D&G are cunning bastards. No wonder they are now a World Power.
No other fashion brand better understands the nature of 21st Century desire, where it lives, what it looks like, what it looks good in –and where it’s taking us in the back of a taxi on Saturday night.
This ad for D&G jewelery, currently airing in heavy rotation on TV and in cinemas across Europe (and causing a barrage of complaints in some), is devilishly clever, on so many different levels – and devilishly disturbing. Like a kinky lover, it toys with your expectations and then, right at the end, when you think you know what it’s about, you slowly realise that yes, it’s kind of about that, but actually it’s much more about something else. Something even more salient and unsettling. Something in fact beyond sexuality.
And strangely hotter.
And if you prefer to focus on the dark-haired lad(s) pouty, sulky lips :
In the midst of this blinging self-love-fest, I can’t help but quote (no gag reflex) from my own devilisly clever, diabolically prophetic, 2002 essay ‘Meet the metrosexual’:
“The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis – because that’s where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modelling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they’re pretty much everywhere.”‘
I think I should give myself a high-fashion snog.
Oh, I already have.
Dear friends (and by “dear” I mean queer). Thank u. You flip off “The Man” with one hand and jack him off with the other. How cool is that? Case in point- this commercial. It’s cheap. But it works. Plain and simple. You see, this vendor chose the cheap and easy way to get people talking about it. And what are we doing? Talking about it, that’s what! That’s what controversy does- attract attention. The real controversy here is not the same-sex kissing, but rather, the fact that it warrants so much attention. Hey, how ’bout that Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, huh? A grown man who lives with 3 teenage boys in fur coats not related to him. Now that’s gay!
D&G always had the best ads, I collected their magazine ads when I was a teenager. They used to make lesbianism hot too… wish they’d get on that again. Or maybe they have… I don’t buy fashion magazines anymore, the American ones suck, the others are too expensive.
I read that the in France it has been actually banned by some televison authority, at the end.
in Italy, native land of Stefano and Domenico, the reaction of the general public has been indifference (they cut the end in the national TV version!)
while somewhere else (on MTV Italy, I think) they show the complete version
I absolutely agree with you, Mark, in analyzing and magnifying the D&G capacity to live in, and take advantage of, the modern male evolving sense of reality.
bizarre is that sculptors of the living lifestyle like the two lads Stefano e Domenico, come from the land of the roman catholic hypocrisy, of Fellini and Pasolini…
where the paragraphs against homophobia -elementary codes of civil behaviour anywhere else- have been taken off “the new laws to improve security” by the centre-left government …not to irritate the Vatican
I JUST read a dispatch from France’s OUT Magazine recounting that that particular ad had received so many complaints from viewers outraged by the same-sex kissing and they wanted it off the air. However, the commission that regulates media in France said that they had reviewed it and felt that it was not offensive because it wasn’t overtly sexual, and the commercial continued to air.
or let someone else do it!
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