Sex, scent and celebrity: what perfume ads of the 2000s reveal about consumer culture today

Looking back at some of the most iconic ads of the 2000s, as Taschen’s latest compendium in its All-American Ads series does, reveals early clues about the direction consumer culture was headed.

It was an era when prestige TV and reality shows ruled, celebrities were hocking everything from Moët to milk, and rapid advances in personal tech, photography and the World Wide Web were on the verge of reshaping life as we know it today.

Sex, scent and celebrity: Taschen’s All-American Ads of the 2000s

Within its pages – divided into chapters on alcohol, tobacco, cars, travel, entertainment and more – are sections devoted to fashion and fragrance. Here, the 2000s truly emerge as a decade when the phrase ‘sex sells’ reached provocative new heights in a growing attention economy.

Few understood this better than American designer Tom Ford. In particular, All-American Ads highlights his 2007 For Men fragrance campaign, in which perfume bottles were cheekily placed, tongue-in-cheek, over glistening, naked bodies to preserve a semblance of ‘modesty’. Earlier, during his tenure at Yves Saint Laurent, Ford was responsible for the infamous Opium advert. Shot by Steven Meisel and released in the year 2000, the image showed a nude Sophie Dahl in ecstatic repose. It drew hundreds of complaints and was ultimately banned by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, but the controversy meant that it remains one of the most iconic perfume adverts in history.

The book also charts the rise of the celebrity perfume brand, which, alongside celebrity beauty lines, is a hotter commodity today than ever before. While Elizabeth Taylor arguably pioneered the trend with her 1987 Passion fragrance, it was the massive commercial success of her White Diamonds line, which launched in 1991, that popularised the trend of celebrity-branded perfumes. ‘Everybody jumped on board,’ Jim Heimann, editor of All-American Ads of the 2000s, tells Wallpaper*. ‘David Beckham, Michael Jordan... And Paris Hilton, who just seemed to be everywhere, selling her products. Celebrity endorsement with perfumes is so indicative of advertising trends in the 2000s.’

All-American Ads of the 2000s features Taylor’s 2003 scent Gardenia, alongside Jennifer Lopez’ 2002 advert for Glow. And, it even highlights Donald Trump’s 2004 cologne, Donald Trump The Fragrance, where the current POTUS is depicted beside a beaming Melania. In other full-circle moments, designers like Ford and Marc Jacobs star in their fragrance ads. Jacobs’ 2010 campaign for Bang, shot by Juergen Teller, sees him nude, save for a giant bottle of the scent strategically covering his crotch in an unmistakable nod to Ford’s visual language.

‘One of my bellwethers for this kind of sexuality in 2000s advertising is men’s underwear,’ says Heimann. ‘You see virtually nothing between the 1950s and the 1970s. Then, in the 1980s, Calvin Klein changes everything: you’ve got a guy, seven storeys high in the middle of New York, wearing only his underwear.’

Alongside the aspirational messaging that one must smell, dress and eat like a celebrity, a striking theme within All-American Ads of the 2000s is the recurring lure of ‘individualism’. How can the average consumer become more than ‘average’ and ‘stand out from the crowd’ through the products they use?

The 2000s helped lay the groundwork for today’s digital age, where the iPhone is ubiquitous as both a status symbol and a tool for proliferating the same ‘individualism’. Social media influencers and the impact of viral, user-generated TikTok trends, particularly in the beauty sphere, now rival – or even eclipse – ‘traditional’ forms of advertising. (It’s worth noting that in All American Ads of the 2000s’ chapter on tech, there are some striking examples of early Apple adverts, bearing its tagline of the time: ‘Think Different’).

From this temporal vantage point, there’s a palpable sense of a new era dawning – and, one coming to an end. ‘It’s all online now, and so print is just slowly getting choked off,’ says Heimann of why this will likely be the final Taschen book showcasing American ads by decade. ‘I don't think it’ll go away completely, because you look at newsstands, the ones that are left, and there are hundreds of magazines there. So there’s still space for traditional ads on those pages. But online, everything’s so peripheral. It’s there for a moment – and then, boom, it’s gone.’

All-American Ads of the 2000s , £30, published by Taschen is out now.

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