believe me? Just try to imagine this Calvin Klein shoot with a group brothers. Picture Chris, Liam, and the third Hemsworth cuddled up in an abandoned barn with their hands on each other’s abdomens. OK, now picture that Liam has no pants on and is casually covering his tushy cheeks with a country blanket. Yeah. The whole thing adds up to a whole bunch of WHYYY. It would never happen—nor would this kind of sisterly touching occur in the real world.
Kylie and Kendall get physical for Balmain, 2015
“The whole thing is weird. I’d say I’m very close with my sisters but not that close,” editorial assistant Tess Kornfeld, 24, said when I asked for feedback. “I can’t imagine posing with my sister in a sexualized way,” offered up features assistant Samantha Leach, 25. “We don’t have many boundaries, but I’d never want to pose in lingerie with her.” Added another Glamour staffer, 29: “I have no issue with my sisters seeing me naked, or sleeping next to me in a bed in undies and a tank top, but I would never pose in a weird ad that makes it look like we’re game for threesomes.”
I then took my research to the wizards of Instagram. Of the 271 people who viewed my poll, above, only 27 responded. Of those responders, only four people voted yes (though I am disqualifying my husband’s friend Glenn, because he is not a woman. Also, how Glenn of a move is that?) Eighty-five percent of responders said they would “never” touch their sisters the way depicted in these ads.
Included in those who responded “yes, duh” to sisterly touching was my friend and fellow editor Danielle Prescod, 29. “I don’t even see it as sexual,” she texted me when I asked for her reasoning. “They feel individually sexy to me, but it doesn’t make me feel like they’re trying to be sexy with each other. I’m more uncomfortable when it’s brother-sister stuff, like Anwar and Gigi.”
In an effort to get some cross-generational perspective, I emailed my own sister, who, at 42, is a decade older than I am. “Are all those people really sisters?” she responded. I quickly broke down the Kardashian-Jenner family tree and asked my question again: Would you be comfortable touching me, your little sister, like this? “I’m not offended by the photo, if that’s what you’re asking,” she eventually wrote back. “If I were getting paid a bazillion dollars like the Kardashians, maybe.” A few minutes later a new message from my popped up in my inbox. “Wait, would the photo be published?” she wrote. “To be clear, I don’t want a nudie photo of me published anywhere—with or without you.”
