France's ad regulator made Saint Laurent take down 'degrading' posters across Paris

In early March 2017, Saint Laurent put up around two hundred posters across Paris for its spring campaign. Two images drew immediate criticism: one showed a woman in a fur coat and fishnet tights reclining with her legs open, her face barely visible; another showed a model in a leotard, stilettos and roller skates bending over a stool. Critics, including France's then families minister Laurence Rossignol, said the ads portrayed women in humiliating positions, and that one model looked almost anorexic.

France's advertising self-regulator, the ARPP, received more than a hundred complaints. Its head, Stéphane Martin, said such cases were extremely rare. On the Monday the ARPP wrote to Saint Laurent asking it to stop using the images and to withdraw or change them; by Wednesday night the posters had come down across the capital. The brand itself declined to comment.

The episode landed in the middle of a wider French debate about how fashion portrays women, and about ultra-thin models on runways and in ads. For Saint Laurent, the cost was not a fine but a public order to take its own campaign off the streets of Paris — a regulator doing in a week what critics had been demanding, and a reminder that a provocative image is judged by the room it enters, not the one it was made in.