Brooke Shields slammed Barbara Walters on Monday over a 1981 interview she did about her famous Calvin Kleins ad, describing the veteran journalist’s questions about her sexual history as “practically criminal.”
In 1980, Shields, who was then 15, starred in a Calvin Klein TV commercial which featured her most famous slogan: “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
The commercial sparked a public and media outcry at the time, prompting Shields to address the controversy in a series of interviews thereafter — most of which were characterized by invasive questions about her personal life.
On Monday’s episode of Dax Shepard’s podcast “Armchair Expert,” Shields said the interviewers she spoke to in the wake of the Calvin Klein ad “never wanted my answer — they just wanted their point of view.”
Shepard said that the 1981 interview with Walters following the release of the Calvin Klein commercial was particularly “maddening.”
Shields agreed, saying: “It’s practically criminal. It’s not journalism.”
During Walters’ interview with Shields, the broadcaster asked the model about her measurements, if she wanted to be like her mother or whether she kept any secrets from her.
Shields, who appears to be visibly uncomfortable, defends her mom throughout the interview, adding she was still growing up as a teen.
This isn’t the first time Shields has addressed the outcry against the Calvin Klein commercial.
In a video for Vogue in October, the supermodel, now 56, explained she didn’t realize it was overtly sexual at the time.
“They take the one commercial, which is a rhetorical question. I was naive, I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t think it had to do with underwear, I didn’t think it was sexual in nature,” she said in the Vogue video. “I would say it about my sister, ‘Nobody can come between me and my sister.’”
Shields added that the public backlash “backfired,” saying the campaign made the brand a household name.
“The campaign was extremely successful. And then, I think the underwear sort of overtook the jeans, and they understood what sells and how to push the envelope,” she told Vogue.
“There’s an appeal to it that is so undeniable, and they tapped right into it. They knew exactly what they were doing, and I think it did set the tone for decades.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
