Get your fantasy on!
Some choice shots from this weekend’s epic runway show. Images courtesy of Apparel News:
Skin.Graft Designers: Cassidy Haley, Katie Kay, & Jonny Cota:
(photo by: half a second)
And yes, I must admit I am quite proud of myself for having introduced Katie and Jonny to one another back in 2005. So tremendously proud of what my friends have created together!
“Last Supper” by David Myrick:
(click image to enlarge.)
MLB 2k9 ad starring Tim Lincecum:
It’s totally funny, but it’s also kind of interesting social commentary in a way. I’ve been doing some research for a client over the past few months on community sites for kids such as Club Penguin, GuppyLife, Stardoll, imbee, etc. Because of the way that COPPA laws restrict what kids are able to do online, and what information they are able to share about themselves, all of these kinds of social network / virtual world sites aimed at kids under the age of 13 have to rely very heavily on the use of various Avatars instead of photos.
It’s gotten me thinking about what this means, that a whole generation is coming up right now whose youth will have been shaped by the use of avatars. It’s something that did not really exist to the same degree of pervasiveness for prior generations, and I’m very curious about how it will impact the way kids construct identity. It’s interesting. Replay that ad with this question in mind….
This is hardcore tripping me out right now:
I drew this picture when I was 10!
I just rediscovered it tucked away in an old folder.
It is kind of boggling my mind thinking about what inspired me to draw this, and where in the hell I got the references for all these outfits at 10 years old. I pretty much have no clue why I drew this picture. It wasn’t any kind of assignment or anything like that. I think I’d maybe just gotten new markers, so I came up with this idea….
By the time I was 10 my family and I had defected from the Soviet Union, and after spending about six months between Austria and Italy, we’d been in the United States for 3 years at that point. Summer/Fall of 1991 was the year the Soviet Union finally collapsed. Maybe hearing about all this political news stuff had gotten 10-year-old-me thinking about countries…. It’s pretty interesting that the picture still says USSR even though it was drawn months after the coup. I wonder what it is I understood of all that noise at the time.
Anyway, it’s totally bizarre to discover this picture, especially right on the heels of the previous post, which is pretty much the exact same idea, just executed with img tags instead of magic markers, 17 years later. Clearly, I have been looking at culture and identity in this kind of analytical way for waaay longer than I’ve even been aware of doing so. I’ve been doing it my whole life.
A few months ago I’d written a post called How Not To Use Condoms, about the misstep of Trojan’s “Evolve” campaign.
Here, then, is Durex’s take on how to advertise condoms, courtesy of Fitzgerald & Co:
And I’d actually been planning a more substantial entry to be the first post of 2009, but when I came across this last night, I couldn’t not write about it. I think the ad is brilliant in SO many ways, and the difference between Trojan’s “Evolve” and Durex’s “Get It On” approaches to marketing condoms could not be more glaring.
It’s more than just that the tag-line “Get it on” is a damn clever double entendre (in one smooth maneuver intimating that getting *it* on, and getting a condom on, actually mean the same thing!) whereas “Evolve,” as I’d written before, aligns condoms with a phenomenon that half of Americans are in opposition to (aka: Evolution)…. It’s that this is SERIOUSLY funny!
I didn’t even realize it until I saw the Get it On ad, but Evolve is really quite humorless, isn’t it? Granted it’s hard to be funny when you’re dealing with STD’s–and, to be fair, the Evolve radio spots do manage a bit of wit in dealing with the subject. With Durex, though, funny is the key.
Both brands are trying to un-taboo their product. One of the specific goals of the Evolve campaing is, in fact, to get all of us to be more open about the topic of sexual health. But while Trojan stakes out Public Service Announcement territory, Durex is going about it in a way that I guess can be described as tongue-in-cheek porn. Of course, the dire gravity of the sexual health crisis truly cannot be underestimated, and perhaps this is why the feat of being able to position sexual responsibility–which is what condoms stand for, basically–in the context of playfulness and silliness and…..naughty condom-balloon animals, is that much more significant.
Humor makes the subject infinitely less taboo than invoking Evolution, and not only that, but it makes it more resonant too. After all, despite however it is you feel about the process of natural selection, if you get what the naughty balloon animals are up to, then the ad is speaking to you.
(P.S. Whoever did the sound design for this spot should seriously get some kind of award.)
