2000 Belle d’Opium parfum campaign and the erotic female grotesque

Abstract

Abstract The now famous Belle d’Opium Eau de parfum campaign of Yves Saint Laurent Beauty featuring a naked Sophie Dahl has provoked both derision and titillation in audiences since its release in 2000. On the one hand, the image is clearly sexually alluring. On the other, the subject’s nakedness also provokes male fear of the female body as a site of difference, that is, castration, and demonstrates a re-claiming of female eroticism from the traditional domain of male sexual desires – a ‘grotesque’ display of female self-pleasure in defiance of the male gaze. For this reason, the advert captures particularly well the paradox of woman as both an object of attraction and a site for culturally informed moral reprehension through this mode of defiance. This article examines how the advert works on multiple registers, not only drawing attention to deep social and cultural anxieties that exist in relation to the female body but importantly also demonstrating an active reclaiming of women’s libidinal pleasure and ‘grotesque’ bodily ‘difference’. In this sense, the article argues that the Opium advert can be interpreted as a site of active transgression of strict moral and normative gender expectations, along the lines of Mary Russo’s concept of the ‘female grotesque’. In analysing this particular quality of the advert, the article goes on to suggest that the image works particularly well to challenge patriarchal conceptions of women, and yet the subject’s clear sexual attraction also defies traditional feminist interpretations of female objectification. It is precisely because of the moral ambiguity attached to the advert that it acts as a valuable site of discussion on how female agency can be interpreted through conditions traditionally seen as ‘objectifying’.