No underwear anymore: we can do without.  It is simply more exciting so. This is an upcoming trend in the North of Europe. And it might go more broad, because people in many places of this world are getting fed up with the over-sexualisation on TV and the internet.

This ad for D&G jewellery, currently airing in heavy rotation on TV and in cinemas across Europe, is devilishly clever. It toys with your expectations about boys meets girls and all the love that might come from that. But then, right at the end, when you think you know what it’s about, you slowly realise that yes, it’s kind of about that, but actually it’s much more about something else that is even more powerful and salient and unsettling. And strangely hotter. Narcissistic self love.

Topless Apostles
A calendar featuring twelve topless, buffed Mormon missionaries showing us the beauty of God’s Creation.
The NYFD may have banned their famous topless fireman calendar this year after their cover star was ‘exposed’ as having a porno past, but, not to worry, here come the Mormons with their shirts off.  The calendar may not have been officially sanctioned by the Church of the Latter Day Saints but the evident keenness of the young Mormon missionaries to turn themselves into sex-objects shows how deep the metrosexual desire to be desired has permeated even devoutly religious cultures we might have assumed to be fiercely retrosexual.  Sexiness is the new sacredness.

Dieux du Stade
And then there were the French rugby players again. Oh, boy, do they show off. In the last few years rugby has become nakedly spornographic. Take a look, if you dare, at the Dieux du Stade French rugby Calendar, and accompanying, shrink-wrapped ‘Making Of’ DVD, featuring oiled, naked, shaved, designer tattooed rugger buggers naked in the locker room in poses that are frequently deliberately, provocatively homoerotic in a way that football wouldn’t countenance. Phenomenally popular, the Dieux Du Stade sporno calendars have dramatically increased the popularity and coolness of rugby in France with women (who seem to like the homoerotic teasing) but also with men - gay and straight. Rugby sporno has helped make rugby seem that most modern, most covetted of things.

This ad, designed to drum up tourism for Paris in the run-up to the Rugby World Cup is meant to be funny and eye-catching – which it certainly is.