Splay It Like Beckham

I did not grip the wheel with sweaty hands and swerve dangerously when I drove past the original Calvin Klein men’s underwear ads.

Nor when the Swedish soccer player Freddie Ljungberg became Calvin’s hunk du jour in 2003. And I have not yet crashed my car at the sight of David Beckham (right) in Emporio Armani skivvies — even if the soccer star is living up to his wife Victoria’s graphic nickname for him.

Having survived the postfeminist generation, I allow myself a smile of satisfaction now that poster boys are being given the hypersexualized treatment meted out for so long to my own gender.

Wherever you look, from the high-exposure ads for Sloggi underwear on Paris billboards to those ubiquitous Calvin Klein ads, men in next to nothing are showing off their assets. These are not just male models earning money the only way they can; they are men with real careers, like Djimon Hounsou, nominated as best supporting actor for his role in “Blood Diamond,” who chose to make himself the face and body of Calvin Klein to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the iconic underwear.

It was the rock-hard physique of the rapper Marky Mark — Mark Wahlberg — that put underwear (and Kate Moss) on the fashion radar in 1992. But when I started my career in fashion, half-naked men had not yet appeared in ads. Instead, it was scantily clad women who were draped across anything from golf clubs to sports cars in the hope of selling to impressionable males.

The feminist struggle banished the passive sex object for a while, but then the mood switched from burning bras to seeing them in all their uplifting glory on the blond bombshell Eva Herzigova. By the 1990s, the Czech model was offering cleavage and the cocky allure of Mae West for Wonderbra with the hilariously unsubtle tag line “Hello Boys.”

“Boys,” indeed. There seemed to be a case of arrested development as infantile male drivers apparently veered across the road at a glimpse of the Wonderbra ad. A solemn study claimed that one in five male drivers had his attention diverted from the highway for as long as five seconds, the time it took to kick a soccer ball across a field.

Who finds ads of men-in-the-buff hot? Judging by the blogs, Beckham’s spread-eagled pose of his handsome package has been received as enthusiastically by the gay community as by the soccer star’s female fans. But it can hardly be argued that the pink dollar is the target, because brands like Calvin Klein, Dolce & Gabbana and Sloggi are aimed at the big money, which means appealing to the straight guy and a partner who might shop for him.

Calvin Klein not only made sexy male underwear mainstream — the ads featuring its logo emerging from Marky Mark’s low-slung jeans also created brand loyalty. Now that Giorgio Armani, a designer trusted for his faultless taste and embraced by Hollywood, has joined the exposure club, how long can it be before we have elaborately staged and televised shows for male underclothes? Think “Victor’s Secret,” featuring masculine models in the provocative poses and glamour stuff that Victoria’s Secret has so far reserved for the “girls.”

You could argue that it is those same girlie looks — the tide of visible bras, pretty-pink lingerie and lacy frills — that have created a countersurge for über-male underwear. As young women followed the bubble-gum-pink airhead style of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears (although neither is famed for her underpants), men have pivoted toward a macho counterpoint.

Vive la différence!

There is just one caveat about this new gender equality on the billboards, and it comes via the supercool Marc Jacobs. The designer is not, as far as we know, creating a new range of Louis Vuitton underpants — although given the French label’s speedy brand extensions into new categories, who knows? But this spring, Jacobs came up with a hot idea: LV bags gripped by women draped over — guess what? — flashy cars.

The new Vuitton ads are inspired by the artist Richard Prince’s installation at the Frieze contemporary art fair in London last October. A curvaceous creature clad in her bra and shorts was hired to caress a gleaming, egg-yolk-yellow ’70s Dodge Challenger rotating on a turntable.

The handbag ads, as the Vuitton Web site shows in a backstage clip filmed by Zoe Cassavetes, were created in a London studio where Jacobs directed the cool photographic duo of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott (who also shot the Beckham/Armani campaign), using ’90s supermodels as character actors. Posing on the glossy vintage cars are Naomi Campbell, Stephanie Seymour, Claudia

Schiffer and Miss Wonderbra herself, Eva Herzigova. Now a young mother, the model — who had slimmed herself down to a size 0 — has regained her pulchritudinous figure and flashes it on the car’s gleaming, candy-colored surface.

“Hello Girls! Here’s a Vuitton handbag!” Plus ça change. . . . Is it really back to sex-object women selling stuff? Jacobs has, of course, added a little postfeminist, postmodern irony to make the tills ring faster.

Me? I am waiting for the boys to climb seminude onto the hood. But my guess is that they won’t risk spoiling that gorgeous, glorious automobile’s finish.

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