Advertising Vs Runway

Posted by: sj7g09 on: November 22, 2009

• In: inside/outside & self-directed | Media Analysis
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In looking at fashion advertising, I found the ads of American Apparel. I hadn’t actually heard of them before, and because of the ambiguous nature of their ads, I wasn’t sure whether they were real advertising or anti-advertising, as they seem to incorporate elements of both. With more research, I found that American Apparel is apparently the biggest clothing brand in the USA, which very much surprised me because of them running this sort of ad. I loved the subversiveness of this campaign – it’s like it’s being explicit in telling the viewer that it’s manipulating them and trying to sell things to them through sex. In some of their ads, it’s impossible to even see the clothing that the ad intends to sell, which is a prominent nod to the fact that people buy things according to the model, not the actual product.

This is another ad run by American Apparel that failed to get past British censorship. It was intended to run in VICE magazine, but it was considered to be too much like child pornography, so it was thought that it could seriously offend some readers. The only problem with that is that the model in this campaign is actually 23, not under 16, as it was thought readers might perceive her to be. I can only assume that it was considered she would be seen as younger than she is because of her physique, facial features, or that she is wearing oversized glasses in some of the photos that make her look somewhat childlike. One of the things I like about AA’s ads is that there’s such a contrast between their models, because apparently in some of them they use porn stars (see top image), whereas a lot of their models arent actually models at all, they’re just random girls from the street or girls who have sent their photographs to the company. I think it’s because of that that the above ad was banned – the model doesnt look enough like a conventional model; we’re not used to seeing real women in the media. Usually we see such an airbrushed, perfected image of femininity in advertising that we’re not generally exposed to women who have flaws and genuine femininity and can therefore be seen as sexual rather than a blank canvas to sell products who is no longer human.

I started to look at fashion images, particularly of runway models as they often have such a child-like physique, but this is considered acceptable, it’s even encouraged. Women with this sort of bodyshape look so unnatural that it’s impossible to sexualise them, and maybe that’s why it’s considered ok for them to look this way, despite them having such unhealthy, grotesque-looking bodies. I think that generally an image like this, of a young woman, would be considered sexual because of her revealing clothing – it’s even possible to see her breasts under the top… It intrigues me that an image like this is acceptable, whereas the AA ad above this is not acceptable, perhaps because the woman in that ad looks unconventional, she does not adhere to the stereotypical view of a model. She’s too real, has too many imperfections and therefore too much character to just be seen as a coathanger for the clothing she is modelling, and this accessibility maybe means people would find her sexually attractive in a way that runway models are not.

This image is modelling for the brand ‘Miss Sixty’, a brand mainly aimed at teenagers. Her hair being in bunches, tied with ribbons, combined with her emaciated figure, heightens the idea that childlike aesthetics are attractive – to be a runway model, it seems like it’s part of the criteria to have staved off puberty by never reaching a weight where it is a possibility. Perhaps it’s just me, but I find it really quite saddening to look at images like this, of such unnatural bodies, of women who no longer look like women, or even humans at all. I would probably prefer not to be exposed to images like this if I were to just go on how I feel about them, but because of my negative feelings towards them, I feel it’s important to use them in my artwork and to make commentary on issues such as how fashion impacts society’s view of femininity. It’s like, there are so many campaigns for ‘real women’ to be in the media, but AA ads use real women, real women who are not even airbrushed for the ads, and they’re shunned because their models have too much spark and sexuality to be considered acceptable in marketing where lifeless women are considered the norm and all the general public are used to seeing.

I think advertising is still a lot based on trying to sell something according to the model – that you want the product because you want to be that person and obtaining the product will get you a step closer to that. Personally, I think it’s much more healthy to want to be an AA girl, because they have personality – it’s not just their looks that make them attractive, and their bodyshapes are widely varied and dont encourage women to try to attain ridiculous, unhealthy, impossible standards. Ok, so AA objectifies women, but so does everything – I’m at a point now where I think that people need to embrace this objectification and use it to their advantage. It’s like porn actresses – many people think that they’re being exploited because they’re ‘selling their bodies’, but it’s a commodity that they should be able to sell, and a career that they should be allowed to choose without people questioning their judgment. Plus, really it’s that those women are ‘exploiting’ their viewers, enough so that they can also convince them that actually it’s the viewer that’s ‘exploiting’ them.