The Fountain of Youth

This image taken by photographer Terry Richardson for a Lee jeans poster in 2008 is an excellent example of how Nabokov’s tale has leapt from the pages of his novel into the collective conscious of American culture. Interestingly, it is not just old, depraved men preying upon innocent “nymphets” driving this theme in advertising. After all, one does not encounter lines of Humbert Humbert’s standing at outlet malls across America buying girls jeans in order to legitimize their fetish do they? Instead, this phenomenon seems to have been cultivated by a more mainstream sentiment that has more to do with an obsession with youth than it does with perversion. To be sure, while sexuality is central to the new role the “Lolita” inhabits in popular culture today, it is possible that conventional sexual attitudes are behind advertisements such as Mr. Richardson’s. Humans are, after all, simply sexual creatures and, as a result, the synthesis of youth and sexuality has mass appeal for a society that abhors ageing. Thus, the “Lolita” contains a powerful charm for consumers as she provides an unattainable aesthetic state of perfect sexuality that is uncorrupted by the degradations of ageing, which, ironically, and to the dismay of many, reveals an inner Humbert that exists in most Americans who actually do stand in the lines at the outlet malls buying girls jeans.