Frank Ocean has kept us waiting for his supposedly-titled Boys Don’t Cry album, most recently revealing a cryptic library card filled with dates that some saw as a hint about timing for the album. Sans music, he has finally resurfaced in a very public way as the face of a new series of Calvin Klein #mycalvins ads.
Shot by photographer and filmmaker Tyrone Lebon, in the video Ocean wears a suit and recites what sounds like spoken word poetry, themed on his love of music and nostalgia:
“You start a new habit and you keep in up for four or five weeks and when you stop, it feels like your missing something in your day. That’s what music is for me. It feels like a necessary act. It takes a mind to worry, a conscious to feel ashamed but there’s no place to hide out here, these skies are filled with planes. You just sort of romanticize something in the past. Fantasy plays the role of almost like a supplement. You draw on fantasy to make things hyper-real, I guess; saturate the colors.”
Drawing on the combination of fantasy and the past, the video has a surreal, dream like quality, and includes Ocean pressed up against a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like at the end of the short.
Among the videos Calvin Klein released in association with the campaign, Ocean’s video is the longest and most complex. Creatives including Henry Rollins, Grace Coddington, Bella Hadid, James Rodriguez, Young Thug (“I don’t believe in gender”) are included in additional shorts.
