It’s late August and Jeremy Allen White is currently in Los Angeles, but the native New Yorker is thinking about summer back in his hometown.
“It is tough in the summer in New York, but it is my favorite,” White told me by phone last week. “I know I’m not alone in that, but I don’t think there’s many of us. It’s my favorite time of year in New York.”
Last year, the Emmy-winning actor shot his first Calvin Klein underwear campaign way up on a Manhattan rooftop, posing in his skivvies against the skyline. Today he’s back for round two—and this time, he’s wearing the brand’s latest fall-winter 2024 collection in sunny LA, in a new poolside portfolio photographed by Mert Alas. Aside from the West Coast locale, the main distinction from the first campaign is that White is now actually wearing jeans.
Ahead of the new launch, White and I chatted about Carmy’s style on The Bear, Bruce Springsteen’s denim legacy, and how he felt about beating Pharrell in GQ’s 2023 Most Stylish Man of the Year tournament.
Courtesy of Calvin Klein
GQ: Your first Calvin campaign was a huge hit. Did it feel like a huge hit to you?
Jeremy Allen White: Yeah, I mean, yeah…I think it did what it was supposed to do. I felt so insecure leading up to the shoot itself, and it felt kind of crazy. Acting on film or TV and then doing these sort of campaigns or photo shoots, there’s such a big difference—because in film and TV, your job is to sort of forget the camera is there, and then with these sort of shoots, your partner is sort of the photographer and the camera. And so I was concerned about making that work.
But yeah, it felt really special. I was in New York when the first campaign went up. When they put the billboard up on Houston, I woke up early that morning and I went with a buddy of mine who brought his camera and took it in before the public took it in. And that felt really wonderful and intimate, and like an achievement. It was still just mine in a really nice way. And then everybody else saw it in the weeks to come. For the most part people were excited about it, and that was cool and surprising. I mean, like so many things in my life right now, they’re all very cool and surprising. [Laughs.]
I’m very much a jeans guy. You can say that, yeah.
