So there’s buzz about body size and fashion once again, only it’s kind of an interesting angle. Lane Bryant, who among other types of clothes sells plus size garments, decided to do a t.v. ad campaign for their plus size lingerie line. The key first ad (below) is pretty much shot for shot like a Victoria Secret’s ad without the wings, but with serious curves. (It actually kind of reminds me of the Charlize Theron perfume t.v. ad where she strips.) Lane Bryant claims that when they wanted to run the ad on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and Fox’s American Idol, that the networks gave them lots of flak, wanted lots of changes, and would only run a version of the ad in the last ten minutes of the shows, near ten o’clock, even though Idol showed a Victoria Secret’s ad a half hour before. So Lane Bryant is calling foul and running an Internet campaign about how the networks are big meanies who can’t deal with sexy larger women.
Now, the part that interests me is not this battle, where it is rather unclear how much actual fighting did occur over the ad and its over-sexiness. Bryant may be taking advantage to a degree for publicity’s sake, or the networks were perhaps not so much appalled at the ad’s standard of beauty as uncertain that those random and often hypocritical network censors wouldn’t hit them with a fine for having a more buxom model in underwear in a prime time commercial in the post-Nipplegate age.
What’s more interesting is that my original blog entry on this subject was about a photo ad featuring actress Audrey Tautou selling Chanel perfume in which the issue was not that her image had been photoshopped and airbrushed, but that it had been done in such a way that part of her looked inhuman, like a stick alien, and decidedly unappealing. My question was, does this really work with the ad campaigns these companies are trying to do — why are they so intent on making models look strange, inhuman, out of proportion and extreme in their skeletalness, when it does not seem to fit with trying to sell flowery dresses or romantic perfume, nor even creates fantastic art images that would draw anything more than a “ew, gross” response from both men or women on average. (Men tend to prefer the Victoria’s Secret curves at the least.) It seemed like a sabatoging approach to advertising that was becoming more and more bizarre, not to mention putting fashion increasingly on the defensive about their models.
But in counter to that now, we have Lane Bryant not only selling a plus size rack of lingerie, but aggressively doing so with t.v. ads and industry complaints, going after Victoria Secret’s share of attention even if Victoria’s Secret doesn’t sell plus size garments. Bryant is clearly taking a page from Dove’s self esteem playbook for cosmetics and toiletries, a campaign that Dove has sometimes been hypocritical about, but also found useful to sell products by complaining about fashion and advertisers and offering alternate body images. Bryant may well have photoshopped and airbrushed their model for their ad, but the woman has not been turned into a parody of humaness. Will fashion advertising shift to chase after the gains Bryant and Dove are and will be making? Or will there be a continued counter-reaction of making women even more like stick aliens? What demographic research are these people actually getting from their marketing consultants? Are we going to see continued pressure on women that they have to choose between the va-voom frame of Christina Hendricks and the near death experience of Nicole Ritchie, or will it even out? Does the lure of photoshopping toys mean we’ll continue to see even buxom models in impossible stances and proportions that don’t match reality? Will it spill over on to male models, besides giving them distorted abs?
Or — and this is interesting — as we move into an environmental green craze that speaks more to Earth Mothers than concentration camps, will heroin chic disappear except for a few edgy products? WalMart has a t.v. ad running about its green products in which the handsome guy is hanging laundry on a clothesline while his admittedly svelte but Earth Mothery wife appears looking really, really pregnant. Sure, WalMart, not exactly high fashion, but decidedly influential on what masses of women buy. That’s the sort of effect that will bleed upwards to socially conscious affluent buyers too. So maybe the stick aliens won’t further invade. Or maybe they will and we’ll have to have an even more extensive talk with our daughters about reality and special effects.
https://katgoodwin.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/aliens-in-pretty-dresses/
The Open Window 