Everyone seems to be gloating about the recent banning of a Supre ad-campaign. Ostensibly this is because the ad was too overtly sexual to be displayed on public television and displayed on busses. Supre is, after all marketed to the 'Tween' market. Although almost every female (and thus inclined male) I know has at least one piece from there. 'It's great for basics!' - quoth they.
ASB spokeswoman Sari Mattila has stated "The complaints focus mainly on the sexualised content, the time slot in which the ad is shown, and also the promotion of body size."
Opinion pieces have revelled in the campaigns removal. But why? Because of its overt sexuality? Haven't we been through this for three or more decades with brands such as Levi, Calvin Klein, and almost any perfume ever?
A smug article published on Pedestrian TV refer to the ads, which feature a topless model in jeans-as-leggings or "jeggings" as being "every teenage boys fantasy". Well of course it is. It's supposed to be. That's how advertisers work.
Almost every fashion product is sold on the premise of buy this and someone will have sex with you. As for the indignation of this being for teenagers; what the hell else does a teenager think about? - Perhaps that's a bit far, but for most people, there's no other period in life when sex is such a central concern/terror.
And for those wanting to take a feminist angle, name a single ad selling men's clothes (for any age market- Rivers not included) that doesn't have a requisite six-pack. Body image is just as fraught an issue for boys. A fact people constantly neglect in the face of 'helplessly sexualized' girls.
In regards to age, do I really need to remind people to look at the kind of clothes we buy, and how they are advertised? Perhaps they are more nuanced, but the intention and effect is the same. And the models used are no different from the one featured in this one, infact they usually look around the same age. Furthermore, is being thin not the national obsession? Which season of The Biggest Loser are we up to now? For prudish older people (and oddly, people just out of their own Tweenage) to complain about these ads is hypocritical. They aren’t meant for you, thus they’re not marketed to your tastes.
What irks me most is that it feels people are attacking this campaign because it's from Supre. Despite having been around for nigh-on-half a decade, leggings-as-pants are only seen as 'tacky' when Supre sells them. More expensive labels have been selling jeans-cum-leggings or vice versa for years. But when they're sold cheap and to Tweens (both of which seem to be viewed as negative - the Pedestrian article even manages to include some Justin Bieber hating) they become, as the article puts it, "a new frontier in tackiness."
All of this amounts to hypocrisy posing as concern for teenagers, the very same people they then implicitly label as tasteless, either sexually naive (false) in which case they need to be protected, or too sexual, for which they're labelled as skanks.
This strikes me as either a severely misdirected envy or a simple forgetting (or glossing over) of your own adolescence. I think if people stopped and thought about that period; the acute feeling of inadequacy, the looming terror and magic of sex, the maelstrom of hormones and chemicals as your brain literally expands ten-fold and more, they'd stop being so damn cruel. And as for teenagers being tacky, take a look through your own photo album, I'm fairly sure you'll be suitably horrified. It's a right of passage.
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