People Almost Playing Sports In Luxury Advertisements

by Mallory Ortberg · October 3, 2014

boat1

im sailing
this is what sailing is

boat6

bathtub is swimming
take it from me, the olympics

boat2

tennis tennis tennis
we are doing tennis

horse1

how to ride a horse
step one? im riding a horse

tennis4

walk fast, hold some rackets, now you’re tennis!!

horse7

TOUCH A HORSE THATS A SPORT, PUT A HAT ON TOUCH IT MORE

horse6

i love touching horses
its my favorite outdoors sport
ill lean on one too, im not scared

horse3

near a dog: thats a sport too

boat9

im a sailor
i can steer boats anywhere on the ocean, no problem

tennis5

is this tennis yet
it feels so close to tennis

boat8

touching a boat is sailing it, im sailing

Macintosh HD:Scripted:SS00417_11_0034_BW.eps

tennis

boat7

its camping
were camping
this is fun, camping together with our furniture

boat5

looking at a boat, thats what sailing is

boat4

are we sailing
this feels so close to what sailing is
ill put on another sweater just in case

boat3

theres no snow here
theres no snow here for skiing on but we’ll still have  a good time skinng
what is sking
skiking is good with friends, where the mountains is

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137 Comments

  1. momoulton22 +66

    Is that loose change on the floor with bathtub guy? Is it like Hansel and Gretel, and after swimming he’ll follow the loose change home?

    Also, Gay Pop-eye has a hell of a can of spinach.

    2. Tyler +15

      Along with her dad.

      The Coppolas: if they didn’t make good films occasionally, they’d be the worst family on Earth.

      1. Ellen W. +20

        Thank goodness – I didn’t recognize them and I sort of thought this would be a great visual for the things-guys-over-40-say-to-young-women post. I’m pretty sure this is how they imagine the way things would work out with their young muse. Having it be her legit mentor/father who isn’t trying to get into her pants is much, much better.

  5. GreenGrasses +66

    I adore this. Horse-touching-while-hat-wearing is definitely my favorite sport. I always wear my finest clothing to the barn anyway, so this is just a natural pastime for me.

    1. Rillquiet +31

      Outside the barn is the perfect place for the flattering cut of jodhpurs I mean who doesn’t like that look saggy knees tight crotch poorly fitted seat not to mention a high waist to emphasize abdominal fat yes yes very chic tres now.

      1. twobluebikes +5

        Amusingly, I see people actually wearing jodhpurs around here who plainly have nothing to do with horses. And no, it is not hot. Ever.

        1. keristars +12

          the only time jodhpurs are EVER hot is in movies from the 1930s when the alternative is slinky silk dresses and also they’re being worn by people like Ginger Rogers or Una Merkel with cute little bobs and jaunty hats and silk blouses unbuttoned down to there and no bras.

          i had a spontanteous crush on Carole Lombard after she showed up in jodhpurs in Fools for Scandal (I think it was that one, anyway) (not that I needed an excuse to crush on her), but here’s Inez Courtney being absolutely hilarious in hers in 1930:

          2. keristars +9

            i should have said “cute little boobs” because lord knows those women had magnificently perky little breasts even though they were clearly not wearing any supportive undergarments.

            though apparently Jean Harlow would help things along with ice cubes between takes…

  6. katiemcgillicuddy +203

    Huh, I didn’t realize Male Novelist was actually one dude. This dude. This dude, sitting right here. Pretty sure this guy’s name is “Male Novelist”.

    2. Girl Named Jack +115

      “Yeah dad, you keep telling me how to make movies. No, I’m listening. I’m just going to shut my eyes tho. To listen better. Keep talking, Dad.”

      It is the Coppolas, right? I am just going to pretend it is.

      2. littlehuntingcreek +24

        it’s Frances and Sofia Coppola (I have Sicilian radar, and can spot fellow Sicilianos a mile away)

        1. nonvolleyball +27

          okay, I’m actually really gratified to receive this information, because I didn’t recognize either of them, assumed they were playacting a romantic picnic, & was like “EW THAT IS NOT OKAY THAT DUDE IS OLD ENOUGH TO BE HER FATHER.”

          …which is, you know, a little less gross if the dude in question is the woman’s ACTUAL father (& the situation in question presumably not intended to read as a date).

    3. littlehuntingcreek +131

      and woman lying and gazing adorably at male artist is an actual job they think should women do
      (I don’t care if he is your dad, Sofia, get up off of the ground)

      2. wallofillusion +29

        Yyyyeah, I didn’t recognize them (slash don’t… know… who they are) and therefore that image looked like a desperately bad situation.

