Benetton's Art Director On The Importance Of Courting Controversy

Speaking on the phone from Milan, Oliviero Toscani pauses in the middle of our interview to ask me what the weather is like in London. I tell him that it's raining and he laughs heartily. "It's sunny here," he says. "Now that you are out of Europe there will only be rain." As the professional provocateur behind many of Benetton's game-changing advertising campaigns, Toscani believes it is his responsibility to address the "problems of humanity." And the greatest threat it's currently facing? "Brexit," he says, without missing a beat. "And integration.""Why would you want to see clothes in an advert? You can just see them in our shops. On a billboard, I can show you how a company thinks"

Toscani's work has long been politically-minded. In his 18-year tenure as Benetton's art director, he produced groundbreaking images that provoked equal amounts of backlash and acclaim - a newborn baby still attached to an umbilical cord, a priest and a nun kissing, a man with AIDS lying on his deathbed, surrounded by his family - and dealt with issues ranging from homophobia and social stigma to diversity and religion. "It is my role to present reality," he explains. "I have been a witness to my time. I talk about things that are problematic and things that need to be discussed. When I was first talking about AIDS in the 1990s, people were interested in talking about AIDS, not about what shoes were in fashion at the time."

That being said, why would a fashion billboard be the right place to present these controversial images? "Why would you want to see clothes in an advert?" Toscani retorts. "If you want to see the clothes you can see them in our shops. On a billboard, I can show you how the company thinks, what it believes, what it represents. Advertising is primitive and powerful - it is more than art. People can look up and see it. And if they don't like it, they don't have to look at it."

Toscani remembers the advert with the newborn baby fondly. "That picture was great. It went up in London, on a huge billboard in Piccadilly Circus, and there was such an uproar. If it had been a puppy, I bet they would have loved it. But it was a baby, and they hated it." Another iconic image featured three "human" hearts, labelled "White", "Black" and "Yellow". Although they were later revealed to be pig's hearts, he was widely criticised. "A journalist from the Guardian called me, and he asked, 'Are those human hearts?'" laughs Toscani. "So I told him, 'Yes, they are the hearts of my three wives.'"

Other criticism might prove harder to shrug off. One 1994 advert showed the blood-soaked uniform of a soldier killed in the Bosnian war. His parents claimed they had given their permission with realising what they were agreeing to. Another campaign, which showed bodies tattooed with the words "HIV positive", was deemed "commercial exploitation of suffering" by the National AIDS Commission. Toscani remains unfazed. "You can't be secure and be creative. What does it mean to be provocative, anyway? Art has to be provocative, to provoke conversation, to provoke interest. Otherwise what the hell are you doing it for? If people criticise you, they are interested in you. So, it is an honour to be criticised."

Despite Benetton's commercial success under Toscani, the backlash proved fatal in 2000 after a campaign about the death penalty in which he photographed prisoners on death row. The murder victims' families lobbied retailers and sales soon plummeted, after which the brand allegedly fired him. Toscani denies this. "I left because Tina Brown asked me to work with her on Talk magazine, but the press wanted another reason because no one could believe that I wanted to leave Benetton at the height of my career. I have no regrets about those pictures - they were fantastic."

After a 17-year hiatus, Toscani returns to the brand this month with a new campaign. Featuring a diverse cast of models, it is more upbeat than his previous work and noticeably more product-led. It shows them smiling and holding bunches of flowers, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with phrases like "gender-free zone" and "colours don't have gender". Toscani describes the images as being "about integration, humanity and the end of discrimination." When asked why he has chosen to come back to the company now, he is intentionally vague. "It just happened. Our paths crossed again." Has he been tempted to tone down his work this time around? "I don't know," he muses. "It will take us about a year to get it to work. This time it will be more about the clothes, but we will also talk about the time we are living through. The world now is in crisis and my task is to get people to talk about it."