News-Record.com

Go check out shots from a new Agent Provocateur ad campaign featuring Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary, Mona Lisa Smile)

I love this woman.

Tom Ford, former creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint-Laurent (and graduate of Parsons, where Project Runway takes place, as it turns out), struck out on his own in 2004.

Since then he's been shaking things up with a menswear collection George Clooney loves and swank Madison Avenue men's store...

...a Vanity Fair cover that got Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley naked (thank you, Tom)...

...and now, a cologne (one of many scents Ford has created at $165 per 1.7 oz. bottle) whose print ad campaign strips the niceties away from the "sex sells" ethic and just puts the tiny bottle between a woman's naked, glistening thighs, resting on her waxed pubis.

A not even kind of work-safe link to the actual ad here.

Even more explicit flash intro to Ford's website here.

Holy. God.

If Ford were straight I think people would be saying he hates women. Because he's not people will just accuse him of being a perverse design school guy who gets off on shocking people.

Which is, I imagine, fine with him.

To reward myself for having survived moving last weekend (and this week, and the unpacking that continues), this is what I'm going to be seeing this weekend:

Good stuff with Mick, Keith, Jack White and Martin Scorsese in the latest Rolling Stone.

I am disappointed to hear, however, that they wanted to get a PG-13 rating for this and so cut the use of the F-word down to two instances. Not just by playing songs that don't require it or watching their mouths but by actually taking it out of songs -- most egregiously in "Some Girls."

I can't really follow the logic -- does anyone think kids too young to get into an R movie are going to be trying to get into this without their parents anyway? The idea that Scorsese (for whom the F-word seems to have been artistically essential to this point) and the Stones (for whom the F-word is, in many ways, part of a way of life) could make a PG-13 movie leaves me scratching my head.