Imagine if in the period before 1989 a glimpse into the future would have been possible. Take a look at this Louis Vuitton poster from 2007, for example: Mikhail Gorbachev advertising a luxury bag. Here the last president of the communist Soviet Union. And next to it a symbol accessory of western capitalism. There really isn’t any more contradiction. Or?
Mikhail Gorbachev was not only an icon of reunification, there is another side to this man that is rarely read about in the obituaries after his death. The man with the characteristic birthmark had his breakthrough as a model, if you will, at the age of 76: that was when he signed an advertising contract with the French luxury label Louis Vuitton, which wanted to combine the image of its bags with the image of legendary personalities.
The advertising campaign by star photographer Annie Leibovitz didn’t just show Gorbachev in the middle of Berlin. She staged the pioneer of reunification in the back of a luxury car while he drove along the remains of the Berlin Wall. His look reveals: A whole epoch passes by here. An image with such symbolic power that a few rays fall on the noble travel bag next to it, that was the marketing idea. And at the same time, Gorbachev was able to stage himself a bit as the character he would have liked to be perceived as.
Starred in the Pizza Hut commercial
“Gorbachev liked the idea of being remembered as the biggest player in the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said a Louis Vuitton spokesman at the time. But that alone was not the reason why he snatched the job away from Scarlett Johansson with the advertising contract and succeeded celebrities like Catherine Deneuve or Al Gore. The Nobel Peace Prize winner needed the money – but he didn’t claim it for himself: all the proceeds flowed into the two organizations he founded, the Gorbachev Foundation and the International Green Cross, which fight against poverty and environmental pollution.
Ten years earlier, Gorbachev had attracted attention in his post-political life as a testimonial for Western consumer goods. We are talking about a spot for the US fast food chain Pizza Hut, whose expansion into Russia in the 1990s made Gorbachev’s political actions possible in the first place. In 1998 he took on the leading role in a company commercialwhich has gone viral on Twitter since the politician’s death.
In it, the pioneer of German unity, accompanied by a young girl, played by his granddaughter, enters a branch and shares a pizza with her. When a family at the next table recognizes the politician, a controversial debate begins among the generations about the merits of the politician. The arguments fly back and forth: “Economic crisis!” – “Freedom!” – “Political instability!” – “Perspective!” In the end, the grandmother points out that things like Pizza Hut exist because of him. At least everyone can agree on that.
The spot was filmed in Moscow but never aired in Russia. He brought the former statesman a lot of criticism in his own country – loudly foreign policy but also one of the highest fees in the history of advertising.