There’s nothing remarkable about Lee Jeans’ new ad campaign, which features a girl being photographed in her room whilst licking a lollypop. Sex, as we know it in advertising, sells fashion, and it has for the greater part of the decade. The sexy images are by Terry Richardson, the fashion world’s naughtiest photographer, renowned for his envelope-pushing, groundbreaking porn-flavoured Gucci and Sisley campaigns.
The creative director of Spin Communications, Emil Vrisakis, said the campaign was, yes, “a bit cheeky” but, “Jeans have always been linked with sex and sexy imagery.” He also compared the photographs to nudes by Botticelli and Norman Lindsay, adding: “Terry Richardson is an artist too.”
The original idea for the Lee campaign, said Mr Vrisakis, was to photograph a concept of “feeling good about yourself”. The models would play around as they might in their own bedroom and photograph themselves posing like porn, rock or pop stars. As teens do. In private. It was Richardson, said Mr Vrisakis, who came up with the idea of inserting himself, shirtless and with his camera flashing, into every picture.
A little sexy controversy goes a long way and everybody’s doing riskier, ruder things to get it. Pants-off fashion photographs are still rare enough to shock, but not for long. Mario Testino’s closed-leg photograph of a La Perla corset and neat Brazilian wax in Vogue Paris’ May issue is treasured by some collectors as an historic moment, as are Gucci’s famous campaign shots, also by Testino, of the “double G” logo shaved into a woman’s pubic hair.
But where to from here? “If you are going to be overly proper about things, you can’t go forward,” said former model Charlotte Rampling to London’s Telegraph magazine recently. She had been asked about nude photographs taken of her in 1973 by Helmut Newton. “I think it’s great that Newton broke taboos . . . it often takes an artist to open the door.”
On the advertising blog site Adland this week, the Australian Childhood Foundation’s CEO Dr Joe Tucci quickly got the ball rolling on the Lee controversy: “An horrific portrayal of young people in sexually explicit poses that were very close to child pornography”. He complained to the Advertising Standards Bureau. Australian Family Association national secretary Gabrielle Walsh also weighed in: “We are concerned about the public portrayal of young women in this manner.”
American Apparel has had similar themes in its advertising. Open-legged shots of young men and women in teasing poses for good shock value. One does wonder, where to go from here? And next season is just around the corner.
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