Jason Morgan - the new face of Armani Acqua di Gio

The Best Cologne for Men team is aware of their slackness in posting to the blog in recent months, so following our recent post about Sean O'Pry and Paco Rabanne 1 Million, let's talk about another new face of men's fragrance...

Like the frequency of our blog postings, it's been a while since Jason Morgan was named as Simon Nessman's replacement as the face of Armani Acqua di Gio (see our article on Acqua di Gio here): 11 months, to be exact. And as always, we've got something to say about that!

According to this excellent interview with Jason Morgan, after an abortive start in the modelling industry, the poor chap was forced to work (albeit briefly) as a recruiter for an insurance company, hiring accountants. This encounter with the drone-like, tedious world of corporate life - honestly, insurance and accountants? It's corporate purgatory, right there - drove him to try modelling again, and here he is today with one of the most prestigious modelling gigs (in the world of men's cologne anyway).

Well, the video has plenty of echoes of earlier photo campaigns and adverts for Acqua di Gio: the half-naked guy with the ripped body, the water, swimming.  None of this is surprising since this is an 'aquatic' men's fragrance.

It's pretty simple stuff: Jason swims through the water, impressively dolphin-kicking his way to the surface.

We don't fail to notice that he's actually wearing a pair of Armani briefs: after all, Jason Morgan is also the face (or should that be the crotch?) of Emporio Armani's line of gents' underwear. 

Anyway, the curious thing about some of these men's cologne campaigns is the way the nearly-naked male body is so blatantly offered up for the viewer's delectation.  Now, that's fine and normal, of course: why, we men are always doing precisely that in offering up beautiful ladies as just so much meat (just look at our reviews of Davidoff Cool Water and Tom Ford Black Orchid for example).  

And indeed, here we get a close-up early on in the video of Jason's headless, sculpted torso and ribcage - check it out, it's like something out of a meat-packing factory.  Jason's dished up like so much food for the eye.

But it's strange, isn't it? When the ladies are served up for our viewing pleasure, it's typically with a male audience in mind.  But aren't men the audience of this Acqua di Gio advert too?  Surely only a minority of us would want to sup on Mr. Morgan's ribcage?

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Meat...Prime rib...

Anyway, we all know that Acqua di Gio is a decent fragrance but very mainstream.  Nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course, but it does lead to advertising campaigns that don't try to push the boundaries:  Jason Morgan rounds off the vid with the trademark phallic dripping thrust out of the water.  

So nothing new to see here, people.  Indeed, the most new and original thing here is Morgan's relative oldness: he's thirty-five (mean to say, just check out the skin damage in the interview shots here). So some credit to Armani for bucking the trend there, we suppose.

As for the fragrance, of course it's a classic: check out our review here.

Sean O'Pry - the new face of Paco Rabanne 1 Million

It’s high time the Best Cologne for Men team made another contribution to our blog - and what better way to do that than to talk about the latest advertising campaign for Paco Rabanne 1 Million (a fragrance that we review right here)?

In March 2015, Sean O’Pry became the new face of Paco Rabanne 1 Million, replacing Mat Gordon.  The new advertising campaign is worth a bit of a review in its own right as it rather cleverly echoes the original version – indeed, the video seems to be highly referential to the earlier installment.

First up, the music.  Well, it isn’t Chemical Brothers this time (check out the earlier video here): it is in fact Denis Naidanow’s ‘Wonderland’.  But we can’t shake off the feeling that the two tracks are very similar indeed – that kind of quirky electro-feel.  As if to clinch that point, after 32 seconds of the vid, you will hear a voice utter: ‘Do it again’.  And what was the Chemical Brothers’ track for the Mat Gordon campaign? It was ‘Do It Again’.

More of the same-but-different vibe in the advert’s content: Perhaps mercifully, there is a lot less dancing this time around, although Sean O’Pry can bust much better moves than the somewhat spasmodic Mat Gordon, it has to be said.   In this one, it’s still about naked pursuit of gold, with the gold bars representing the only flash of colour in an otherwise monochrome series of shots.

