Mikhail Gorbachev features in Louis Vuitton ad push

by Staff, Brand Republic 26-Jul-07, 13:05

NEW YORK - Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR, is joining famous faces such as Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf and Catherine Deneuve in a new ad campaign for Louis Vuitton.

The campaign has been shot by Annie Leibovitz, the photographer whose shoot with the Queen was at the centre of a BBC scandal to do with the way a trailer was edited by production company RDF.

She has photographed Gorbachev sitting in the back of a taxi, with his Vuitton bag next to him. He looks broodingly out of the window as a grim urban road stretches out from the back window.

According to The New York Times, other ads in the campaign, part of a big marketing push for Louis Vuitton's travel range, show Agassi and Graf cuddling in a hotel room and Deneuve on a Louis Vuitton trunk in front of a steam train.

Gorbachev's tenure as Soviet President brought the Cold War to an end and made the Russian words "glasnost" and "perestroika" commonplace in the West. Since his presidency ended in 1991, he has worked on international diplomacy and charitable causes, appeared in the Wim Wenders film 'Far Away, So Close' as himself; and made an ad for Pizza Hut in the US.

Louis Vuitton is using the campaign as it highlights its heritage as a luxury travel brand in a campaign dubbed "The art of travel".

It has created three short films highlighting some if its more famous customers over the years including the model Twiggy, who was often photographed with the Papillon handbag at the height of her fame in the 1960s, and the Maharajah of Baroda, for whom Louis Vuitton created a special case holding a tea set that he could take on tiger hunting expeditions.