Sex Sells: Yves Saint Laurent’s condom range – product placement much?

Advertising and fashion have long used ‘sex’ as a means to sell their products or push their brand to consumers. By designing a range of condoms, Yves Saint Laurent puts the brand directly in the moment when two people are going to be intimate.

What’s the rationale? It can’t just be product placement gone too far?

Absolutely not, according to HaveYouHeard’s Brett Rogers and curator of the agency’s channels of content (https://hyhconsumerandbrand.tumblr.com/, instagram: @thisisin__) aimed at educating and informing the participant about the cultural forces that are changing the world.

“If this is the one thing you can afford from the YSL range, and for most people it is, you’ll go for it. And, they also serve as that emblem of the YSL brand, equating it with sex and desire,” he said.

Yves Saint Laurent’s clothing consists of high end fashion items that range from bags marked at $3000 to $9000 dresses. The French luxury fashion house design of branded condoms will be available exclusively at Saint Laurent’s Parisian concept store, Rive Droite, packaged in six different designs ranging from a black and white checkered pattern to leopard prints and gold heart emblems. Each design is stamped with Saint Laurent’s house logo and will be sold at USD $2.20.

Rogers added this is not the last we’ll see of brands ‘going where no brand has gone before’.

“Brands are constantly breaking the boundaries and extending their fashion beyond the usual clothing items. If we are designing high fashion condoms, soon we will designing toothbrushes, to Yves Saint Laurent Tupperware’s that match your home decor. Our most basic objects have a designer future,” he said.