Angelina Jolie poses for her First Ad on Louis Vuitton’s 'Core Values' Campaign (photo)

She’s barefoot, wearing her own clothes, no makeup and toting her own elegantly weathered monogrammed Alto bag. Yet Angelina Jolie looks radiant and completely in her element, reclining on a wooden boat in a verdant, lakeside landscape in Cambodia’s Siem Reap province. Jolie discovered the country in 2000 when she filmed “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” and it sparked her humanitarian activism.

She’s the latest celebrity to pose for Louis Vuitton’s popular “Core Values” campaign — and surely the only one who brought four children to the photo shoot, some of whom had to be shooed out of Annie Leibovitz’s frame.

“People are not used to seeing Angelina in this situation,” said Pietro Beccari, Vuitton’s executive vice president, unveiling the image exclusively to WWD. “I like the fact that it’s a real moment. This travel message we give through personal journeys is a fundamental one for the brand.”

The ad is slated to break in the International Herald Tribune on Wednesday, followed by a range of news, general interest and lifestyle publications, including Vanity Fair.

Beccari declined to disclose budgets for the media buy, or comment on reports Vuitton paid the American actress millions for the shoot. He would only say Jolie donated an undisclosed portion of her fees to a charity.

The campaign is expected to run for at least 18 months alongside a few other recent “core values” personalities, including Bono and Sean Connery. Vuitton introduced the advertising concept in 2007 as a way to trumpet its travel roots and showcase its perennial monogrammed leather goods as a balance to its fashion-driven marketing — and to reach a broader audience. Other personalities who have posed for Vuitton include Mikhail Gorbachev, Keith Richards and Catherine Deneuve.

Also on Wednesday, Vuitton plans to post a teaser on its Web site, louisvuittonjourneys.com/cambodia, foreshadowing an interview with Jolie that will be posted later in the month. In it, she is expected to discuss how her visit to Cambodia was a life-changing experience, awakening her to the plight of Third World countries. She adopted her eldest son, Maddox, from Cambodia and she and Brad Pitt established the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation, which is active in community development and conservation in the country.

“This campaign is about a very special person and a very special journey,” Beccari said.

And a storied handbag. Beccari showed off several paparazzi shots of Jolie toting the Alto carryall, which is believed to be at least six years old. The style is no longer in production, but “we are considering to re-edit it,” Beccari noted.

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Angelina and Brad Try for (another) Baby

Angelina and Brad trying for a seventh pint-sized Pitt.

While Nadya Suleman was crucified for her delivery of the octuplets, Jon and Kate Gosselin left to defend each intrauterine insemination, and the Duggars depicted as fertility-meets-faith fanatics, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have largely seemed to escape poor procreation press. In fact, reports announcing, “Brad & Angelina: Trying for a Baby” and “Brad and Angelina Trying for Baby #7!”—often lovingly supplemented with a romantic picture of the duo—seem to leave readers in anticipatory baby bliss, just waiting on their doorstep for the celebrities’ stork. And this reporter can’t figure out why. Sure, they have the money and the means, beauty and careers, live in a house that could shelter a mid-size army, and are de-orphaning children from Cambodia to Vietnam, but aren’t most of the issues still the same? Aren’t there only two parents (minus babysitters) for six children? Twenty four hours in a day? A child’s quality of life to consider?

Reported Us magazine in its recent September 21, 2009 issue, “Two insiders tell Hot Stuff the couples are so strong that Jolie is actively trying to get pregnant. . . . Jolie is taking prenatal vitamins, says a source.” But my personal favorite is when Us magazine queries in its issue: “And how could the A-listers resist adding to their brood when they see how the six little Jolie-Pitts are also enjoying their time in France?” Umm . . . the Octomom? Jon and Kate Gosselin? Sanity? Children enjoy lollipops, should we give them forty? Tots fancy Fritos, should we pour bags down their little throats? Sometimes more is more than just more: it’s mad.

The fact is, let’s pretend for a moment that you have six kids and aren’t on every tabloid leaning on a newsstand, that you aren’t the Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency, that you don’t own production company Plan B Entertainment, that you aren’t in the midst of shooting Blockbusters or on press tours . . . and that your children sleep eight hours a night. If you use every moment left in the day, this leaves each of your six children 2 hrs. and 40 min. each of your parental attention per day. Quality.

Rich or poor, married or divorced, managing or crumbling, adopted or biological, with the Duggars, Jon and Kate Gosselin, Octomom Nadya Suleman, and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: When did we start to breed like rabbits? Are American adults so “enjoying” parenthood that they proliferate? Are we thinking of the children—or are we acting like them?—when we take to the sheets, enter labs, skim sperm banks, or adopt, to create broods bigger that would leave even Mrs. Brady wringing her hands? In short, when did procreation become recreation?


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