        1. Hththe1st +54

          They are filmmakers. So this can’t possibly be a desperately bad situation, as we all know filmmakers never inappropriately transgress other people’s boundaries!

    5. vmartinipie +34

      There is a restaurant near my place of work that’s owned by the Coppolas and outside the bathrooms there’s this picture of Francis reclining like a gross Roman senator, surrounded by totally beautiful young Thai-looking women holding plates of fruit. Bleeeech. Apocalypse Now is great but DUDE.

  7. OncoMouse +7

    That guy in the fancy purse camping one looks like my grandfather (“Male Artist”). I’m imagining that he’s lecturing her on how lazy Americans are or how industrial waste is destroying the environment or something.

  8. winterbymorning +53

    What kind of weird circulation problems does the first dude have that he needs to wear a long-sleeved shirt and a blazer, but below the waist he’s okay with just shorts and no socks?

      1. winterbymorning +29

        It makes me deeply and irrationally uncomfortable when men wear shoes without socks (except if those shoes are sandals, obviously). I have no idea why. Just..just put some socks on, guys.

    2. littlehuntingcreek +34

      Rich People always wear sweaters PLUS scarves with shorts and no socks. Clearly having a ton of money keeps your legs and feet from getting cold

      1. breakfastpumpkin +87

        I think it’s warm where they are. Being rich means you can afford to always be someplace warm.
        They still have to wear lots of sweaters, though, because their hearts are always cold.

          2. PonyAlong +12

            I think this hashtag is beyond perfection and could be seen on my next Toastie postcard. Also, this should be embroidered STAT.

    4. shallownotheartless +9

      They inhabit the same microclimate as hipsters that wear knit hats and tank tops

  9. katiemcgillicuddy +150

    That’s just Michael Phelps’ car, he can’t be out of water too long, because he is a dolphin. I know he keeps getting DUIs but like, that thing is soooo hard to drive.

  10. helenin +31

    Rich people seem to have very limited sports options. I feel for all the olympic-standard bog snorkelers and kebbadi players that never were because Mother and Father Wealth-Richerman insisted on them just Standing Near Sports Equipment competitively instead.

    1. breakfastpumpkin +26

      Don’t get dirty and for goodness’ sake, Harold P. Jenkins, keep your sweater on! You’ll catch your death of a frozen heart.

  11. ArsenioB_Ham +115

    My favorite part of camping is DEFINITELY when Old White Dude brings all his Papers so we can sit in nature while he lectures me about Things.

    I mean, fuck s’mores, man. It’s ALL about the lectures.

      1. littlehuntingcreek +56

        Wilderness Mansplaining is a graduate level course.Requirements include “Actually…Mansplaining 101″ and ” Executive Mansplaining in the Workplace”

    2. Household_Opera +5

      I particularly like the satchel of books by his side. He’s lecturing his adoring female companion about GREAT LITERATURE. And he’s probably been bloviating on about Crime and Punishment for the last three hours.

  12. StarFootSneech +46

    Am I alone in thinking that Michael Phelps is tyring to sex everyone straight through the camera?

    Also the guy with the sailor hat is just too, too pretty. I feel envious cause never in my life have I achieved that level of prettiness.

    1. DeepBlueC +4

      Commenting late to say I really hope you meant to write tyring. that’s got the be the best swimsuit brand wordplay I’ve ever seen! (Even if Tyr doesn’t endorse him, the joke still holds water. :D)

      3. hopebordeaux +3

        The JPG perfumes come in tin can-shaped containers instead of boxes. It’s kind of cute and fun, really.

    2. aravisthequeen +21

      I can’t get over why his eyes are so different. One is either open wider or a totally different colour or a different eye entirely photoshopped from a different model. Or possibly he is a cyborg and/or has one cyborg eye to see inside machines with.

      1. winterbymorning +14

        That kind of explains the label-less tin can. He doesn’t need a label – he can see through to the contents with his cyborg eye.

      2. merrily +1

        One of his lovely eyes is in shade, and open wider than the other, which is narrowed due to the sunlight shining into it.

    3. paisleyLo +27

      So so pretty. But Gaultier is at this point basically just dressing beautiful boys exactly like him and putting them in ads. “Yez, sit jhust like zis. You are ME BE ALWHAYS LIKE ME”

  15. mkpatter +31

    Ralph Lauren freaking LOVES showing people maybe doing sports. Like almost all of those are Ralph Lauren ads. I assume this is how rich people actually look when they’re doing sports too. They THINK they’re like so athletic, but really they’re just standing there.

