Crystal Renn And Tom Ford Make Plastic Surgery Raunchy

When I next guest-edit an issue of a prestigious fashion magazine, I must remember to step behind the camera and snap out an homage to Jocelyn Wildenstein. And to put plenty of oral sex in it. Warning: NSFW.

Crystal Renn stars as a plastic-surgery-obsessed and sexually rapacious woman in Tom Ford’s La Panthère Ose (“The Panther Dares”). Pun alert: say that out loud in French, and it sounds like “La Panthère Rose” (“The Pink Panther”). What Peter Sellers has to do with this whole thing, however, is a case only Inspector Clouseau could solve.

I really want to like the spread — it’s over-the-top and gloriously tacky, and it’s not often that you get to see a woman getting head in a fashion magazine — but sadly, the story owes an unrecoverable debt to a notorious, and far superior, 80-page editorial Steven Meisel did for Vogue Italia in 2005.

Meisel’s mammoth story, featuring Linda Evangelista, Elise Crombez, Eugenia Volodina, Missy Rayder, Julia Stegner, Inguna Butane, Hana Soukupova and Jessica Stam as wealthy women who get plastic surgery and then recover together, was shot at the St. Regis Hotel in New York — and at a medical equipment rental house. Pat McGrath was the makeup artist, and Edward Enninful styled. Five years on, the Meisel pictures are still as witty as they are subversive.

Whereas Ford’s version just seems like a raunchier, shallower retread. What is he really bringing to this idea that’s new or interesting?

Not to mention, it’s a little funny to see Tom Ford — who is open about his use of Botox and Restylane, and says he will get plastic surgery as soon as his neck starts “swinging around when I go jogging” — criticizing the culture of cosmetic surgery.

Renn’s new face was achieved with custom-made prosthetics. First, Vogue Paris had a cast made of her face, and then prosthetic cheeks and lips were designed. The effect is pretty freaky. After the shoot, Renn kept the mask, which Ford signed.