Skin in the Game

There’s something about seeing famous people completely naked that makes you stop and pay attention, which is probably exactly why Marc Jacobs got Milla Jovovich, Heidi Klum, and Dita Von Tease to pose this way for t-shirts. Thirty-five dollars a shirt. All the money goes to the NYU Cancer Institute.

The whole thing’s weirdly honest—no performance, no elaborate framing. Just: here’s what you’re looking at, here’s the price, here’s where it goes. Most of the time when celebrities show up naked it’s framed as art or confidence or vulnerability or some other word that makes it feel important. This time it’s just nakedness for a purpose, which somehow feels more real.

Dita Von Tease is in there, which is funny because she spends half her life barely clothed anyway. But that’s the strange thing about the campaign—when everyone’s at the same level, actually naked, all the usual celebrity distance collapses. You’re not thinking about whether they usually wear more or less. You’re just thinking about whether you want the shirt and whether you care about cancer research.

I don’t know if Jacobs dreamed this up thinking about charity, or if he just noticed what actually gets people to buy things and decided to make the money useful. Probably doesn’t matter. Either way it works.