Hey, good looking. Dude has nice hair!
The Spring 2014 men’s video campaign for Saint Laurent has dropped, and it’s a right doozy.
For starters, the impossibly cool French fashion house has decided to tap the relatively unknown Orange County-based musician Rexx Osterkamp to be the smirking front and centre of the ad.
Rexx certainly has the troubled James Dean 2.0 look down pat: We’re seriously digging his styled-to-death pompadour and generously lashed eyes.
In the ad, the young rocker can be seen draped in the sharpest of suits and slimmest of cigarette pants, all given a lush Led Zeppelin twist by way of copious sprinklings of sequins and studs.
Standout piece? We want to tear Rexx’s so-called Blood Luster bomber jacket (pictured above) right off his pretty frame.
A spot of fashion snooping later and we can report that the supremely covetable jacket is made of the silkiest black satin, with the embroidered vampire mouth on the back courtesy of Vermont-based visual artist Luke Thomas.
Peer a little closer and you’ll discover that the drops of blood dripping from the fangs are – surprise! – heart-shaped. How very twee and True Blood-esque at the same time.
Spliced with shots of a salmon sunset amidst flashy fronds in Los Angeles, what we also find arresting about the video campaign is how very Instagram-like the individual frames are: Pause at any point and you would get a visual that could have sprung straight from the social media site of a teddy boy of our generation. (Teddy boys are part of a British punk-rock subculture that takes its styling cues from the jazz dandies of the fifties. You learn something new everyday!)
The jangly music that serves as the soundtrack for this campaign comes from the decidedly out-of-left-field San Francisco-based alt rock band Hunx and his Punks.
Sample lyrics from the ditty: “All my friends think you're a hottie / You don't like rock ‘n’ roll.” You don’t say!
Key takeaway? We’re living in an era of equal opportunity objectification; Saint Laurent likes its boys young, nubile and beautiful. Fabulous fashion and fabulous fellows who could conceivably fit into skinny jeans from the women’s department – what’s not to like?
For more information on Saint Laurent, visit www.ysl.com and follow Saint Laurent on Facebook.