Vanity Fair On A Hollywood Expose
Two ultra thin actresses, Keira Knightley of Pride & Prejudice and baby chubby Scarlett Johansson of Match Point are luminously naked on the fold-out cover the Vanity Fair March issue. And the third subject in the photo is Tom Ford, the handsome and decidedly gay fashion designer, who is sniffing, perhaps about to nibble, Knightley’s ear.
Ford, who resuscitated the Gucci brand and went on to invigorate the Yves Saint Laurent empire before retiring two years ago, is the Hollywood issue’s guest editor.
As Tom Ford quoted in Vanity Fair’s “Behind the Scenes” feature story, “People won’t believe me, but I did not plan on being on the cover.” Last week, he told Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer that he is in the photograph because the intended third subject, actress Rachel McAdams, got cold feet and decided not to disrobe for photographer Annie Leibovitz.
He said, “Three girls in a bed is a bed full of girls. Two girls in bed are lesbians.” Even it’s not exactly clear what two girls and a gay man add up to, but the signs point to a spike in interest at the very least.
Maybe Ford and Vanity Fair are onto something to break through the clutter of a moment in which we are drenched with repeated images of the same dozen or so celebrities on newsstands, television shows, on the Web – is to do in reality what the media does metaphorically every day: Strip ‘em bare. If we can’t be present at the conception of the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie baby, then darn it, let’s at least see what Brad saw when it happened.
Actually it was Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter who hatched this idea of making Ford guest editor for the magazine’s annual Hollywood issue after Ford told him that Vanity Fair’s Tinseltown spreads had gotten stale. “I wanted to put the glamour back in Hollywood,” as Ford said in the magazine. “My main criteria in considering which individuals to include were `Am I tired of seeing them, or do I want to see more of them? Am I still hungry for this person?’”
Among other naked subjects are Jennifer Aniston, curled up in a cute little ball wearing only boots, and Angelina Jolie, who lolls on her stomach in a bathtub, displaying her impressive gallery of back tattoos.
The idea of naked women provocatively juxtaposed against fully clothed men is not a new one, not by a long stretch. Anyone who has ever passed through an art history survey class knows that Edouard Manet shocked the public sensibility in 1863 with his depiction of a nude woman picnicking with two fully clothed men in Dejeuner sur l’herbe.
For a magazine celebrating Hollywood, the combination of the dressed male and the naked heterosexual woman is merely a metaphor for how things are, have always been and will probably always be. Other actors, including Jason Schwartzman, also appear in the magazine with undressed women, and Hollywood plastic surgeon Garth Fisher of Extreme Makeover stands on a golf course next to a giant breast, evoking the oft-parodied chase scene in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.
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Posted by woman
on Feb 16 2006. Filed under Women Gossip, Women Lifestyle.
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