MARK SIMPSON.com

An ad for Braun in Germany.

I have nothing to say.

How much bigger can the cotton-clad packages in men’s underwear ads get, I wonder, before they are literally shoved down our throats? And if they are, will any of us be so impolite as to gag? Even though good quality cotton is so absorbent?

Above is Beck’s latest sporno for Emporio Armani underwear, due to air in early 2008. Below is fellow-footballer Freddie Ljunberg’s 2006 Calvin Klein campaign.

Do these chaps live together? I mean, they seem to share the same type of fancy underwear, the same kind of bed-linen, the same barber - and the same dodgy shaver. They also seem to favour the same saucy bedtime positions - and apparently use the same b/w digital camera. They even look like one another, in that slightly disturbing twin-ish way that some boyfriends have.

In fact, the shots are almost a mirror image of one another: are they looking into our eyes, their own or each others? Even if they don’t actually share the same bed, it’s clear that Becks is doing Ljunberg doing Becks: which is impressive. Auto-fellatio and 69-ing at the same time. Just as well these guys are supple athletes.

Becks seems to sport an even larger Ljunbox - though seems to be less well-endowed when it comes to lighting. (Becks is two whole years older than Freddie.)

Is Beck’s bigger basket a case of post-production spornographic one-up-manship? Or is it just that Beck’s Brit meatballs are bigger than the Swedish variety? (Which at Ikea at least seem to be a little on the mean side.) I think we need to be told.

In the meantime, I must commend Mr Armani’s decision to draw a veil - or a white linen shirt - over Beck’s seriously daggy arm and shoulder tatts.

Tip: Towelroad

This Eurostar ad used to ‘lure’, as the Daily Mail headline put it, Belgians to London has kicked up more of a stink in the UK than a blocked urinal in a boozer at chucking out time. Apparently some wrinkly-nosed types over here think it’s ‘offensive’.

I happen not to find pissing skinheads as ‘alluring’ as the Daily Mail seems to: it’s not really my cup of peculiar - but I rather like this ad. Of course it’s meant to be slightly provocative, but it’s also funny and does manage to convey something of the eccentricity of the English with our pissed-up hooligans and our fey raised-pinky tea-drinking. (And perhaps hinting at how the two may come together in the form of the gay skinhead - pretty much the only kind of skin you see in the UK today.)

And as David, the gent who drew my attention to this ad, points out in his apt commentary, it’s of a piece with the Belgian tradition of surrealist art - and rather wittier than much of our own contemporary offerings.

Perhaps I’m paying too much attention, but it looks like our skinhead’s not been drinking enough beer, or else he has a bad case of Hepatitis: his piss is the colour of mahogany.

Or maybe the Belgians are just passing comment on our tea.

Here’s the latest ‘arresting’ ad from hip men’s designer underwear label, C-IN2.  Shot by Steven Klein, it’s currently airing on billboards on the streets of Melbourne where kids and nuns and navvies can see it. And why not?

There’s really nothing I can say about this or what it says about contemporary masculinity and metrosexuality that isn’t completely explicit in the ‘captivating’ image itself.

OK, so there’s one thing I have to point out: It seems the model prisoner closest to the camera hasn’t mastered the gay porn star technique of removing your trousers without taking off your boots. Perhaps he spent too long plumping his quiff - or his packet.

No doubt he’s going to be severely punished by the nasty guard with the big machine gun.

Maybe he’ll throw him in the cage and make him do a few rounds of Ultimate Fighting.

—-

PS - I’ve been reliably informed that C-IN2 underwear includes a cock-ring type device designed to push your privates into the public’s face. Men these days are just total hussies. They should be locked up.…

This scrum-my ad is part of a ‘C’est so Paris’ poster campaign due to be unleashed on London shortly to attract Londoners to Paris.

Booking my Eurostar tickets now….

Apparently, this ad is supposed to show that Paris is ‘the capital of humour’.

It’s a funny ad - but it’s really another example of how sporno is going seriously mainstream. It will definitely get noticed. It may even cause traffic accidents. I’m sure there will be underwear mishaps.

I only have one objection: the fake (and rather blurred) rugby players aren’t nearly as sexy or tarty as the real ‘pros’ begging to be tackled in that very nicely, verly clearly photographed French rugby calendar.

Tip: AC

A curious ad I meant to blog about when it was released last year.

It’s a self-consciously metrosexual commercial in that Ben, already identified in the media (and by me) as a metrosexual, plays a narcissistic young male about town, shopping, dining and generally admiring himself in the glances of the women who look at him and keeping a tally with a nightlcub bouncer type clicker. (As I explained it in the 2002 article that introduced the metrosexual to the US, the modern male obsession with being looked at is ‘because that’s the only way you can be sure you actually exist.’)

Apparently in keeping with the equal opps narcissism of the metrosexual, and a sign of the progressive times, he clicks his clicker after receiving an admiring look from a (faggy) male shop assistant. Though he has to think about it before giving a ‘what the hell?’ shrug.

