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Voilà! Victoria does Breathless

Fashion icon Victoria Beckham appears as the official worldwide testimonial for Emporio Armani women's underwear Photograph: Giorgio Armani press office/AP/AP

And God created Posh ... Behold, the New Wave of underwear advertising, which announces itself in a shot from Emporio Armani's latest campaign. At the forefront of this iconoclastique new movement in knicker-shifting is the mysterious girl in the picture, whose insouciant cool is merely underscored by the knowledge that in real life, she drives a white Porsche 911 with monogrammed alloys. (I know, I know. How long before the neon underlighting?)

But let's get back to the script, because it was only last year that this enchanteuse was praising her Belmondo-esque husband's billboard ads for the same company. "I'm proud to see his penis 25ft tall," she purred back then. "It's huge. Massive. If I looked like that, I'd walk down the street in my panties too."

Et voilà! La nouvelle séductrice. Oo is she? For oom does she wait? Ees that 'is Cadillac Escalade going crunchy-crunchy on their marble-chip gravel drive, its insanely high-spec boombox reverberating to the strains of Lil Wayne as he returns from yet another malheureuse defeat for LA Galaxy, les babyfoot allstars?

Or is the above picture in fact not a photograph at all, but a still from a nine-minute Nouvelle Vague tracking shot, whose biting social critique only French people are sophisticated enough to understand?

Questions, questions. And if only madame could speak, she would retort: "My underwear campaigns are not about providing answers; zey are about provoking questions. I 'ave never been interested in bourgeois solutions. I am interested in existentialisme. I am interested in naturalisme. Above all, I am interested in representing life as eet is lived. Now bring round my car. I'm late for a barbie round at Will and Jada's."

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