Tom Ford's latest ad campaign has been unleashed, and it's a doozy. Shot by fashion photography's pervert terrible Terry Richardson, the Tom Ford for Men campaign features a crotch shot of a model with a bottle between her legs and her boobs. The designer's website offers a slideshow with its own "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT IMAGES" warning, a porn movie stills in strobe show starring a heavily greased model who keeps blocking the pink shot with a perfume bottle. Surely, feminists will ponder the cultural significance and subtextual meaning of these images. Is the bottle a penis? Do men want to bukkake women with expensive cologne? How did they get that woman so greasy? Sadly, we'll never know. Ford has long been considered a master of the fine art of selling sex, from carving the Gucci "G" into a model's pubic hair to claiming his scents smell like a man's balls to courting RealDolls in a fashion spread for W. This week, New York Times fashion czar Cathy Horyn pronounced the arrival of a new kind of sexy at Marc Jacobs. On the runway, models paraded through a fashion show choreographed to run in reverse sporting a range of looks that more often than not embodied various states of dishabille, a kind of poor man's version of John Galliano's Fall 2005 Dior collection in which couture was deconstructed down to its undergarments. According to Horyn, granny pantie flashing, dowdily disheveled Patchwork girls are the new sexy: "[These clothes] are respectful of women in a way that Britney Spears’s fishnets are not." Meanwhile, Ford continues hawking his upscale brand of porno chic. Today, the one thing that's clear in the battle of what's sexy is the importance of a good Brazilian.
