By Lisa Lockwood with contributions from Cynthia Martens, Lauren McCarthy
wwd.comOutrageous, edgy fashion ads that get everybody talking. Where did they go?
Gone are the scandalous days of Calvin’s rippling abs and come-hither youth; Abercrombie’s S&M Santa; the full-frontal Saint Laurent; Benetton’s kissing clergy, and Jenny McCarthy doing her business on Candie’s toilet.
It wasn’t controversy that killed them. On the contrary, such controversy successfully put these and other brands squarely into the limelight, for better or worse.
But after shifts from the shocking and sexually suggestive to the socially conscious and lifestyle aspirational, the fashion industry has entered a new state: tame.
Blame it on the media. With so much corporate emphasis on having the right social campaign, Instagram, Twitter feeds, videos, Web sites and the goal of accumulating “likes” on Facebook, not to mention global, cross-cultural sensitivities, the edge that cuts through the advertising clutter has been dulled.
To be sure, there’s no shortage of talented photographers who take beautiful pictures, but some observers argue that intensely image-conscious companies, public or otherwise, are so intent on controlling how they’re perceived, advertising has simply become too safe. And safe equates with boring.
That’s not to say controversy is absent from the fashion industry, but it can extract a steep price. The recent ouster of Dov Charney, chief executive officer of American Apparel, over concerns about his personal and professional conduct, continues to make headlines. And his sexually charged advertising images, often depictions of young women in suggestive, sometimes vulgar poses, may end up being the least of his troubles. While one might debate whether Charney is a marketing visionary connecting to his customer’s sexuality or a peddler of soft-core p*rn, his brand of advertising stands out in that it’s controversial, intentionally or otherwise. In this particular case, that isn’t helping Charney’s cause to regain his standing in the company he founded.
The granddaddy of advertising controversy, Benetton, certainly didn’t have a great future following its shock advertising campaigns. The company came under harsh scrutiny for the use of shock in its campaigns, resulting in public outrage and consumer complaints. At the same time, the ads won kudos for raising public awareness of important social issues. Benetton’s ads, when not tweaking mere convention, featured women’s bodies with tattoos that said “HIV Positive,” or a black woman breast-feeding a white infant. They also showed scenes of war as well as a man dying of AIDS surrounded by his family, an image that ad professionals widely cite as the most controversial in the history of fashion advertising.
The man behind these images, Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, still stands behind his approach, most noted for Benetton during the years 1982 to 2000. In an interview with WWD earlier this month, he said, “If an image does not provoke, then you’ve thrown your money away.” Toscani emphasized that provocation is a positive force, and said images that provoke or shock encourage people to think about the world and to be creative. He also cited a preponderance of boring imagery in recent years. “These images are all devised by marketing executives without intelligence or culture,” said Toscani, still clearly unafraid of tweaking the fashion establishment.
Benetton continues to use pointed advertising in its campaigns to raise awareness of social issues, although they may not be quite as inflammatory as those in Toscani’s day.
Its Unhate campaign, launched in 2011, featured images of world leaders in passionate lip-locks with some of their biggest adversaries. There were shots of President Obama kissing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Pope Benedict XVI making out with Egypt’s Grand Sheikh Ahmed el Tayeb. After the Vatican sued, Benetton pulled the ad, apologized to the Holy See and donated to a Catholic charity.
According to the company, the Unhate campaign was inspired by the notion of tolerance by contrasting faiths and cultures.
The Unhate campaign generated a bonanza of publicity for Benetton, and was among the first five topic trends that year on Twitter and Google worldwide. Over the year, it garnered five million results, 20,000 discussions and 1,500 blog posts. The campaign, which reached 500 million people, generated more than 4,000 articles in over 60 countries and 600 TV reports all over the world, according to Benetton. The company added 60 percent more Facebook fans and 60 percent more visits to benetton.com from the campaign. The sentiment toward Benetton was 80 percent positive, the company contended. And the campaign received numerous awards at international competitions, such as the Press Grand Prix at the Cannes Ad Festival and Two Gold Pencils at the One Show Awards in the integrated branding and public service — outdoors and posters category. It also won a Gold Clio Award at the International Clio Awards in the print category.