In the sequence seen here, O’Pry is less of the dishy rich guy, more the dashing criminal.  With his superior athleticism, he hand-springs over and even manipulates golden motion sensors and poses as a bank robber with his eye out for gold bullion. 

He effects his escape with a weird King Kong section where he climbs a skyscraper with Hana Jirickova in his hand (the usual male fragrance advert chauvinism where women are passive putty in the hands of great-smelling male apes…), before jumping off the landing skid of a helicopter.

But King Kong isn’t the only cinematic reference here.  We argued before that the Mat Gordon vid was referencing super-spy James Bond.  With Sean O’Pry, it is even more obvious: there’s the good looks, the smooth demeanour, the white cocktail jacket at the end, the helicopter stunt (uncanny foreshadowing of the famous Mexico stunts in SPECTRE, perhaps?)…

In fact, even the part where bank-robber O’Pry is caught in the circular spotlight echoes the famous opening scenes of all the Bond films (see what we mean in the embedded video on the left…).  And James Bond was always a character who pushed the boundaries of what was legal in pursuit of his mission and the girl…

Paco Rabanne have done a good job of upgrading the original advert while remaining faithful to its tone. In our view, O’Pry is a much more convincingly masculine male lead than Mat Gordon for this justifiably popular fragrance: to hear more about that, don’t forget to check out our off-beat review here!

Chris Pine and Larissa Hofmann - the 2014 Armani Code ad campaign

...and why it's creepy...

In our original review of Armani Code, we included a few comments on the 2010 advertising video featuring Enrique Palacios.

Well, here's the latest vid, starring Captain Kirk himself, Chris Pine, and the German model Larissa Hofmann.

Now, are we really the only ones who find it downright spooky?

So the concept is that young Larissa has been so taken with Chris's Armani Code that she just sees him everywhere: no matter which guy happens to be walking or standing near her, she sees Chris.  So when Chris - some sort of superstar even in the advert, since the paparazzi want a piece of him even there - picks her up in his $200k sport car and informs her: 'I thought I lost you', it is ironic we presume, because of course she was dementedly obsessing over him all along.  He's got no chance of shaking off this one.

A quick search online reveals that girls love the idea of a world populated by 'multiple Chris Pines'...  But surely it's just sinister?  The way that one of the Chris-replicants in a tie steps into Larissa's eye-line at 22 seconds is particularly spooky: it's like Chris is stalking her.

That, or Captain Kirk has suffered some terrible accident, and Scotty's beamed him simultaneously into 5 or 6 different locations, thereby inventing instant human cloning.

Or inhalation of Armani Code has brought on hallucinations and psychotic derangement in Larissa Hofmann's mind.  Armani Code is pretty good stuff, but we didn't think it had powers of that magnitude on women.

It's not the only thing that undermines the advert:  the soundtrack is Harshman's 'Barker', a re-mix of a tune from Rossini's Barber of Seville.  But that is a comic opera - not exactly in line with the suave, slick imagery of the advert.  Not only that, in Rossini's masterpiece - as I'm sure we all know - the central figure gets the girl of his dreams with great difficulty and only after paying off the old lecher who originally had his busy hands on her... all of which is at odds with the way that, in the advert, Chris Pine can get his girl simply by wearing cologne and putting his fancy car in reverse.  Speaking of barbers, Chris could do with a trim himself: just look at that stubble.

Gratuitous shot of an Aston Martin DBS...

In case you're wondering, Chris's car is an Aston Martin DBS, and if you watch this video, you'll find that fact pretty much confirmed at 1 minute and 29 seconds.  So to crown it all, Chris Pine is James Bond, Captain Kirk, a replicant and Count Almaviva all in one.  How very confusing.  You thought you lost us, Chris? Damn right you did!  

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Read the review of Armani Code here.