The Strategic Removal of Clothing
Marc Jacobs once talked several famous people out of their clothes in the name of cancer research, and the result was a thirty-five-dollar t-shirt. That’s a reductive summary of his "Protect the Skin You’re In" campaign, but it’s not wrong. Milla Jovovich, Heidi Klum, Dita Von Teese, and Brandon Boyd—the last one clutching a pug at a strategic angle—all posed unclothed, the images printed on hundred-percent cotton, proceeds going to the NYU Cancer Institute. Science against cancer is a plainly good cause. Nobody is going to argue with that.
Dita Von Teese without clothing is not exactly a surprise—she’s spent a career building an aesthetic practice around the strategic reveal, and she’s very good at it, and it translates well to a cotton print. Klum and Jovovich both know precisely how to make a camera register what they want it to register. Boyd and the pug are operating in a different register entirely, somewhere between beefcake and absurdist comedy, but the whole thing holds together as a campaign.
What I appreciate is the honesty of the approach: the glamour is openly the point, not window dressing over a fundraising pitch. They’re attractive people with their clothes off, this costs thirty-five dollars, here is where the money goes. No elaborate justification for why you should find this compelling. You clearly already do. The NYU Cancer Institute ends up better funded for it, and everyone involved got to be photographed in the most flattering possible context. Mutually beneficial. Occasionally charity is exactly as simple as it looks.