It's a Ford fiesta after McAdams gets cold feet

What is to be done when one of your models gets cold feet about posing naked?

That was the dilemma facing the fashion designer Tom Ford, directing the eagerly anticipated Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair. The answer, naturally, was for him to step in front of the camera himself.

The original plan was for the photographer Annie Leibowitz to shoot three of today's hottest starlets, Scarlett Johansson, Keira Knightley and Rachel McAdams, posing seductively on a bed, nude. But McAdams, who starred in The Notebook and Mean Girls, got cold feet at the last minute, and the emergency measure was called for.

Ford explained: "Three girls in a bed is a bedful of girls. Two girls in a bed are lesbians.

"At the end of the shoot, Annie said, 'Can you slip yourself in there?'"

So now Ford (whose companion of nearly 20 years is a man) is at the back, chest bared, hair slicked back, nuzzling up to the Oscar-nominated Knightley's ear.

It was not a scenario the man credited with reviving Gucci would have envisaged when he told Graydon Carter, the magazine's editor, that he thought the annual star photo-shoot was getting "a bit ... well, tired" ­ and was challenged to do better.

George Clooney, Pamela Anderson and the Munich star Eric Bana also posed for the Hollywood issue, which goes on sale from 10 February.