Keith Richards, the newest celebrity in the Louis Vuitton campaign, hesitated before making his virgin leap into the pitch business.

"I told them, 'I'll only do it if you make me a guitar case with the logo on it,' " the Rolling Stones guitarist says. "They've done it. I'm very proud of it. I'll probably never travel with it, because it's just too beautiful."

The Annie Leibovitz photo depicts Richards strumming his guitar flanked by the custom-made Vuitton case and a lamp draped in a skull-print scarf. The caption reads: "Some journeys cannot be put into words. New York 3 a.m. Blues in C."

The billboard and magazine ads featuring the 64-year-old rocker, who follows Scarlett Johansson and Catherine Deneuve in the French fashion house campaign, elicited the usual wrinkle-related wisecracks.

An Adweek blogger sniped, "If you're selling leather bags, why not hire one, too?"

Richards dismisses the knocks as the product of envy.

"It's never from the ladies," he says. "It's always male journalists. If I got annoyed about it, there would be a lot of dead journalists, and I'd be in jail."

The rocker declined payment for his participation, and instead a donation went to The Climate Project pioneered by Al Gore. Richards says he's rich enough, thank you.

"I don't know what to do with all this money, quite honestly," he says with a cackle.