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San Francisco is smiling today with the unvailing of a massive Emporio Armani ad feature David Beckham in his finest tighty whities. Soon those in New York, Los Angeles, Rome, London, Milan, Paris and Tokyo will be able to indulge in the eye candy as well. Why the first ad in San Fran? Armani wanted to make their target demographic perfectly clear. Read More »

I am not the target audience for luxury knitwear designer St. John (this being because I am not often in the market for a $2,000 suit jacket), but if I were, I would totally have bought all of their stuff solely because of Angelina Jolie. The actress has been St. John's spokesmodel for the past three years, and her crisp, black and white ad campaign (shot by photog Mario Testino), was consistently gorgeous, provocative, exciting, sexy, powerful...just everything a rich lady would like to be.
So, why Kelly Gray—the blond daughter of St. John's founder who was the face of its cheesy ads for years and is now the company's "creative director"—would replace one of the most famous women in the world with a bunch of skinny, non-interesting models, is kind of beyond comprehension (if it ain't broke...). Perhaps Angie herself wanted out because, you know, she's not only pregs, but also a bazillionaire. However, according to this morning's WWD, Ms. Jolie has officially been dumped because: "Three years is a long time to maintain any campaign, and we felt it was time to do something new and different. [The campaign] ties in nicely to our whole rebranding initiative." Indeed. After the jump, the new ads, the Angelina pics, and a sampling of yes, oh, yes, the over-the-top, Kelly "original cougar" Gray campaign. Read More »

There's a big story in this week's New Yorker about renowned photo retoucher Pascal Dangin (who works with every fancy person in fashion magazines you've ever heard of and tons that you haven't).  In it, Dangin talks about softening lines, "re-doing" asses, adding hair to men's chests and on and on. It's fascinating. It's terrifying. It's the world we live in now, how it's gonna be forever, nothing is real anymore, it sucks, etc to infinity.

But then something surprising happens in the interview. The writer brings up the real women Dove campaign... Read More »