  16. Andrew +38

    These advertisements remind us that being rich is about looking good and having absolutely no fun. Do luxury advertisements ever show people being joyful? I suppose they don’t, so that we proles can look at these ads and say to ourselves, “But are these people happy? They are not”, and then congratulating ourselves on the fact that we’re not rich.

    2. hysterietta +13

      Joy is for peasants. The rich people version is grim satisfaction based on expensive surroundings.

  17. AmazingSandwich +19

    I’m oddly touched they let Phelps wear his Swedes and not, like, Goggles(tm) by Ralph Lauren.

  18. Sean_Sullivan +264

    Ferdinand-Xavier’s lot was a hard one: an eighty-minute commute to prep school, both ways. He tried his utmost to study pendant le voyage; but the Sophonisba rode high and tight, and rocked beneath the slightest breeze, and the constant dipping and leaning and plunging unseated his stomach and rendered him entirely unable to read or write for more than six seconds at a time.

    The best he could do was grip fast to the rigging, keep his gaze fixed at a point on the horizon, and chant Latin declensions to himself. This was all well and good for his classical studies, but his desperate meditations could not supply the place of true, landbound cramming, and Ferdinand-Xavier found himself dropping further and further behind his cohort. He was left back one year, then two years, then four. Every new term saw him leaner and more perfectly golden, but never any wiser than when first he made land at Saint Eustachius’ Academy.

    4. V_Hardapple +6

      I was just thinking he looks so terribly frightened, clutching his bag there, but this story is much better with more good words.

  20. dakimel +13

    Near a dog women look like they were on Project Runway last night when the designers chewed the team out for too many layers of wool and cape and hat and stuff.

    I have no fashion sense, it’s true, but I just don’t see a substantial difference. Except the tv show outfit was made of sofas or something.

    Maybe if they’d been outside by a mountain or a tree the judges would have been “oh, perfect, yes, more please.”

    1. AmazingSandwich +6

      The outfits on the middle two would be right at home in Aria Montgomery’s closet. Well. With some judicious application of feathers.

    2. Sarita +5

      I noticed two of them weren’t wearing pants under their coats and I just think about them actually climbing into a saddle and OW.

  21. TheRenleigh +91

    This is exactly as close to sports as I’m willing to be. I’d make a great rich person.

  22. eliana23 +20

    I saw that Phelps picture when it came out and it creeped me out. Now that feeling is back. Anyone else feel vaguely threatened by him sitting there thrusting his crotch as the world?

      1. merrily

        I suspect he’s cold and miserable. Look at the fingers of his left hand… they’re blue with cold.

    1. turanga_leela +31

      Bertie: Now, I wonder, has everyone heard the one about the fan-dancer and the performing flea? No, actually, here’s a better one. Uh, yes, there are these three deaf chaps on a train, and it stops at Wembley.
      Charlotte Devrill: What’s he doing?
      Harriet Deverill: Mr Fink-Nottle is telling an anecdote.
      Bertie: Anyway, there it is at Wembley, and one of the chaps says, “Is this Wembley?” and the other one says, “No, it’s Thursday!”
      Charlotte Deverill: What did he say?
      Harriet Deverill: He said, “No, it’s Thursday.”
      Charlotte Deverill: Not it’s not; it’s Friday. I know because I changed my library book.
      Myrtle Deverill: It’s a joke Charlotte!
      Bertie: Thank you. Um, so then the third one says, “So am I. Let’s go out and have a drink!”
      Myrtle Deverill: It’s a joke about drink Charlotte!
      Bertie: No, it’s not about drink, it’s about, um…
      Harriet Deverill: But why did the first man bring up the days of the week?
      Myrtle Deverill: No, the first man is the one who says, “Is this Wimbledon?”
      Bertie: No, no…
      Emmeline Deverill: No, that was the second man!
      Dame Daphne Winkworth: Let Mr Fink-Nottle finish his joke before we judge it!
      Bertie: Well, that was it, actually.
      Charlotte Deverill: Is it about tennis, perhaps?
      Dame Daphne Winkworth: I don’t care for jokes about tennis.

  26. DeepBlueC +27

    I feel so sorry for the black guy who is obviously going to be the odd man out if they ever get around to playing tennis instead of posing with old fashioned rackets. They couldn’t have a fourth guy so they could pretend to play doubles? Noooo, he’s just there for the pictures and you can tell he knows it by his expression. I have similar feelings about 2 women/one horse-can’t they both touch the horse???

  27. YESsteveYES +113

    I feel like this is the closest Mallory has gotten to giving a tip of her hat to her enormous, passionate, complicatedly misandrist gay male fan base. We’ll take what we can get.

