Many people look to fashion advertisements as eagerly as they do the layouts, and a perusal of the spring issues finds chalk-striped vamps at Dior, discoing Amazons at D&G, hipsters at Burberry and cloud-borne nymphs at Lanvin. Emerging from all this dreamy splendor, like an uninvited guest, her sharp elbows out, is the figure of Victoria Beckham.
Beckham, the former Spice Girl whose marriage to the soccer star David Beckham stirred the UK press to the point of obsession until the couple moved to the US, is not a conventionally beautiful woman, but, to judge by Juergen Teller's pictures of her for Marc Jacobs' ads, she is a good sport. Instead of looking like a glamorous celebrity, she has been rendered as an abstraction, a living doll. In the most disquieting image, we see only her bare, high-heeled legs flopping over the side of a shopping bag Jacobs had specially made to hold her.
"I knew this wasn't going to be Vogue," Beckham said by phone from her home in Los Angeles. "I knew I had to put myself in their hands, which could be quite scary." She said she had had a long discussion with Jacobs after he first proposed the idea, last September, and a follow-up chat with Teller, who met Beckham's misgivings with a typical mixture of charm and candor. "I told her, 'You're the most photographed woman in the world,'" Teller recalled. "'And fashion nowadays is all about product - bags and shoes - and you're kind of a product yourself, aren't you?' She was, like, 'Uh, yeah.'"
As Beckham calculated the advantages, "People are always going to talk about what Marc does."
If fashion shows are a way for a designer to think out loud, collaborations with a photographer can help spin those disparate ideas into a story. Both Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein owe a debt to the visionary eye of Bruce Weber, who is really a storyteller. Gianni Versace frequently paid homage to Richard Avedon, whose pictures lent imaginative energy to Versace's designs. And it seems doubtful that generations of women would have felt quite the same about Yves Saint Laurent's pantsuits if Helmut Newton had not made them an object of sex and mystery.
Today, the most meaningful collaboration is between Jacobs and Teller. In one way or another their ads, begun in 1997, with a photo of Kim Gordon performing in a lavender-pink tulle dress, serve as an authentic record of the distractions and tastes of the moment, though Jacobs insists that they are really about "someone I know or someone I'm interested in seeing in my clothes."
An astonishing array of people has appeared in the ads, generally doing nothing in the Seinfeldian sense - lying in the grass, kicking up their heels, teasing a squirrel. The group has included Sofia Coppola, Dakota Fanning, the photographer William Eggleston and Winona Ryder, who pitched herself for an ad shortly after her shoplifting trial. Even Teller has put in an appearance, in makeup and wigs with Cindy Sherman and boldly naked with Charlotte Rampling.
"It was always free," said Teller, who is German and lives in London with his wife, Sadie Coles, an art dealer, and their young son, Ed. (He also has a daughter, Lola, with Venetia Scott, a stylist who has worked with Jacobs for many years.)
Teller is extremely funny and gregarious, at once sensitive (he created a book-length series of photos around Ed, who is the spitting image of his dad) and capable of the gross joke. It's hard but not impossible to believe that he was once, as the London editor Jefferson Hack put it, "a shy, unknowing boy from Germany, incredibly intimidated by models."
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