Oliviero Toscani obituary
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Photographer and art director who oversaw a series of controversial ad campaigns for the Benetton fashion brand. The art direction and photographs of Oliviero Toscani were provocative not for what they showed – real life, he said, complex and contradictory – but where they were seen. The images, subjects ranging from a bloodied newborn baby to the condemned of death row, would have been unremarkable on the editorial pages of a classic photo-reportage publication such as Life or Paris Match. But they sprang out of the safe spaces reserved for prestige adverts at the front of fashion magazines, or were pasted up on big billboards.
![[Toscani’s abstract of coloured condoms in a 1991 ad for Benetton. He stared direct and hard at the sex and death often present, but only allusively, in advertising.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/42237ba11009f8c0349f63f2d5603e5e6e262045/0_0_2048_1390/master/2048.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Toscani, who has died aged 82, regarded advertising as the most powerful medium, and claimed an artist’s right, like Michelangelo, to express his ideas in it. Like Michelangelo, he had a patron of papal benevolence, Luciano Benetton, who paid for the spaces where Toscani’s creations were seen. Benetton had co-founded a family firm that evolved into a company making mid-price fashion knit separates, with an international chain of shops. He wanted advertising that promoted an ethos for the brand, and in 1982 recruited Toscani as art director.
![[A 1991 Benetton ad by Toscani. The pictures shocked, and divided opinion, which made for major publicity.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1bfb0ca4f4eb9b051fcac6ddb06f0313efc333e3/0_0_1990_1424/master/1990.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Toscani already had a reputation for sheer cheek in fashion photography. In 1971, the Jesus Jeans company – its name a deliberate affront in an Italy where the Catholic church dominated public morality – hired him for a campaign to illustrate slogans that subverted Christian sayings. He superimposed the words “If you love me, follow me” on his close-up pic of his girlfriend’s backside, clad in jeans cut off short to expose chunks of buttock. After the posters went up, carabinieri were sent in to break up the protests.
![[A 1989 ad by Toscani, who asserted that ‘selling jumpers is the company’s problem, not mine’ – and that advertising space could be better employed to show life itself.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/af41503196b385857fe2d6f23034d80006ab351e/0_0_4960_3507/master/4960.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
