Over the years, Tom Ford, an American fashion designer, has made himself known for his over-the-top, provocative and sex-related advertisements. The notion of “sex sells”, which led him to many successes over the years, has reached the ultimate in his 2007 campaign. It was promoting Tom Ford’s first ever menfragrance photographed by Terry Richardson. Because of its explicit nature, the 2007 campaign was banned in Italy, and created a major buzz within the fashion community for the strong exploitation of the female body.
The first image of the advertisement consists of a nude female model, laying down with her skin shining and her legs spread widely towards the camera. The subject of the ad, the perfume bottle, is placed strategically over her genitalia with her finger, painted in bright red, reach down and resting on the lid of the bottle. The second image also shows a reclining female body with the perfume bottle trapped between her bare breasts. Once again, her painted fingers covering her nipples and pushing her breasts together in order to support the placement of the bottle. In this photo however, we can see part of the model’s face. Her lips, painted to match the bright color of her nails, wide open.
“The body is both an intimate and social object” suggests Joanne Entwistle in her text, “The Dressed Body.” By intimate, Entwistle mentions that the body is in many ways a physical symbol for one’s identity, while the social part indicates that bodies are constructed by the social burdens surrounding it. In the ad above, it is clear that the body is advertised as both an intimate object in which the identity of the woman is exploited and sexualized. As for the social object, once again the female body is explicitly used for men, much like the objectification and over sexualization of the female body in today’s world of media and advertisement.
