This morning, I was forced to ask myself a question I’d never once considered: Is Jerry Seinfeld hot?
For years, I thought—heck, knew—the answer was a clear-cut “no.” I’m a Seinfeld fan, and the show fails to make a good case for the comic as anything close to a sex symbol. Jerry dated dozens of beautiful women over the course of the series, but that always struck me as implausible. That was the show’s whole gambit anyway: These are some deeply charmless, pitiful, yet undoubtedly hilarious people.
Today’s Jerry Seinfeld isn’t much different: My image of him is bemoaning “What’s the deal?” about something mundane, while driving another rich person around to get coffee. (Sometimes I think about him voicing Barry the Bee in Bee Movie, in which he, a bee, falls for a human woman. That’s even less appealing.)
I felt confident in my opinion that Seinfeld was a physically unappealing man to me, and I was okay with it. That changed when I received a shocking, unforgettable Instagram post in my DMs Tuesday morning. Fashion brand Kith shared new photos from its fall 2022 campaign, featuring Seinfeld front and center. And in these photos, Seinfeld looks undeniably good. Yes, I would even say he looks hot.
There he is, donning designer baseball hats, jackets, hoodies, and sneakers. He’s serving blue steel, perched on the back of a leather armchair like it was the most comfortable spot in the world. Wearing Air Force Ones and a Mets hat, Seinfeld looks at the camera with his head tilted slightly upwards—as if to say, “Hey. You like what you’re seeing right here?”
And it pains me to admit that I do, Jerry. I like his arms-crossed pose, showing just enough of the Kith branding on his letterman jacket to remind us this is an ad. I like the photo of him leaning on the windowsill, eyebrows raised, palms upward; here, he’s wearing a brown hoodie atop a matching gray sweatsuit. (The sweatshirt is repping Queens College, Seinfeld’s alma mater.) The sweatsuit returns in a medium-wide shot, where Seinfeld leans on a stack of books and radiates the aura of a hot gym teacher. Those sweatpants are really doing the work here; I’ll be taking no further questions.
The two photos that made me lose my mind are in turn the least and most surprising of the set. In one, Seinfeld is seated at a desk, ripping a page from his typewriter. This throws me back to Seinfeld Season Four, when Jerry and George pitch and write an ill-fated sitcom. (Very meta; very funny.) Seinfeld’s a writer! But Seinfeld has never before been a lip biter, and that’s exactly what he’s doing here. If he were looking at the camera, I would have fainted from the power of this unexpected sexual energy.
But it took me a moment to catch onto what he was doing with his mouth in that photo. The final photo in the set is immediately disorienting, by contrast. Seinfeld leans against an ornate side table, arms crossed, face scrunched into a slightly forced smile. He’s wearing a flat-brimmed hat, Nikes, and a Canadian tuxedo. Yes, Seinfeld is wearing black jeans and a black denim jacket, which is buttoned all the way up—a daring choice that he pulls off with aplomb. Both pieces of denim have a subtle floral pattern, begging for us to zoom in and look ever closer. Reader, when I tell you I did exactly that, please know I’m doing so with a sense of great shame.
I don’t want to offend Seinfeld’s wife, family members, and exes—including that high school girl he controversially dated in the 1990s, which was a whole weird thing that plays into my general distaste for him on a physical attraction level. He’s not a bad-looking guy! But Jerry Seinfeld was never meant to be a model; he is not the kind of guy you look to for fashion advice, let alone couture inspiration.
I can’t help but applaud Kith, then, for making what would have definitely been a Seinfeld plot back in the day into real life. Thank you for doing the unthinkable: making Jerry Seinfeld a babe.
