Naked Perfume Hunk: Meet Naked Handbag Babe

We’ve had a lot of guests for spring break. “You know what we saw in the metro station?” my nieces said at dinner the other day. “People without clothes.”

I had almost stopped noticing. It’s always fun to see Paris from a fresh visitor’s point of view.

The two specimens my nieces were most intrigued by are the Naked Perfume Hunk and the Naked Handbag Babe. Equal opportunity nudity.

The Hunk lounges on a polar bear rug, wearing nothing but a black-and-white striped scarf over one shoulder. (The French do love their scarves.) One hand presses on the ice, which he melts because he is so hot. A large perfume bottle, shaped like a naked male torso with a conspicuous bulge sits in the foreground. The model’s forearm somewhat obscures the part of his body that, were it hung in the Louvre, would be covered by a fig leaf.

The Handbag Babe sits on the floor, completely naked, a designer purse the only thing blocking the area often covered here by tiny, lacy lingerie. The background is empty and the only text reads “500 Euros.”

The Hunk’s ad is over-the-top masculinity. The Babe’s is mysterious. Primal meets Minimal.

Sometimes, when I see the two ads across from each other, one on my side of the tracks, one on the other, I imagine they’re flirting. Maybe they’re making a date. Once the stations close at midnight, she invites him to her non-icy abode, and he shares his scarf. She spreads open her handbag and an entire picque-nique appears from inside—baguette, foie gras, and champagne. He snatches his polar bear rug to use as a tablecloth. They joke about the handbag, how it’s a metaphor for that piece of female anatomy it obscures in the ad.

They munch their meal and laugh at us, the passengers, whom they’ve stared at throughout the day. “You know what I saw at the metro station?” they ask each other, giggling. “People with clothes.”