Elle MacPherson Ad Featuring Disturbing Imagery Has Surfaced

When’s the last time a voyeuristic shot of a woman lying crumpled in her underwear on the floor in a defeated position, as if she’d just been thrown there, facing away from the camera, made you go “Ooh, I should order that demi cup!” Never? Yeah, me neither.

A tipster shared a tweet from a Sydney-based bra designer Renee Mayne, who posted the image that’s been floating around the Internet:

(The dark lines bordering the left and right sides of the image are mine, if you were wondering.) Apparently Coloribus (Creative Advertising Executive) has the ad, entitled “Blue Shoes,” listed as the product of a 2004 shoot, around a time when Elle MacPherson Intimates was dabbling in provocative imagery. In 2004, a campaign called “Knife Fight” was initially banned by the Advertising Standards Board in Australia. According to Brand Republic, it “opens with a woman standing in Intimates underwear picking up and putting down knives in a kitchen. It then shows two women having a naked knife fight and ends with a woman cleaning blood off the kitchen floor. At no point in the ad can the women’s faces be seen.

And voyeurism is also a theme: A year later, an ad featuring a headless woman appearing to masturbate as we/the camera looks at her from behind a keyhole, appeared in Vogue; a rep from the company said that it was “inspired by Rear Window.” Jimmy Stewart would never!

The knife fight thing suggests that the ad might be one of a series in a campaign, in which case there would be more context that might make it tamer. Unless the theme of these ads is like the one above, obviously.