Why Sports Stars
Sell Men's Underwear

Nearly a Century of Jocks in Jocks

Design historian Shaun Cole traced this in his 2014 paper Jocks in Jocks: Sportsmen and Underwear Advertising. Some 80 years before David Beckham, baseball's Babe Ruth was appearing in adverts for Coopers, the company behind Jockey, and launched his own underwear line in the 1930s. Cole argues that over the century the sportsman's body in these adverts shifted from a hard, muscular "rock" to a more passive, posed "languid leaner", and became steadily more objectified and commodified.

The modern era is easy to chart:

• 1982 — Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus becomes Calvin Klein's first athlete underwear star.
• 2000s — Arsenal's Fredrik Ljungberg fronts Calvin Klein, one of its most talked-about men's campaigns.
• 2008 to 2011 — Emporio Armani builds its men's underwear on David Beckham, then Cristiano Ronaldo, then Rafael Nadal. Calvin Klein casts tennis player Fernando Verdasco in 2010.
• 2012 to 2013 — The athletes become the brand: Beckham launches his own bodywear range and Ronaldo launches CR7 Underwear.
• 2022 to 2023 — Son Heung-min becomes a Calvin Klein Underwear ambassador in South Korea, Carlos Alcaraz joins the Calvins or Nothing campaign, and SKIMS launches menswear with Neymar Jr., Nick Bosa and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
• 2024 — Jude Bellingham fronts SKIMS Mens before Euro 2024.
• 2025 to 2026 — Calvin Klein casts NBA player Jalen Green and, reportedly, Trent Alexander-Arnold, then makes Bellingham the face of Icon Cotton Stretch.

Our archive of Calvin Klein models past and present covers the actors and models alongside them.

Athleticism and Attraction: What the Research Says

Evolutionary psychologists have spent decades on why a trained body reads as desirable. In 2007 UCLA researchers David Frederick and Martie Haselton framed it as the fitness indicator hypothesis: muscle is costly to build and maintain, so it works as a visible signal of health and genetic quality, the human equivalent of a peacock's tail.

A 2017 study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by Aaron Sell and colleagues went further. Women rated photos of men's bodies for attractiveness while others estimated each man's strength. How strong a man looked accounted for over 70% of the variation in how attractive his body was rated, rising to 80% once height and leanness were added. In their samples the strongest-looking men were always rated the most attractive.

Those findings come with real caveats. The raters were heterosexual women and the subjects mostly students. The research measures bodies, not faces or personality. Plenty of other work shows that the most extreme, bodybuilder-level muscle isn't what most people pick when asked. And critics point out that "evolved preference" explanations can make cultural taste sound like biology.

Still, the overlap with advertising is obvious. A professional athlete is about as close to a guaranteed strength cue as a casting director can get, and unlike a model, his body comes with a verified story of how it was built.

Sport as a Licence to Look

There's a second, more cultural reason. For most of the twentieth century, a straight man posing near-naked for the camera risked being seen as vain or effeminate. Sport removed that risk. The athlete's body is framed as a working tool, so showing it off reads as performance rather than display, and looking at it reads as admiration rather than desire.

That framing gives everyone permission. Straight men can look at the body they'd like to have. Women and gay men can look at the body they'd like to have in a different sense. The brand never has to say which audience it means, and the athlete never has to step outside the locker room to sell a product that is, frankly, about sex.

The cultural critic Mark Simpson saw this coming. He coined metrosexual in 1994, and he wrote early on about Mark Wahlberg's 1992 Calvin Klein billboards. In 2014 he declared a new type, the spornosexual, a blend of sport, porn and metrosexual, for men whose gym-built bodies had become the main accessory, and he named Cristiano Ronaldo as the type's poster boy.

Everybody Knows Who's Looking

Underwear brands have never been naive about their gay audience. In 2002 David Beckham became the first footballer on the cover of the gay magazine Attitude, and openly embraced being a gay icon at a time when that was rare in football. Within a few years he was on Armani billboards.

Today the reaction to every athlete campaign follows the same pattern: LGBTQ+ media like Queerty, Attitude and Out cover it first and loudest, often reading it explicitly as homoerotic, while sports media cover the dressing-room banter. Bellingham's campaign got both within hours. For brands, that crossover is the whole point: one image, two audiences, twice the conversation.

We've written about the other side of this, why gay men have always dressed to be seen, in gay men's underwear: a history of jocks, thongs and the gaze.

Does an Athlete Actually Sell More?

The industry measures campaigns in "media impact value", a figure from analytics firm Launchmetrics that puts a price on the coverage and social buzz a campaign generates. The numbers are revealing, and they don't all favour athletes:

• Jeremy Allen White (actor, Calvin Klein, 2024) generated $12.7 million in 48 hours. PVH's chief executive said underwear sales rose 30% year on year in the campaign's first week.
• Jung Kook (musician, Calvin Klein Jeans, 2023) generated $13.4 million in 48 hours.
• Neymar Jr., Nick Bosa and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (SKIMS, 2023) generated $4.5 million together.
• Carlos Alcaraz (Calvin Klein, 2023) generated $827,000 in 48 hours.

So an athlete is no guarantee. The campaigns that explode tend to combine a body people want to look at with a moment people are already talking about. Bellingham ticks both: a World Cup summer behind him, nearly 57 million Instagram followers, and a fan base that spans sport, fashion and the gay internet.

The Case Against

Not everyone is comfortable with it. Reported comments attributed to Sergio Ramos argued that Bellingham's priority should be football and that elite players owe young fans a certain image, though we haven't been able to trace those to a primary source. Other critics worry less about the athletes than about the viewers: a steady diet of professionally trained, perfectly lit bodies sets a standard almost nobody can meet, and Simpson himself described spornosexuality as a more extreme, body-obsessed stage of male vanity.

There's also a cost to the athletes' own image. When fans mocked a pose in Bellingham's campaign, the jokes were about him, not Calvin Klein. Football culture's teasing, Kroos's "WTF" and Militão's "you cannot do that", is affectionate, but it shows the line players still walk between being admired and being laughed at.

Our take: the athletic ideal is one look, not the only one. Fit and fabric matter far more to how underwear feels and looks on you than whether you have a midfielder's thighs. Our piece on form-fitting menswear and body confidence goes further.

What Sport Did to Underwear Itself

The athlete's influence isn't just in the adverts. Sport changed the product: wider elastic waistbands borrowed from gym kit, cotton blended with elastane for stretch and recovery, contoured pouches for support, the jockstrap's move from the changing room to fashion, and cuts like the trunk and the sports brief. Brands such as PUMP! and Teamm8 are built entirely on that athletic look.