    1. dakimel +2

      you can’t see the horses on their breasts, but you can infer that maybe they have them, since they’re next to horse-breasted people, though there’s always the possibility their breasts have no horses at all. It’s a plausibly deniable hypothesis.

  31. tongsandsporks +15

    I watched this ad last night (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6NpJ8wQ1KM) hoping against hope that it was not simply a luxury watch ad but truly an ad for a Lesbians-In-Italy Heist film starring Cate Blanchett, Emily Blunt, and Zhou Xun. Instead it’s just This Is How We Ride A Speedboat Wearing Wristwatches. Alas.

  33. MayKatieMae +25

    at boats and tennis incorporated, almost sports are no laughing matter. you can’t touch a horse and smile, this is important business.

  34. extermikate +14

    I feel like we’re talking too much about Pretty Le Male Sailor and not enough about the unnerving bottle he’s advertising? WHY IS IT SO SHAPELY. Do my eyes deceive me or is it naked from the waist down and has man-thong tan lines?

  35. mollyculetheory +21

    Um Mallory the first guys with the racquets are actually sportsing at badminton #justrichpplthings

  36. NotThatAmy +47


    Tennis in culottes or harem pants or whatever, I can forgive. And that guy with the expensive purse on the yacht? Totally fine. They are mere trappings of privilege, they are not blood sports. But these ladies are clearly referencing fox hunting while wearing cocktail dresses. I can’t even.

    I did not know that I had feelings about this. But I do! So many feelings! There are SO MANY layers of exploitation going on here, no living thing in this photo is not being exploited by men of the leisure class.

    -The crucial but unseen fox, who would be run to exhaustion and brutally shredded by the hounds.
    -The hounds, who live piled together in kennels until they’re turned loose once every few weeks to run themselves to exhaustion, risking injury and death to kill an animal that is neither threat nor prey. Solely because they are bored and neglected and wild and hungry.
    -The horses, who have the lauded but brutal task of bearing ~180lbs of wealthy (male) person, at speed, through forest and field, risking fatal injury because the wealthy (male) people are too lazy to chase the dogs chasing the fox on foot.
    -The women, who are clearly not going to be riding, since all save one are wearing skirts, and the last who is NOT wearing hunting attire, but whose costume more closely resembles that of the hounds’ keeper or the game beaters (three decorations and a servant).
    -The land, ceded to the leisure class via inheritance from warlords dead centuries ago, who do no more than take a share of all wealth produced through the labor of the tenant farmers (as unseen as the fox) to maintain “great homes” (and hounds and horses and decorative companions), while carelessly trampling through planted fields and pastured flocks in pursuit of game they will kill FOR SPORT.

    1. Canellianni +2

      But, how do you know that the hounds and the horses aren’t from a drag hunt, NTA?

      If you are going to pick holes, at least do your homewerk first…

  39. Isabel C. +5

    This is, I have to say, as close to sports as I think it’s ever reasonable to come. For anyone, but especially me.

    I’m not rich or anything, I just don’t believe in sweating or Nature and especially not in doing one in the other. Ugh.

  41. molly +13

    “what do rich people who play sports like? come on, i need ideas here people!”

    “bl…blazers, sir? i think rich people sometimes like blazers. they may also play sports in them.”

    *tense silence in the boardroom*

    “dammit ralph, you’re a genius.”

  42. mizchalmers +7

    There’s a brilliant line in Tad Friend’s book Cheerful Money where someone observes that “if Ralph really wants to get to the heart of Waspdom, he should do a whole window full of beakers of lithium and patients in white gowns.”

  43. LordSmellington

    Yes, I know!!! I'm glad I'm not the only one that noticed! Its also impossibly straight!!!

  44. Household_Opera +8

    You can’t play tennis unless you wear a shirt with a little picture of a polo player on it. Because reasons.

  45. V_Hardapple

    I imagine dude on the right is having enough trouble carrying around the significant bulge in the front if his pants….

  47. leslieellenjones +3

    Yeah, but a real double-take realizing it’s Aishwarya Rai doing the horse-touching. WASP, WASP, WASP, WASP, Bollywood, WASP …. who doesn’t belong in this set?

  51. longboards review +1

    I’ve a little confusion about whether Bathtub Guy actually Michael Phelps or not? . Whatever, I love the American competition swimmer and the most decorated Olympian of all time.

  52. longboards-review

    I’ve a little confusion about whether Bathtub Guy actually Michael Phelps or not? . Whatever, I love the American competition swimmer and the most decorated Olympian of all time.