Don't Know This Face? Just Wait Clockwise from top left, Steven Klein (left and center); Karsten Moran for The New York Times; Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images; David Sims (center and left). Clockwise from top left, two images of the model David Agbodji from the spring 2010 Calvin Klein campaign; Ronald Epps, who did not make the cut in a recent modeling audition for the designer; on the catwalk at the Calvin Klein show in Milan a year ago; AJ Abualrub (two images), who was featured in the spring 2009 campaign. In a corridor outside a sixth-floor conference room in Manhattan's garment center, five exceptionally handsome young men slouched against the walls, looking like gods of Olympus come temporarily to rest. It was midafternoon, and the men had been summoned for a secret meeting, several flown specially from Houston or other corners of the country to meet with those who would decide their fate. Inside the conference room, a panel was convened. It was made up of people whose task it is, among other things, to shape the current ideals of masculine beauty. The meeting was a preliminary casting for a Calvin Klein men's wear fashion show, taking place Sunday in Milan. Few jobs in the modeling business carry anything like the weight that a booking for Calvin Klein does, and for straightforward reasons. Models in a Calvin Klein show are placed under exclusive contracts that restrict them from appearing on any other runways; are flown to Milan; put up in hotels rather than the overcrowded crash pads that are standard model housing; and paid for their time and talents at a figure experts estimate at about $10,000, a particularly lavish sum when the industry standards have dwindled. Many male models can now hope to earn no more than 350 euros (or about $454 at the current exchange rate) to appear on top runways. Above all, they get a shot at stardom. "To do a Calvin show is amazing," said George Brown, the co-director of Citizen models in New York. It means you have a chance at a campaign, and since their ad buys are among the biggest in the business, that means millions of dollars in ads in magazines. Just as being cast by Prada can turn a woman overnight from a lovely Scandinavian nobody into what Mr. Brown termed "a six-figure girl," a Calvin Klein casting vaults a model's name to the top of the ratings on Web sites like Models.com, which exert considerable influence in markets like South Korea and Japan. "Calvin is the job everyone wants," said Ivan Bart, the head of IMG Models, the agency that represents Gisele Bündchen, Lara Stone and Kate Moss, along with Joan Smalls and Karlie Kloss, respectively ranked No. 1 and No. 2 on Models.com. Remember in the old days how we all stood in Times Square waiting for the new Calvin billboard? Being cast in a Calvin Klein show, Mr. Bart added, "is still the opportunity to become that new face, the next Marky Mark." It happens that none of the young men outside the Calvin Klein showroom were even born when the celebrated image of Mark Wahlberg, shirtless and in his boxer briefs, was splashed across magazines and billboards nationwide 22 years ago, but no matter. As so many other Calvin Klein campaigns have done, that one seeped into the culture, helping to alter in permanent ways how men are seen and sexualized. "It was once said that Ralph Lauren owned romance and Calvin owned sex," said Sam Shahid, the art director behind many celebrated Calvin Klein campaigns. Calvin himself was very physical, very athletic, very much about the body, and classical beauty was always very important to him. So, too, is it for Italo Zucchelli, who will mark a decade as creative director for Calvin Klein men's wear at a party this weekend in Milan. "Masculinity is very important for me," Mr. Zucchelli said at the casting session. "Yes, it's a fashion show, so it's ultimately about the clothes," he added. Yet as Stefano Tonchi, the editor of W, recently noted, fashion is about more than clothes. And Mr. Zucchelli is as much in the image as the garment business. "What we are trying to project is a very strong feeling of American-ness," he said. Part of my fantasy is for the clothes to enhance the human form and the masculine side of men. What American-ness, or masculinity, looks like exactly was left largely to be determined by Jennifer Venditti, a seasoned casting agent with a reputation for unearthing talent at malls, on streets and college campuses and by combing through social networks. Ms. Venditti was there at the casting call, alongside the stylist Panos Yiapanis and Nian Fish, a producer with the fashion agency KCD. For the last several months, Ms. Venditti had been scouring the country for prospects to fit Mr. Zucchelli's current vision, working from a template that called for a uniform height of no less than 6-foot-1, for lean though muscular bodies and for such imponderables as a "confident attitude" to go along with the requisite knife-blade cheekbones and perfect smiles. "There are many things going on about what masculinity is, but the guys in a Calvin show have to have a presence," Ms. Venditti said. "They have to have this quality that people say, "I want to look like that." "