One of my finest teaching moments occurred last week when one of my students said “basically we’ve learnt that sex = money.” I felt very proud! If I had my way, I would have handed them their diploma in Fashion Marketing right there and then, as the whole premise of fashion marketing is “sex = money.”

A Bruce Weber photo for Calvin Klein Body. Calvin Klein has a history of using the strategy of Sex = Money. They are also quite good with Sex + Controversy = Money.

So here’s another blatant example of sex = money, and jumping on the fashion video bandwagon.

EVERYONE is doing fashion videos at the moment, because its the thing to do, but its getting boring. I had started a Youtube playlist of all the important fashion videos, but then it got impossible to stay up to date on things, so I have given up. When everyone is doing the same thing, its hard to stand out.

This is where photographer Bruce Weber and Yves Saint Laurent menswear come in. They decided to do a video together, and, since its hard to get people excited about fashion videos, since EVERYONE is doing them, they did what every brand does to grab attention: good-looking naked people.

A&F Quarterly cover. A soft porn "catalogue" for Abercrombie & Fitch.

A little bit of background on Bruce Weber and naked men. He is a great photographer, no question about it, and he perfected his skills as a “photographer of naked men” when he shot the A & F Quarterly. The Quarterly is basically a soft porn “catalogue” for Abercrombie & Fitch (a catalogue implies that there would be products in it, and since everyone is naked, its not really a catalogue because its not showing off the clothes) that causes a lot of controversy for the otherwise extremely boring brand Abercrombie & Fitch. The Christians get all worked up about pictures of naked young people frolicking outside, and Abercrombie gets called controversial by the media, and so more young people flock to their stores to buy boring college clothes. (I don’t blame them for having boring clothes, I interviewed for them once for a job on the design team. You HAVE to move to Columbus, Ohio, and work in their headquarters, aptly named The Campus. So they can’t really get many good designers, because no one wants to move there.)

Here’s some more images from the quarterly.

Still trying to figure out what clothes they are trying to sell here...

This totally happens to me when I go on a picnic.

More proof that you don't need clothes to sell clothes.

There are more images from the A&F Quarterly here. Tons of toned butts to be seen.

Anyway, the YSL “Ain’t Nothin’ Like The Real Thing” Bruce Weber Short Film looks like it could be an Abercrombie video, because there are naked boys jumping into the water. There are also some naked women (but very old video clips, which makes them less offensive, because they are “retro”), and naked babies. I could not last through the whole 7 minutes, it boring and pointless, and basically a big Bruce Weber ego trip. Here it is, you can fast forward through most of it, that is the only way it is bearable, unless you are just checking out the naked people, in which case, its worth watching, because they are all pretty hot.

And by the way, where does Yves Saint Laurent come into this video?

As a contrast, I would like to show you my favorite fashion video, by Sergio Rossi, which is a fabulous Italian luxury shoe brand. Watch this with the sound on if you can. You will laugh, guaranteed. If Sergio Rossi had a shop in Vancouver, I would go and buy a pair immediately, as a show of thanks for the many smiles I have had and caused when showing this video to people. (By the way, they also make fabulous shoes.)

Images Credits. A&F Quarterly images came from here.