David LaChapelle | Make Love Not Walls / 2017 [commercial advertisement]

blow the walls down

by Douglas Messerli

 

David LaChapelle (director) Make Love Not Walls / 2017 [1.37 minutes] [commercial advertisement]

 

In 2017, in direct contrariness to US President Trump’s wall-building mania along the Mexican border, the Italian-based fashion line Diesel produced an ad that took the “Wall” as a major symbol standing for the borders created by many forces between love between cultures and individuals

    This ad begins with a handsome, tattooed young man wandering a sort of desert path to come up against the crude metal wall topped by barbwire, the strains of Alex Vargas’ song Higher Love calling out like an Odyssean siren.

     Among the piles of junk and other discarded objects lined up against the wall, he finds a single white aster that clearly has been tossed over from the other side.

     He tosses it back over, and another appears. He tosses that back, and we see from the other side a beautiful woman and a man, soon joined by many others.

     They join together to crawl over the top, as the original man makes a couple of dance pirouettes, as the others finally break through leaving a heart-shaped opening. Others take back-leaps over the walls, one man being hugged and kissed by the original young man.

    The Vargas song, meanwhile, almost chants: “you giving me higher love yeah you / giving me high love you giving me high / love you giving me high love.”

      As they all break through, dressed in various clothing from numerous cultures, almost like a kind of hippie gathering, full of color, with women kissing men, men kissing other men, and others just moving into sexy positions.

 

    An inflatable multi-colored tank enters the picture, obviously the one which has shot a heart through wall, as the words appear on the screen: “Make Love Not Walls.”

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).