These campaigns have gone around the world. Here is what they staged:
- An AIDS patient, literally dying, surrounded by his loved ones (1992)
- A nun with a cornet kissing a young priest (1992)
- Isabelle Caro, young anorexic woman posing nude, displaying a skeletal body (2007)
- A container full of refugees (90s)
- A baby just out of its mother’s womb (1990)
Several of its “United Colors of Benetton” campaigns were banned in Italy, but also in France.
The Benetton campaigns, it’s him
Reviving the original provocation, the group shocked again at the end of 2011 with photomontages showing the greats of this world kissing each other on the lips, including the Pope and an imam.
A 2012 calendar presented by Toscani in Florence represented 12 penises, after that of 2011 which was composed of the same number of female pubes.
Asked by Il Corriere to know which photo he would choose if he had to choose only one, he replied: “For the whole, for the commitment. It’s not a photo that makes history, it is an ethical, aesthetic and political choice.”
-Oliviero Toscani exhibits 700 portraits in Liège: “Diversity is our wealth”
Toscani and Benetton definitively broke up at the beginning of 2020 after controversial comments by the photographer on the tragedy of the road bridge which collapsed in Genoa in 2018, killing 43 people.
The Benetton family was then the main shareholder of the company ASPI (Autostrade per l’Italie) which managed the bridge at the time of the disaster.
“But who cares if a bridge collapses,” he said during a radio broadcast. He then claimed that his statements had been taken out of context.
Still in Corriere, this father of six children born from three unions assured that he only “regrets the things that I have not done, not the ones that I have done”.
