Death Becomes Her

I think advertising may have hit its new low.

 

Seriously, were these ads designed by a serial killer? Are the French consumers of this ad really a bunch of necrophiliacs? What the hell?

And no, before anyone even brings it up, I’m not buying that the “animals” in these ads are the women, being all dangerous and stuff. The palid skin, the vague sense of decomposition — it screams death. And then there’s this ad:

Sorry, that is an animal — a dead Homo sapien — and it’s revolting. Really, what are we selling here — other than rape and murder?

This is a despicable campaign. It fetishizes murder and violence against women. To sell blue jeans. The people making the ads should be ashamed, though Copyranter doubts they are.

This entry posted in Media criticism, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues. Bookmark the permalink. 

12 Responses to Death Becomes Her

  1. 1
    Robert says:

    WTF? WT Fing F?

  2. 2
    Renee says:

    When I first say this over at shakesville I didn’t get it, and I still don’t. How does promoting violence against women sell jeans? This is beyond WTF it actually leaves me speechless which is a rare occurrence really.

  3. 3
    Kate says:

    Every so often, the advertising world *still* manages to surprise me.

  4. 4
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    “The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” –Edgar Allan Poe

    So creepy in so many ways…..

  5. 5
    Angiportus says:

    Aside from the sex of the 2nd corpse being not clear…why would anyone use death, dirt and decay to sell jeans to people who presumably want to stay alive and healthy? Is there a huge zombie market out there? Or have we all gotten immensely interested in having our pants outlast our bodies?
    Those people must be on something. That 1st image flashed me back to a dead deer I found the other week, a road casualty, with its back all hollowed out and…I’ll spare you. I was so ticked off that the meat was not salvaged when fresh, even by someone else. It isn’t just a misogynist thing you’ve found here…these people are nuts.

  6. There was an ad that I saw about a year ago that I’ve been trying to find (although I’m not sure what I plan on doing with it) – it shows a car in the middle of the desert with a dead woman in the trunk and a man holding a shovel. Has anyone seen this? Was it on a blog? I can’t remember where I saw it.

    And, yeah, I don’t get the fascination with depicting murdered women to sell clothes… to women. Don’t get it.

  7. 7
    Carnadosa says:

    The only way these ads would make sense to me is if they were for a horror movie. And this is probably a weird nitpick, but jeans are really frigging uncomfortable and heavy when wet. Looking at these makes me think of leeches and cold rain and scary stuff living in the water that will EAT ME…now I want to turn on my heater and it’s 70 some degrees out.

    *note to self, never buy creepy wrangler jeans*

  8. 8
    r@d@r says:

    i don’t know a lot about the mostly-bogus psychology behind advertising theory, but from what i do know i think the concept is that when you open up the primal “eat drink shit piss fight fuck run” part of the brain with a visceral image like a dead woman in designer jeans, sort of like sticking an electrode into the lizard brain, the idea is that the image of the brand and of the product gets implanted into a deep sub-rational part of the psyche so that the next time you go shopping you instinctively are drawn to that product without even consciously realizing it. the cynicism of this sort of tactic is only outweighed by its bizarre inappropriateness. it makes more sense to me to show a woman in designer jeans eating a hamburger. but perhaps what they are thinking is that women have some sort of masochistic death wish and that this will tap into that. i can’t bring myself to accept such a noxious theory, but i can see how some white male mass communications major who can’t get a date would buy into such a line of thinking.

    file under Ms. magazine’s “No Comment” section…….

  9. 9
    RonF says:

    This looks like one of those “art must be shocking to be art” type of things. Either that, or (perhaps more likely) it’s purely a way to get people to LOOK at the ad. We are inundated with so many images every day that it takes a lot of effort to get eyeballs. It’s not an attempt to say “Here’s why you should buy and wear our jeans” as it is to just get people to remember the company name.

  10. 10
    jed says:

    These ads are obviously targeting the type of women who would not read a blog like this.

  11. 11
    Maco says:

    I agree with r@d@ar. I remember an old, grainy black-and-white movie in which company execs hired an advertising expert for suggestions on marketing their product. This southern gentleman Orson Welles-sorta guy hocks a big loogie onto the boardroom table, and in the stunned aftermath calmly cleans it with a hankie explaining “Gentlemen, you have just seen me do a very disgusting thing. And you will never forget I did it.”

    Wrangler or their advertising company wishes to bypass our anti-advertising filters using an ambiguous but highly suggestive psychosexual-murder-suicide as a key. We let it in to dissect and analyze and complain about, and invite others to view it and complain about it with us, never once suggesting there is anything wrong with the product itself.

    This isn’t the first time an advertiser has exploited righteous indignation to burn their brand name into my mind.

  12. 12
    Petar says:

    > some white male mass communications major who cannot get a date…

    Then I guess we are lucky that Farid Mokart is not exactly white, that ‘Etudes politiques’ does not exactly translate into ‘mass communications’, and that men who casually boast on TV about making fifty millions in six months don’t exactly have trouble finding a certain kind of date…

    Just imagine how much worse the ad would have been if Farid had not been around to restrain the despicable excuse for a human being you described – his partner Frederic Raillard. Because it is of course only white males who can’t get dates that produce misogynistic crap like this ad. Crap that does not sell any product, because people with self-respect simply blacklist the companies responsible for it.

    By the way, there was a non-sarcastic sentence in the above. I haven’t had a single bottle of Orangina since I saw one of Fred & Farid’s previous chef d’oeuvres.