The business of the male shop assistant is however slightly disingenuous because metrosexuality, happy as it is for any attention, tends to valorize other men’s looks even higher than women’s. That gay men find you desirable makes you REALLY desirable, apparently. This is something confirmed by Becks et al. And also by less vaunted metros. When visiting Manhattan a couple of years ago a very forwards gay friend of mine trying to disprove my theory asked several random young straight men on their way to clubs if they liked being checked out by gay men (while I cringed with embarrassment). They all said ‘yes’ without hesitation . ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Because gay men have good taste.’ was the universal response.

Young metros today know that women’s new found or newly expressed aesthetic interest in men is still largely derivative of (gay) men’s interest in the male form. Men are generally more visually orientated than women - and straight men know that even better than gay men. Besides, metrosexuals are metrosexuals because they themselves are very much aware of the attractiveness of the male. If you weren’t, how could you hope to be attractive yourself? More generally, metrosexuality is about a certain kind of passivity - inviting the gaze - which men know they are flirting with by being on the ‘receiving end’. This is what made male narcissism so taboo in the retrosexual past and why today being admired by other males can give metrosexual males such a thrill.

To be convincing and really hip to the times, the Click ad should have had Bendover Affleck click his clicker at least ten times when checked out by the faggy male shop assistant.

Of course, the commercial is not selling Affleck but Lynx deodorant. Affleck’s affectedness is being mocked slightly. Which is why the Lynx-wearing blue-collar boy-next-door wins the metrosexual click-measuring contest in the lift at the end. He has been getting more attention even than Affleck.

I suspect though that the reason he won had nothing to do with Lynx and is actually due to the fact that a) he has been giving proper weight to the looks of other males and b) he’s been riding around in lifts all day with strange men.

Old Spice are running an eye-wateringly spornographic wrestling TV ad for their Red Zone Hydrowash in the US.  It features two buffed, cut, metro-wrestlers with really great hair and skin grappling on the mat.  The ‘bottom’, held in a neck lock, comments, between fighting for air, on the ‘top’s ’soft skin’ and how it’s ’supple’.  ‘So?’ replies the top, slightly baffled but carrying on choking. 

‘It’s… nice’ the lad eventually manages to sputter, before the ref blows the whistle.  ‘THERE’S NO SHAME IN SOFT SKIN,’ announces a reassuringly butch coach-like, ironic but perhaps not so ironic, voiceover. 

I’m not sure what ‘Hydrowash’ is, but after seeing this ad I don’t know how I’ve lived without it.  I suspect those 300 Spartans probably use it too.

I don’t think these guys eat Snickers.  This ad is as funny and smart and young as that Superbowl Snickers ad wasn’t.  What’s more, it has big (shaved) balls where that Snickers ad just had nelly OMIGOD!! NOWAY!! SOGROSS!! THEIR LIPS, LIKE, TOTALLY TOUCHED!!! man-panic.

A clever and effective way to re-brand a company still associated with the smooth operator breeder naffness of the 1970s.

The end-line for this knowlingly, wittily spornographic ad is ‘Keep it clean’. 

Fat chance.

[Thanks to Glenn for bringing this to my rapt attention

Dolce & Gabbana and the New World Order

by Mark Simpson (Arena Homme Plus, Winter 2006)
If you think that Italy won this year’s Football World Cup, think again. In actual, historical fact, this year’s World Cup was won by Dolce & Gabbana, the Milan-based, city-state fashion brand run by two rags-to-rag-rich prince(sse)s, that seems increasingly unassailable, particularly in the world of men’s style. Which increasingly means in the world of men.

In a post-metrosexual era in which masculinity has been well-and-truly aestheticized, and men all over the world have become more Italian, it’s entirely right and proper that Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana should be, in effect, designing masculinity by decree for the 21st Century. The Italian team’s sensually shiny yet coolly elegant blue suits and shirts – and the spornographic ad campaign for D&G underwear, featuring team-members hanging around the showers in spectacular briefs, oiled up and waiting for our attention – shows D&G’s total mastery of the new masculine universe.

To spell it out: the Italian team won the World Cup because, thanks to D&G, the world, male and female, would much rather celebrate in their changing rooms than with those of the rather dowdy, rather plain French team. D&G understand better than anyone the modern male desire to be desired in a world where desirability increasingly means victory – and rather liking what you see in the mirror.

This is, after all, why the city state of fashion D&G has become a World Power (they even have their own Navy – at least in their recent advertising campaign.) As Domenico and Stefano gushed in their forward to a delicious photo book of the Italian stallions published before the World Cup: ‘Really good and all handsome. Handsome, really handsome… We love Italy… long and narrow, warm and sensual come rain or shine, the Italy that has faith it itself and never gives up. Quite rightly envied and rich in art, because taught to appreciate beauty,, having grown up surrounded by beauty.’ Replace ‘Italy’ with ‘Dolce & Gabbana’ and you have the truth. The seamster boys have staged an aesthetic coup d’etat, effectively absorbing ‘Italy’ herself into their own brand; their March on Rome more of a sashay than an assault, but no less effective for that. [Arguably, given that Dolce is from Sicily and the romantic styles of that island carried through to the brand, they also represent the first serious union of North and South since the time of Il Duce.

