2000 Man: Keith Richards for Louis Vuitton

Keith Richards aged overnight. Unlike the rest of us, who must sit helplessly by and watch as a barely discernible line turns into a crow's foot and slight shadows become permanent baggage, Richards rusted in 1978 and has stayed that way. At 65, he looks only marginally craggier than he did at 45. Long the subject of unflattering visual lampoon, the only significant difference between the Richards of today and the Richards of 20 years ago is the color of his hair.

For years an anticipated morality tale of the type parents like to use to caution teenagers against drugs and debauchery, Richards has persevered through addiction, Altamont, and Anita Pallenberg to become a New Millennium poster boy for Louis Vuitton, not "Just Say No."

The Vuitton ad finds Richards, the eternal nomad, in a luxury hotel room. In this anthem to life on the road, five-star style, the room is decorated with heavy, bland decor. Richards strums his guitar while taking a break from a novel that requires a magnifying glass to read (oh, those stylists); a cup of tea recklessly sits sans doily on top of a custom-made Vuitton guitar case. Ever mindful of rock-and-roll quirk, the stylist has thrown Richards' trademark scarves over the lamps and placed a scabbard on an end table. A lens filter makes the guitarist's hair appear blue; the video made to accompany the shoot proves that Richards in his dotage has not resorted to an old woman's colorful rinse.

As Leibovitz welcomes him to the set, Richards asks where he should "park the carcass," and in that wheezy moment he calls to mind not just his own archetype but that of Bill Nighy's marvelously decaying musician in 1998's Still Crazy.

"Some journeys cannot be put into words" reads the text of the ad. Indeed, if one were to consider the whole of Richards' public life, from 1964 onwards, that would be almost half a century of rootless, indestructible survival. Richards is life itself, bruised and abused, but he is not a lifestyle. Rock and roll used to be, before it went corporate (at the hands of Jovan and the Stones, no less). Jagger stopped being hip around the same time he started wearing kneepads on stage, but Richards has been chugging along for five decades as the undisputed king of all things reckless and therefore recklessly cool.

Richards' journey of je m'en foutisme can be traced back farther than his first rotting tooth. You first see it in his shaggy hair as he frolics about a beach in Santa Monica, circa 1965. By 1966 he'd found his inner dandy, and in 1967 he'd grown the hairstyle that has provided forty years of bad imitation among would-be guitar gods. If some little Strat-wielding punk says he's going to get his hair cut like Keef, you immediately apprehend the man and the era.

By the late 1970s, Richards had built himself into a Roman ruin, with all the glories of antiquity attached. Living history? Sure, he's writing a book, but try science instead: Where else could you see an ongoing experiment in pushing the human body to its limits?

Richards, as biology will attest, is no ordinary human. He singlehandedly invented heroin chic, 20 years before magazine editors realized it had editorial appeal. He's nodded off looking as if he smelled like a skunk and has been photographed that way, glamorously. He wandered around for fifteen years without a front tooth. He doesn't appear to eat, and yet you hear he makes one hell of a fry-up. He was not born in a cross-fire hurricane, he was born sucking the teat of Jack Daniels, with a Telecaster instead of hips. He's one of very few celebrities who've transcended decades--five of them-- without falling into, as the French say, "les oubliettes." He gets away with calling women "bitches."

The Vuitton ads are reminiscent of the Blackglama "What Becomes a Legend Most?" campaign. In Vuitton's case, they've been designed to appeal to an older consumer now that Vuitton's customer base has skewed younger. The idea was to take random legends--Richards, Deneuve, Gorbachev--who'd have some face value among the senior set. Richards has been entitled to his pension for five years now and he's ten years past eligibility for Denny's senior special.

Still, he strums.

The Leibovitz video shows Richards at first pretending to play, without an ounce of attitude to his skeletal frame. You get the feeling that Richards motors through life at a very comfortable 33 1/3 rpm, always. Time waits for him. One wonders if his lack of urgency is the key to his longevity. Blues play in the background, low key. He mimes a strum, catching his hand in the air, and then repeats. At one point, this resembles nothing so much as Bill Murray's impersonations of the Rat Pack in Lost in Translation. Leibovitz encourages: That's great...so great...when you play...don't even need to play...

"Like a Rembrandt," Richards says about the photos, as the crew applauds. The final photo catches him looking off into the corner, a deep grove running down his his cheek like a tear.

Vuitton's in a bit of tough spot. They make luggage and handbags that are copied everywhere; one can hardly set foot into an international tourist area without seeing hundreds of them, many made better than the originals. They never had the type of hipness one associates with popular culture; they aren't Burberry. For the cynical, the Richards ad fails as propaganda; this is a guy who sleeps--when he sleeps--in his clothes. He's crusty. It's hard to imagine him couching himself in terms of material possessions. He's never been a studied wastrel, which is why all of his countless imitators are just that, cheap knock offs. One can see him using the custom case, but not buying one. That doesn't mean that there aren't any potential customers. Anyone who's been to Stones concert since 1995 has seen them, pulling up in their SUVs, firing up their portable barbecue grills, loosening their ties, watch the tail lights fading...time not so much on their side.