Cut for Men?

For nearly a decade we seem to have been watching the same young white man with cheekbones like the Himalayas acting out quirky quasi-morality tales in cinema and television jeans advertising. Ever since Nick Kamen's self-aware strip in the Washerette, the release of each new Levi's commercial has been something of an event. The latest adverts, Taxi and Drugstore, advance the jeans commercial as a form where issues of race, gender, eroticism and rebellion can be stirred but not shaken and served up with a generous twist of irony. Visually gorgeous and thematically smart, these new films have all the appeal of Belgian chocolates - sensual, addictive, and slightly exotic. There is a bravery, too, amid these days of corporate caution, in Levi's latest choice of narratives: Rarely, if ever, has a major company lent its reputation to depictions of sexuality which the majority of its target audience are unlikely to find aspirational.

Taxi and Drugstore can be regarded as an advertising diptych, with one panel addressing gay sexuality and the other toying with teenage relationships and parental approval. In the ubiquitous Taxi, a beautiful young woman is picked up by a horny cab driver. Driving through a humid and colourful New York City, she teasingly put the finishing touches to her make up as the cabby watches her, excitedly, in his rear-view mirror. The magnificent twist occurs when she begins to shave her five o'clock shadow, and - having shown she is a he - gets her revenge on her leering driver. Drugstore, thematically and visually, is the reverse of Taxi. Here we have the story of a young boy in a small rural town going to buy some condoms. The film is black and white, slightly shaky, and the period is set (judging by the tin of 'rubbers' and the cut of the boy's rodeo jeans) in the late 40s or early 50s. Brazen but honest, the boy checks his purchase in full view of an outraged customer, and a split-second of complicity passes between him and the druggist. As the sun goes down, he drives to pick up his girlfriend; she is a slip of a girl - like Kate Moss in a chiffon nightie - and her father is the drugstore owner who sold the boy condoms. Now that the customer is on his doorstep, his understanding disappears. Of course, young love triumphs, and the teenage couple disappear into the rural darkness.

Taxi owes a phenomenal amount - by chance or intention - to Nan Goldin's vividly precise portraits of New York transsexuals. Of the two adverts it is the most original, sticking two fingers up at the macho reputation of jeans commercials. (There is an ironic comparison to be made with Wrangler's Cross Town Traffic ad of some years ago, with its ultra-straight morality tale of urban disaffection.) Taxi gives the product the last laugh in a way which makes you want to join in. Drugstore, one feels, is almost there to redress the balance; it would have been a double whammy had the young boy with the condoms turned out to be collecting the drugstore owner's son. But this would be expecting too much. Critics may suggest that the use of drag in Taxi merely reinforces the stereotypical image of the gay underworld (the implication being that gay men inhabit a Warholesque fashion inferno on a full-time basis) but this, I think, is to miss the ad's glorious sexiness, and to ignore its power in an age and a medium where chiselled boys and girls with big tits are considered the sole characters in the fictions of youth advertising. Braun and Bic should take note, as should Gillette: 'the best a man can get', in shaving as in life, might well be better if the man's a woman.