Jean Paul Gaultier Advertisement Analysis

Great Essays
Anthony, J, and I chose two still ads from the same cologne line, over a decade apart. The line is “Le Male” by Jean Paul Gaultier, and the two ads that we chose are pictured below. Our task was to analyze the “gayness” of the advertisement, and therefore to also analyze what wasn’t gay about it. To do this, we collectively did research about the history of the content of the ads, the brand and the creator of it, and the models used. Lastly, we analyzed the aesthetics of the ad to pull it all together, using subtle or not so subtle visual clues to further support our hypothesis that these ads did indeed have at least a little something gay about them. The navy has had a long standing reputation for being the gayest branch of the military. …show more content…
The ad, released in 2010, features the model Robert Perovich, who took over the male model scene in the early 2000’s (Listal RSS). Although he has done editorials in Out magazine, he has never ‘come out’ as LGBTQ+ himself. It is, however, strongly rumored that he is gay (vooxpopuli). In the ad itself, Perovich is not wearing a shirt, but he is wearing white sailor pants and a “Dixie Cup” sailor hat (the latter of which has been used by the Navy since 1886). The background of the room is blurred out to bring focus to the model, but it looks almost reminiscent of a standard military infirmary with cream walls and shutters on the windows. Perovich has three tattoos, one on his bicep and two on his chest. These are all real, and were not placed there for the purposes of the ad. He himself is standing almost perpendicular to the camera, but he is turned so that he is looking directly at the viewer, and there is a striped black and white shirt tucked into the waistband of his pants. The bottle for the cologne is placed in the lower right corner of the ad and is shaped to show a man’s sculpted chest to about the top of his thighs, complete with a bulge that is unmistakably phallic. The bottle is blue, with paler blue stripes on the torso echoing the imagery of the stripes on the shirt that is tucked into Perovich’s waistline. These shirts are Navy style, again harkening back to that connection between the Navy and …show more content…
The second ad was released in 1996 and features only one model, David Fumero, who is mirrored to create the illusion of two men. Fumero is a former male model turned actor who now has a wife and son (though that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s straight) (Wikipedia 1). In this ad, because he is mirrored against himself, I will refer to them separately as the ones on the left and the right for simplicity’s sake. They are both facing each other in the semblance of arm wrestling, but if you look closely, it’s actually poor ‘90’s photoshop and his hands are just pasted on top of each other in fists. They are both wearing the “Dixie Cup” sailor hat, and they both have tattoos and earrings: a tiger’s head and “LOVE” written on a banner over a heart on their biceps respectively from left to right. Their earrings are both hoops, but the one on the right has three, whereas the one on the left only has one. The one on the left is wearing a blue and white striped shirt resembling those worn by men in the Navy, and the one on the right is not wearing a shirt at all. The one on the left is holding what looks like an empty soup can in his free hand, but the other has nothing in his hand. There is, though, a blue perfume bottle with small black tube leading to a poofy spritzer for applying

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