Madonna's New Ad for Louis Vuitton (More Photos)

Since we had Baby Jesus on the blog yesterday, let's check in with the Blessed Mother.

Here she is, photographed by Steven Meisel, in all her glory in the latest ad campaign for LV Fall 2009:

It's like a salute to Photoshop. Everybody knows Madonna doesn't look anything like that, so why go there? We realize this is a cliche, but she really does look like a wax figure. Look at her fingers. They look like they would melt in the sun. Oh, and don't think we didn't notice those vein covers on your hands, missy. There are some things even Photoshop can't fix, apparently.

Look, we get it. Photo manipulation in ad campaigns is just the way it is and a certain level of it is to be expected, but when it's at this level, it's just creepy-looking.

Oh, and here's the dress, which is fine, but those bunny ears you keep pushing are never gonna happen, Miss Jacobs.

Louis Vuitton Fall 2009 Collection
Model: Tanya Dziahileva

And for additional Sunday reading, here's Cathy Horyn's take on Madonna's last go-round in LV at the Met Gala and how it represents the necessary narrowing of choices for the fashionable woman as she gets older, in a piece called "Irony and the Old Lady":

"While I’m still in love with the ironical gesture and its mild but wholly satisfying orneriness and freedom in the face of so much conformity and New Jersey housewife opulence, I can’t pull it off anymore. I mentioned this to a friend, Luca Stoppini, the art director of Italian Vogue. I asked him why it is that fashionable women can’t wear certain things after 50. Luca had the answer right away. “It’s like fighting with the wind,” he said.

Nothing conveys that struggle better than Madonna’s attire last month at the Costume Institute gala at the Metropolitan Museum. In addition to wearing a taffeta hair bow that poked up like rabbit ears, she had on a bright blue minidress with a romper hem and a pair of swashbuckler boots that noticeably left a crack of skin showing at the top of her thighs.

Although the outfit was plainly a riff on exuberant Paris fashion — it was designed by a host of the event, Marc Jacobs of Louis Vuitton — many people took the excessiveness seriously. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that some members of the low-brow media on the steps of the Met didn’t get the joke. But, in any case, they thought that Madonna, who is 50, looked like a nut.

One person who didn’t was Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York, who said last week, “To me, that’s the Madge I fell in love with.” He let out a laugh. “Scandal!”


More photos:






Source:
Irony and the Old Lady [NYTimes]
Can Women Over 50 Pull Off Ironic Fashion? [TheCut]


[Photos: Steven Meisel/Style.com]

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