Federer and Nadal's poorly-equipped mountain adventure looks set to end badly

Having lined up two of the winningest tennis players of all time to model some clobber for them, you’d think the folks at LV might have gone for something, oooh, I dunno, tennis themed? But no, the fashion behemoth’s current “Core Values” campaign (shot, by the way, by Annie Leibovitz) finds our two racket-swingers boldly striking out across the snowy landscape of Italy’s Dolomite Mountains on what appears to be... well... perhaps the most hopelessly under-equipped mountaineering expedition since things went pear-shaped for Ötzi the Iceman in 3230 BC.

In the money shot currently doing the rounds of the world’s glossy magazines, each man is packing a dainty little LV backpack which (the LV website helpfully informs us) is called “The Christopher”. (“Hey Rafa, got any spare carabiners?” “I think so Rog, let me just check in my Christopher.”) Federer is manfully shouldering a brown one, overlaid with a symphony of golden LV logos and what might charitably be described as stylised snowflakes, while Rafa’s pack is dark blue, overlaid with the same pattern in powder blue.

Best of all: poking out of the top of their under-sized baglets they have pristine, never-used-before climbing ropes which have evidently been carefully selected to colour-coordinate with the bags. Rafa’s rope is the same blue as the details on his action-satchel, while Rog has gone roguishly off-piste with an olive man-dangler which, although not a perfect match for the colour scheme of his bag, still obviously sprang from the same corner of the designer’s mood board.

And how are they attired, you ask, these two rugged men-of-the-mountains? Well, Rog has gone for a black, long-sleeved polo shirt that screams “dullest Zurich banker at the dinner party” and has twinned this with the blingin’est chronometer he could find at H Samuel – presumably not the sort of thing one would want to find oneself wearing during an all-fours scramble up an unstable scree slope for fear of smashing it to pieces. Rafa, looking a smidge bemused about something in the middle-distance, is showing off his tanned left bicep to its best possible advantage in a nondescript black T-shirt. Heroically holding up his equally anonymous black trousers, meanwhile, is a very skinny belt – an item which, were the former world no.1 to sustain a paper cut to his index finger, might just be strong enough to serve as an impromptu tourniquet.

I’m not a climber, but I’ve met more than enough of them to know that this pair do not look like climbers. Where are the unruly neck beards? The sweat-encrusted beanies? The mangled, tape-and-chalk-covered hands? Then again, perhaps it would be unwise to rush to judgement based on one image. Perhaps Federer and Nadal are, in fact, keen climbers in their spare time? Just, y’know, climbers who are on a mission to bring smart-casual attire into the mountains. A search of the other materials in the campaign, however, suggests otherwise.

There’s an eight-minute film, made during the photo shoot, in which the pair sit on a large, LV-branded trunk in the snow and respond to unchallenging interview questions. At one point Rafa is asked “who do you look up to in sports?” A chance to talk about his admiration for Reinhold Messner perhaps? Nope Ronaldo Nazário. Turns out he’s a football fan. Federer? He’s into basketball, so Michael Jordan for him.

Of course, in comparison to some of the crimes of cultural appropriation committed by the fashion industry, this is only a very minor one – certainly not on a par with Karl Lagerfeld putting a verse from the Koran on a corset for Chanel in 1994, or Isabel Marant being accused of commercially exploiting traditional Mexican Purepecha designs in 2015 in a collection for [checks notes] Louis Vuitton. I imagine climbers will take one look at these ads and snort, much as surfers did when Dior started trying to sell surfboards for over £9,000 last year (display stand included!)

Still, for the benefit of any extraordinarily wealthy wannabe climbers who may have seen these ads, and might suppose that in order to carry your ropes correctly you need to buy a Christopher, a word of advice: don’t. According to the care instructions on the LV website, in order to keep your bag “looking beautiful” you need to do the following: “Beware not to scratch or rub your product against abrasive surfaces... Keep your product away from damp or humid environments and avoid direct exposure to sunlight… Keep your product away from water. Should it get wet or dirty on the surface, dry with a lint free, light-colored, absorbent cloth.”

"Rafa! Help! I have dirty water on my Christopher!”

"Hang in there amigo! I’m lowering down the lint-free cloth to you now...”