bang

Before there was Marc Jacobs taking it all off for Bang, Yves Saint Laurent was posing naked for his own men's fragrance campaign. A nude photograph of the late designer will be up for auction at Christie's in Paris next month as part of a sale featuring 60 photographs by Jeanloup Sieff. The photo of Saint Laurent (at left) was used for Pour Homme, the first YSL men's fragrance advertising campaign in 1971.

Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent's business partner, in 1997 said of the image: "It was just provocation on the part of Yves Saint Laurent. The picture didn't specifically target the gay population, even though it  resonated strongly among them. In any case the photo was hardly published at the time. Just barely in the French press. It was only much later on that it became an almost mythical icon."

Marc Jacobs appears in his own advertising campaign for the first time, posing nude with a giant bottle of his latest men's fragrance, Bang. Longtime Jacobs collaborator Juergen Teller photographed the ads and is credited for coming up with the idea of a naked Jacobs on top of silver Mylar (a material he also used for a POP magazine editorial in the fall of 2005).

“This fragrance ad isn’t about some chiseled face on a beach — that approach wouldn’t be in line with what we’re doing,” said Jacobs. “This fragrance is for a contemporary guy, who, even if he isn’t young, has a younger spirit.” That said, it seems most national magazines will be running a version of the campaign with much less skin. There are shots with Jacobs cropped at the shoulders and one of only the bottle—"a version for Peoria, IL and a version for the Middle East," promised Claire Fermont Langlais, senior marketing director for Marc Jacobs fragrances at Coty Prestige.

It's pretty close but Jacobs has yet to go as far as the Tom Ford men's fragrance campaign from 2007 for which Terry Richardson photographed this image.