Advertising: Fondling hands, phallic bottles: it's just like the old days

What could be lovelier for Christmas than a nostalgic commercial with all the values of a more unselfconscious age? Not pastiche, but the real thing from a personal brand we've come to know: a Johnny Foreigner who's become a bit of a national treasure here.

As you play your glorious Eighties pop compilations with Adam Ant and Duran Duran - your granny knows all the words and the moves - then that's the time your thoughts turn to Jean Paul Gaultier and the old arty Paris pouf style we took to our hearts back then. He can still show the youngsters a thing or two.

You know it's Christmas when you get the scent commercials. And they're completely true to their brands because they're usually made by photographers who really know what the brand aesthetic's all about. In Gaultier's case, this is a line that stretches from Cocteau through to Pierre et Gilles and on, taking in a bit of Christian Lacroix along the way. With loads of colour and sexy ambiguity and lashings of bonjour, matelot.

So we get a split screen and some did I really see that? and who's doing what to whom? First off we've got one of those girls you only ever see in a certain kind of fashion picture: wavy red hair, bright red lipstick and a bare body so extravagantly powdery white, she could have been Elizabethan white-leaded all over. As white as Sophie Dahl in that marvellous Opium poster campaign all the Mrs Grundys kicked up about.

And on the other side we've one of the Gaultier sailors - muscly, tattooed, olive-skinned with one of those little white Frog sailor hats at an angle. Plus several pairs of exploring hands. Self-exploring hands on small, pale breasts. Big olive hands copping a feel. Pale hands tweaking big olive pecs.

But there's a bit of triangulation too. On the next screen there's a beautiful dark brown, naked creature with short hair and what look like long black gloves - they're actually painted arms and hands - covering its own chest (are they breasts or not? it's all very fast) and going down south as well. Then the black hands start wandering too, over white skin and the most unmistakably phallic bottle imaginable (to the pure in heart all things are pure, but take my word for it).

Then there's Gaultier's famous girly scent bottle (it's got breasts) being given the black hand treatment; and his famous boy one (it's got a stripy sweater) being explored too; followed by the dark creature in profile looking like an über-dyke from a Revue Nègre of the 1920s.

And you're away. The original pair are certainly well away; they look as if they're getting a lot of attention down south, off-camera.

For the more mature viewer, this marvellous-looking commercial is a sort of Queen's Speech, a reminder that some good things never change.

Peter@sru.co.uk