Frankly After the Francs

A nude couple lies entwined in bed.

The woman's wristwatch puts the time at 7:30. In the next photo, the pair's positions are reversed and the man's watch reads 7:45. Underneath is the caption: "Forget the time. Your Universal Geneve will take care of it."

On the theory that nothing sells like sex, French admen are dressing up their advertisements by undressing the models who appear in them. France's nude look is far more explicit than anything in U.S. advertising, which largely confines its scantily clad models to women's fashion layouts. In an ad for Sea Club beach apparel in French men's magazines, a bare-breasted young woman lounges seductively inside a sleek sports car while a man in a snug-fitting bathing suit sprawls across the auto's trunk. To promote Selimaille men's underwear, a layout in the politically oriented Le Nouvel Observateur features a male model standing with hands folded in front of him, a pose that fails to hide the fact that he is stark naked.

Responsible for most, though by no means all, of the eye-catching campaigns is Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, 61, the freewheeling chairman of Publicis, France's largest private ad agency (billings: $43 million). Bleustein-Blanchet founded Publicis in 1927, gradually expanded the business by piloting his own plane around the country in search of contracts. After World War II, during which he flew for the Free French, he had to rebuild Publicis almost from scratch. In the process, he picked up such major accounts as Shell, Colgate-Palmolive and Renault. He also gave the agency a profitable sideline by opening Le Drugstore on the ground floor of the Publicis building on the Champs Elysees, a venture whose success has led to a profusion of American-style drugstores across France.

In 1958, Bleustein-Blanchet took a tentative step toward sex in an advertising campaign for Rosy brassieres. The original ad showed little more than a woman's torso, with the arms folded discreetly across the chest. But the campaign's success--sales of Rosy bras have increased fivefold--has convinced French admen that frankness can bring in the francs. As a result, their ads have been getting increasingly more daring. A recent Rosy ad, for example, pictures a woman wearing a lacy bra, but otherwise she is bare to well below the navel; partially visible behind her is a man wearing nothing. To Bleustein-Blanchet, there is nothing erotic about such advertising. "The nude is very pretty," he insists. "So why not show it?"

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