This seductive eight-page gatefold for Donna Karan hosiery will appear in September issues of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Bazaar This study of a leg, it’s brilliantly designed so that the image unfolds with the insert. Opening with a provocative shot of the underside of the knee it sustains the excitement through the close: a view of a hand resting next to a thigh.

In Edward Weston’s best known photographs of fruit and vegetables, the natural folds and curves of the subject connoted something far more erotic. And thats the case with Denis Piel’s photos here: the opening panel suggests a forbidden place. The viewer isn’t exactly sure what it is or where it will lead, and there are surprises at every turn. The piece opens gatefold-style, but almost like the funny puzzle on the last page of Mad magazine, there’s a new visual combination with each successive fold. Peter Arnell’s and Ted Bickford’s backgrounds are in architecture, and it shows. In some ways. the full leg opened out across four panels is the least interesting part. The back is fantastic with four separate images of the undersides of knees and calves and feet that don’t follow any natural order. 

But the visual provocation is not over a naked leg and thigh. First, this is not a curvy, show-girl leg. The printing is grainy; the soft lighting makes the skin look like marble; there are folds in the fabric in the background. In all it’s beautiful and sensual, yet distant and cool, like classical sculpture.

And, as in sculpture, the leg is objectified: We don’t link Iit to a specific face, or body, or time. Lofty concepts and production aside, isn’t this, after all, an ad? Where’s the product anyway? One of the inside pages bears the logo, in gold, of Donna Karan hosiery. (Hosiery is a sweetly old-fashioned term for stockings and pantyhose.) That’s pretty risky, or in the wrong hands, pretty pretentious - to create an elaborate gatefold with no hose in sight. But there’s something smart going on here. What the best stockings are supposed to do is make every leg look perfect. What advertising is supposed to do is reassure and encourage. Dressed-up model legs in ads can be alienating. Because this idealizes the leg without showing any identifiable context, it becomes every woman’s leg. Every woman can fantasize about being photographed like this. It also provides the current issue of polarizing women into camps of those who weir short skirts and those who don’t. Of course, using nudity in a fashion ad is not new. Designer Carol Little has a two-page print ad, showing a beautiful Deborah Turbeville photo of the curve of a woman’s back. And Calvin Klein started it all by running Bruce Weber photos that were similarly Edward Weston-like shots of the body. But Klein also took the idea one step further in perfume ads that implied group sex, and were shot and cropped for shock value. There’s none of that here. It’s beautiful, not off-putting. Even more amazing, Donna Karan hosiery is a Hanse licensee. These eight pages should shake the industry.