MANY people look to fashion advertisements as eagerly as they do the layouts, and a perusal of the Replica Louis Vuitton issues finds chalk-striped vamps at Dior, discoing Amazons at D&G, hipsters at Burberry and cloud-borne nymphs at Lanvin. Emerging from all this dreamy splendor, like an uninvited guest, her sharp elbows out, is the figure of Victoria Beckham.
Ms. Beckham, the former Spice Girl whose marriage to the soccer star David Beckham stirred the British press to the point of obsession until the couple moved to America, is not a conventionally beautiful woman, but, to judge by Juergen Teller’s pictures of her for Marc Jacobs’s ads, she is a good sport. Instead of looking like a glamorous celebrity, she has been rendered as an abstraction, a living doll. In the most disquieting image, we see only her bare, high-heeled legs flopping over the side of a Replica Louis Vuitton Handbags. Mr. Jacobs had specially made to hold her.
I knew this wasn’t going to be Vogue, Ms. Beckham said by phone from her home in Los Angeles. I knew I had to put myself in their hands, which could be quite scary. She said she had a long discussion with Mr. Jacobs after he first proposed the idea, last September, and a follow-up chat with Mr. Teller, who met Ms. Beckham’s misgivings with a typical mixture of charm and candor. I told her, ‘You’re the most photographed woman in the world,’ Mr. Teller recalled. ‘And fashion nowadays is all about product — Louis Vuitton Wallets and shoes — and you’re kind of a product yourself, aren’t you’ She was, like, ‘Uh, yeah.’
As Ms. Beckham calculated the advantages, People are always going to talk about what Marc does.
If fashion shows are a way for a designer to think out loud, collaborations with a photographer can help spin those disparate ideas into a story. Both Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein owe a debt to the visionary eye of Bruce Weber, who is really a storyteller. Gianni Versace frequently paid homage to Balenciaga Handbags, whose pictures lent imaginative energy to Versace’s designs. And it seems doubtful that generations of women would have felt quite the same about Yves Saint Laurent’s pantsuits if Helmut Newton had not made them an object of sex and mystery.
Today, the most meaningful collaboration is between Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Teller. In one way or another their ads, begun in 1997, with a photo of Kim Gordon performing in a lavender-pink tulle dress, serve an authentic record of the distractions and tastes of the moment, though Mr. Jacobs insists that they are really about someone I know or someone I’m interested in seeing in my clothes.
An astonishing array of people has appeared in the ads, generally doing nothing in the Balenciaga Wallets sense — lying in the grass, kicking up their heels, teasing a squirrel. The group has included Sofia Coppola, Dakota Fanning, the photographer William Eggleston and Winona Ryder, who pitched herself for an ad shortly after her shoplifting trial. Even Mr. Teller has put in an appearance, in makeup and wigs with Cindy Sherman and boldly naked with Charlotte Rampling.
It was always free, said Mr. Teller, who is German and lives in London with his wife, Sadie Coles, an art dealer, and their young son, Ed. (He also has a daughter, Lola, with Venetia Scott, a stylist who has worked with Mr. Jacobs for many years.) Mr. Teller is extremely funny and gregarious, at once sensitive (he created a book-length series of photos around Ed, who is the spitting image of his dad) and capable of the gross joke. It’s hard but not impossible to believe that Fake Handbags was once, as the London editor Jefferson Hack put it, a shy, unknowing boy from Germany, incredibly intimidated by models.
Mr. Teller continued Marc and I just discuss. ‘Oh, it would be great to have that person.’ He introduced me to Sofia Coppola, and I thought, ‘Oh, it would be really great to photograph her’ and Marc said, ‘Yeah, why don’t we do a bag ad.’ So we met at the Mercer, and I said, ‘It’s kind of snowing, let’s just go to Central Park and do this bag ad.’ I tried to make sense of what the hell she was going to do with a Replica Handbags, right It had to come out of a real life story. You come out of a taxi or walk around the park. Not like some sort of model lying around on some sand with a handbag, oooh …
He laughed. So there was this scenario in the park where suddenly these squirrels were coming, and Sofia put her hands out with the bag — I ended up cutting her out — and the squirrel looking toward her and the bag.
Although the ads are influential, with Mr. Teller’s raw, overexposed style and bordered layout widely imitated, it’s not immediately clear why. (Unlike most photographers who traverse the worlds of commerce and art, Mr. Teller works with just one assistant, and he uses a Contax G2 camera with an onboard flash.) Mr. Hack suggested that his advertising approach is the opposite direction to everyone else, adding that as a young brand, Louis Vuitton Handbags should be irreverent and fun. There’s no heritage to play on, there’s nothing to subvert, he said.
Certainly the ads are not overtly about selling anything. They’re not aspirational pictures, Mr. Jacobs said. Pointing to the Cindy Sherman ads, in which she and Mr. Teller look like dumpy siblings. You wouldn’t look at them and say, ‘Oh, mmm, that dress is so attractive.’
Yet Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, which has published Mr. Teller’s editorial work for years, contends that the ads are comparable to those Mr. Lauren did with Mr. Weber. Ralph created a perfect world for his customer to live in, Mr. Freedman said. Marc has created a world around himself, and everything he does has a kind of mystique. It’s very aspirational to anyone who wants to feel they get it.
Taking almost the same line, the art dealer Barbara Gladstone, who is a friend of both the artist and the designer, said, The ads are really for people who get it, and I think Marc and Juergen happily dispense with those who don’t.