Dirtbag Glamour Is Ascendant Once More

Rejecting conventional ideals of good taste in favor of grit and grime, fashion’s new mood continues a long tradition.

Recently, without fanfare or warning, the friends and collaborators Pete Davidson and Colson Baker (better known by his rap pseudonym, Machine Gun Kelly) dropped their pants and went live on the Calvin Klein Instagram account in a sendup of the label’s famous underwear commercials. Maintaining a running gag that they had not, in fact, been hired as models for the brand (they had), they joked about fluffing up “the boys” and poured popcorn into each other’s mouths. Something felt off as the 28-year-old “Saturday Night Live” star and the 31-year-old actor and musician flopped around on an immaculate white couch. It wasn’t just that two straight men, famous for dating even more famous women, were baiting their queer followers by mock flirting with each other in various states of undress, although they were. It was that they looked, uncharacteristically, as clean as the white boxer briefs they’d been paid to wear. Pretending to imagine their power as poster boys, Davidson said, “We could have gotten all the dirty people to buy underwear. … Dirty, trash — like our fans.” Read more at The New York Times.