Benetton followed up that campaign with another initiative that was less provocative, called “Unemployee of the Year,” which spotlighted a pressing social problem, the nearly 100 million unemployed young people worldwide aged 15 to 29.
Calvin Klein’s imagery is the stuff of ad industry legend, especially his early jeans commercial with the young Brooke Shields cooing that “nothing” came between her and her Calvins. Further pushing the edge, at a point when Klein was an established megabrand, the designer got into hot water with the U.S. Justice Department in 1995. Remember images of teenage models, some of whom were reportedly as young as 15, in overtly sexual poses in a dingy basement, shot by Steven Meisel? Despite the controversy (and a clearing by the Justice Department), denim sales soared. Most of Klein’s fragrance and underwear ads featuring suggestive and sexually provocative images of Kate Moss, Christy Turlington and Mark Wahlberg helped establish the designer at the forefront of controversial advertising.
Klein declined to comment for this story but a key collaborator on many of Klein’s earlier ads is Neil Kraft, ceo of Kraftworks. Kraft pointed out that “people have started over the last 10 years, starting with the recession, to play it safe and are afraid to rock the boat.…I still, 20 years later, have people coming to me and saying, ‘We want to do the next CK One.’ I’m like, ‘OK, we can do that. Are you willing to break all the rules? Are you willing to shake things up?’ They always say yes, but yes doesn’t mean yes. The minute you list the things they’ll have to do to shake things up, they’ll say that’s a good idea, but you end up being pushed up to [the] safe area.”
For client Elizabeth Arden, Kraft said they would run into trouble for coming up with headlines that were puns, but didn’t work outside the U.S. “The markets reject the ad because they don’t understand the idiosyncrasies,” he said. “Part of it is, the more global we become, the harder it is to shake things up. What’s controversial in the U.S. is not necessarily controversial in Europe. Or maybe it’s incredibly controversial in Asia.”
In the heady days of Klein and Luciano Benetton running their own shows, and even the late Ken Zimmerman, former ceo of Kenar Enterprises Ltd., these executives were constantly pushing to see how far they could go.
“Very few brands are really run by entrepreneurs anymore,” Kraft pointed out. “They’re run by big conglomerates such as LVMH [Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton]. Dov Charney is an example of where it’s backfired. He has done controversial ads that are offensive. Does it work or leave your stock at 63 cents? There’s controversy and then there’s ‘ew.’ Dov Charney tends to be ‘ew.’”
Kraft pointed out that this past spring, Barneys New York featured 17 transgender women and men in its ad campaign, shot by Bruce Weber that a decade ago might have stirred strident reaction. “It was an interesting way to get attention, but I didn’t feel a groundswell of business,” he said.
Kraft also attributes a lack of provocation to the popularity of digital media.
“I think to some extent the digital thing is exacerbating the problem because it’s so easy for people to create their own controversial things. Almost no matter what you do, somebody’s done it better on YouTube. You see almost every week something about a brand’s video. It’s just a print ad moving. They’re not really engaging videos. They’re just people walking down the street,” said Kraft. “People talk about wanting to disrupt all the time…but I don’t think they mean it.”
He recalled that in the old days, an advertiser could do print, TV and outdoor and they were subject to censorship. Magazines would think twice about running Moss naked, unlike what much of digital media does today.
According to Kraft, 15 to 20 years ago, outdoor advertising was the Wild West. “Today, digital is still the Wild West,” he said. “Clients become kind of frozen by the number of choices. The way media is bought has changed over the past 10 years. It’s all bought by big media buying companies. We can suggest media, and come up with ideas for media, the plans come back from the media companies and they’re all about reach, not about shocking, takeover, cool…we end up with a bunch of static banners on 100 sites, when maybe one takeover on an important site would be better,” said Kraft.