“We really wanted to take it back to an old school underwear campaign,” he said before the film aired. Back in 2008—before the category ‘bodywear’ was even a thing—Beckham sparked his first bout of underwear mania courtesy of a campaign for Emporio Armani which, like this Boss campaign, was shot by Mert & Marcus. Beckham said: “Working with them has always been special, and I trust them. So when we started talking about this campaign and me getting back into underwear, I told Daniel that I wanted to work with them again. When I walked out on set they were like: ‘Here we go again!’”
Back in 2008 he confessed to feeling a little embarrassed about all the attention his first underwear campaign attracted, but tonight he said: “People are used to me doing this now! This is something I’ve been doing throughout my career, and I’ve never been afraid to push the boundaries. What we’ve done now I think, though, is to do that in a very elegant way.”
Beckham turns 50 this year, which makes this campaign an especially inspiring example for his fellow Gen X-vintage gentlemen, especially those for whom being objectified from across the block is nothing but a distant memory (OK, fantasy). So how did he get in such especially Boss-level, hot daddy form? “I came into this in the same way I approach everything else: I prepared well,” he said. “Because it doesn’t matter what age you are, if you feel good in your skin then you should be able to do anything.”
“Plus I trained!” he added: “To be honest, I’m always training, but for this I followed a 12-week regime: it was two workouts a day. I always train hard, but I was especially dedicated because I knew I was going into this.”
