MaryV Benoit. Photo: Ryan McGinley. Courtesy of Calvin Klein.
Young, attractive and with over 600,000 Instagram followers between them, on paper actor, artist and model Chella Man and photographer MaryV Benoit—are stars of Calvin Klein’s new #ProudInMyCalvins campaign. Dig a little deeper, however, and you can see that they’re anything but ordinary. Known for advocating for greater visibility for the LGBTQIA+ community (as well as each having voracious creative appetites) their Instagram pages are an honest—and inspiring—accounts of life as queer people in 2020.
Chella and MaryV’s bold self-expression, both in the way they speak about their identities and the emotion they pour into their art, begs the question: “is there an innate link between queerness and creativity?” It’s best to avoid generalisations, but both Chella and MaryV proudly draw inspiration from the LGBTQIA+ communities they are a part of, with Chella admitting: “My biological and chosen family are my inspiration to persist and create.” The impact of queer culture is even more tangible within MaryV’s work, with her moving portrait series You’re The One Who Holds Me Tight exploring queer people’s connections to their chosen family.
Chella Man. Photo: Ryan McGinley. Courtesy of Calvin Klein.
Made in collaboration with her sibling, writer Kénta Ch’umil, these tender photographs capture intimate moments between friends, lovers, blood and non-blood relatives to show that family is what you make it, not who you’re born with. “A lot of queer people don’t have their biological family to care for, love and respect them so they find a chosen family—their best friends, or even just people they see in the club every Friday night,” MaryV says of the project. “It’s a really important part of queer culture to highlight, so that there isn’t always this mainstream narrative of being born into a perfect family.”
Ideas around visibility and representation are also central to what Chella does—he first rose to prominence after documenting his transition as a trans masculine person via YouTube videos with titles like “One Year On Testosterone”and “How Did I Know I Was Trans?”. As he tells SLEEK, coming of age as a queer, deaf, Jewish person of colour, he found it hard to contextualise his identity with so few people looking like him in the media.
Ultimately, being so candid about his transition online stemmed from not wanting anyone else to go through the same struggles as he did early in life. “As a teenager, the one place I could find information about my identity and history was through social media and hashtags,” Chella explains. “So I wanted to give back to the people who gave me the resources to understand who I really was and use the internet to be as open as possible about my transition.”
The current fashion and media landscape is starkly different to what Chella remembers growing up, a paradigm shift that he has been an active part of by modelling for major brands, fronting magazines and landing a TV role in DC Universe series Titans. But being asked to appear in the #ProudInMyCalvins campaign for Calvin Klein along with a number of famous faces including Tommy Dorfman, Ama Elsesser, Gia Woods, Jari Jones, Mina Gerges and Pabllo Vittar was still a serious “pinch me” moment. “To have a brand as big as Calvin Klein uplift someone like me, it goes to show how far the door has been cracked open by the people who have come before and the progress that all of our fight has made—but also how much fight we have left to give.”
MaryV Benoit and Chella Man. Photos: Ryan McGinley. Courtesy of Calvin Klein.
But, as MaryV’s creative practice and work for brands like Calvin Klein testifies, queer representation behind the camera is just as important as in front of it. “I’ve realised that in high school, a lot of the photographers I looked up to were men because they were more represented,” she explains. “As a queer woman I use my work to reflect what I see in my life and in my relationships and to seek out and highlight people I identify with.” Incorporating her queer friends and peers into her work, which is always lensed with love and care, she encourages spectators to find empathy with the LGBTQIA+ community, no matter their preconceptions.
Creating in a cultural landscape still dominated by cis, heterosexual white men, Chella and MaryV are opening up different ways of being and seeing—we just hope that, some day soon, how they navigate the world becomes the new normal.
See the campaign video below: