If you follow proper fashion or fragrance releases (does anyone follow fragrance releases, is that a thing, to be really into fragrance and collect it like records?) this is semi-old news (2 months old) but if you follow bus shelter adverts around Liverpool Street like I do, you’ll have recently spotted that Marc Jacobs has a new fragrance out.
AND THAT’S NOT ALL HE’S GOT OUT!!! PHWOAAARRRRRRRRRR!!!!
Yep, he’s taken the bold move of modeling naked to advertise his own product, and the first thing you’ll notice is that he’s got it gooooooing oooooon for a 47 year old (although I’m told that in the gay community this is quite common), his glistening flesh is really something to behold. He keeps pretty trim, what’s the gay version of a milf, a dilf? I don’t know.
I used to think Marc Jacobs was a dick because he’d gone from meek nerd, to gross graphic designer, to Italian duke on holiday in Monaco in the space of three years, and I’m suspicious of anyone who goes on that kind of creepy personal reinvention mission. Doesn’t it look like he betrayed bookish dorks everywhere?
Weird huh?
BUT The other thing about Marc’s smokin’ bod in his new ad is that he has some amazing tattoos. He’s got a Spongebob, the M&Ms guy, a Simpsons version of himself, Elizabeth Taylor from Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Wolfe? with 3-d sunglasses on, ‘BROS BEFORE HOS’ written above his wrist, and a load of other things. This is old news for fashion fans, as he’s been getting them since 2007, but bear with the rest of us laymen, please guys. It always takes a few years for the high-end fashion stuff to get to the plebs anyway, and this is how it starts.
Marc Jacobs has taken tattoos and emasculated them, turning them into the most trivial, silly things possible, basically saying to the ultra macho ‘creative’ types who’ve spent the last ten years turning themselves into 1930s dockers: “You have meaning and ‘heritage’ behind your tattoos? Jeez, what a mood killer, what are you, gay or something? Be a man, this fashion stuff’s just a bit of fun, treat it as such!”
Now these hilarious things are on bus shelters in London, a few people who might not have seen them before but fancy themselves as knowing about stuff are gonna get that sort of thing. Then a few more are gonna get into that vibe off of them, and then it’ll trickle further and further and soon everyone with a sailor tattoo is going to look like a dork to takes themselves too seriously, just like what happened to the guys with tribal tattoos a generation before, when the sailor tattoo guys took over. And whose fault was sailor tattoos? Well, we could say Sailor Jerry, the rich heritage surrounding western tattoo culture, 80s hardcore and few other things, but really, honestly, if you think about it, it’s probably Jean Paul Gaultier’s. Fashion’s got us all by the balls, so pay attention.
But as well as looking at this like a professor in cultural studies, we could also say that the man who has a tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor from Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Wolfe? with 3-d sunglasses on is probably the most-fun-to-have-at-a-house-party-one-person-could-possibly-be, and we should all go out and get this fragrance to fund his lavish lifestyle. Because frankly, he’s the definately the kind of guy I want dictating to me what I should wear via a trickle down effect as explained by Meryl Streep to Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada, as opposed to some moody guy who thinks anything actually means anything.
Finally:
He’s got a tattoo of the airbrushed cover of the Poltergeist VHS on his back!? WTF?! He’s making me feel like a square, I can’t take it!