And of course they know it. It’s not just a vain fashion boast that their Men’s Autumn Collection is called The New Power and, with it’s almost Austro Hungarian (i.e. Milanese) motifs, appears to announce the foundation of an empire. Or perhaps merely the acknowledgement of it. After 20 years in business, they have more than 100 boutiques worldwide and over 2000 employees, wholesale revenues of over $1B (the company is soley owned by the two designer princelings), and have just bought a large cinema in Milan to showcase their collections; a D&G Colliseum (Milan was also once the capital of the Western Roman Empire). Little wonder that Hollywood can’t get enough of D&G (who are in many ways the new Hollywood). Hip Hop and RnB keep name-checking them (e.g. Black Eyed Peas and 50 Cent), and David Beckham imitates them (see his new ‘Intimate’ fragrance ). Meanwhile the casual-yet-noble, slutty-yet-stylish, approachable-yet-mythical, naked-yet-dressed (those astonishing shiny suits are fully-dressed nudity) approach of D&G looks more and more like the ideology of a mediated, pornolized age.

But then, D&G began their fiendish work back in the 1980s, the decade which laid the foundations of metrosexuality, beginning the transformation of masculinity into an appetising commodity. Perhaps this is why their Men’s Summer 2007 Collection is replete with Chariots of Fire, Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber references – as well as more oiled athletic limbs and lip-glossed suits.

The future foretold has finally arrived, guys. And it’s D&G.
© Mark Simpson 2006

I recently came across this Second World War US ad for Buna bath-towels on the web.

I could say something about lost ‘innocence’ and how in the past a lack of knowingness could, paradoxically, mean more explicitness. Or how patriotic gay porn was being used to sell product to women 60 years ago.

Or how those gay bath-house shower scenes in ‘Top Gun’ suddenly look much more realistic and traditional.

But all I can really say is: where do I get some Buna bath-towels??

In the Seventies advertising was doing its best to swallow Western manhood whole, but it just wasn’t up to the job.  It couldn’t quite suppress its gag reflex.  Or ours.  Men’s advertising was almost universally a joke and an hilariously camp one at that that. 

It wasn’t until some way into the Eighties, the decade in which advertising became sexier than sex, and with the arrival of slick, slutty allies in the form of men’s fashion magazines - the poppers of men’s marketing - that it really began to get the hang of deep-throating masculinity without even blinking, turning it into the shiny, hard-cash, quiveringly serious commodity it is today.  The rampant Nineties and Noughties metrosexual was fluffed by the Eighties.

Richard Jarman’s just-published ‘Smooth Operator’ (New Holland), a light-hearted, hilariously illustrated and captioned bijou book-ette anatomises that almost-innocent period from the Seventies and into the early Eighties when suited admen were doing their manful best, but were really only barely managing to get the bell-end in before dissolving into splutters and traumatic public-school flashbacks.  

The kind of man they were selling and slicking back then was of course as ’smooth’ as their own man-swallowing action was dodgy and toothy.  He was, in other words, utterly absurd, but rather likeable for that:

‘Smooth Operator celebrates that distinctly ’70s and ’80s breed of man - the Hai Karate-wearing, lounge-suit-sporting, big-hair-boasting hunk.  Modern man can only aspire to the God-like status of these Smooth Operators, photographed here in their natural habitat of cool bars, poolside loungers and, er, knitwear catalogues’

Or, as he puts it elsewhere, the Smooth Operator is ‘the metrosexual’s grandad’.  Jarman himself is closely related to the subject: ‘I would like to thank my father and his man-clogs and fuzzy perm for the inspiration for this book,’ he writes.  The ‘Smooth Operator’, like Jarman’s dad, was a ‘ladies’ man’ - or at least, he would have been if ladies were actually putting out in the 1970s without first being promised, as a minimum, a finger-buffet reception, two weeks in a high-rise in Magaluf and a lifetime’s bickering in a semi-detached in Macclesfield. 

Unlike the metrosexual, the Smooth Operator hadn’t discovered Wilde’s maxim that loving oneself could be the start of a lifelong romance - one uninterrupted by in-laws or kids or in fact anyone else, save your stylist.  The Smooth Operator though wasn’t really capable of loving himself.  I mean, could you love matching coloured vests and Y-fronts?  The Smooth Operator, like much of ’men’s’ advertising itself back then, was much more interested in selling himself to women.  Or at least appealing to their sympathy.  The Smooth Operator was as likeable as the metrosexual is attractive - or as unattractive as the metrosexual is unlikeable. 

Which reminds me: I should warn that some people, especially those of a sensitive or aesthetic disposition, will find some of the images collected in Jarman’s book very disturbing indeed.  Weeks of retail therapy and a year’s subscription to Arena Hommes Plus may be required after viewing them. 

Here’s a selection of some of the less shocking ‘Smooth Operator’ images and Jarman captions [and Simpson comments:

‘The problem with Y-fronts, and their matching vests and T-shirts, was that they led many a smooth operator to leave the house half-dressed to stand about in gangs on sand dunes looking cool.’  

[If you look closely you'll notice that all three models are wearing the same cleft chin.  Big chins were very important in Seventies advertising - big packets less so....