pants and advertising
Tomorrow
a friend of one of our planners is coming in to show us some super luxe, silky
soft underpants over lunch. Check out burtonwode.com
for a teaser. In days gone by it was commonplace for shirt-sellers and tailors
alike to visit London’s offices and measure up gentleman for bespoke
clothing. This tradition has died with
all things ‘click and collect', but for tomorrow it’s back on.
It’s
also got me thinking about the evolution of underwear, and the evolution of
underwear advertising. There’s an incredible shift from underwear as something
practical and restrictive, to something provocative and subversive.
This
was underwear in the 1860s:
Yes,
you could wear the rigging of The Eden Project around your waist. Here was
underwear designed to hide your legs if enhance your waist. But by the turn of
the century under garments were rapidly changing for less bulk and greater
mobility.
The
changing styles are incredible culture markers of the time. During the 1920s when women were beginning to
push back against their all-things-feminine-and-floaty stereotypes underwear in
turn became boxy and androgynous.
This evolution was never stagnant. By the late 1940s advertising underwear was
really taking off. Interestingly, it was as much about the day’s celebrity pin-ups as in modern times. Marilyn Monroe started her career as an underwear
model. Then advertising imitated her when they couldn’t have her for
themselves.
Movie
stars put underwear firmly on the sexy map. Bras were no longer ‘over the
shoulder bolder holders’ but something seductive. No more was the evolution of
underwear something restricted to women’s clothing. Marlon Brando and James
Dean would make the white t-shirt, formerly something very much an undergarment
and unglamorous, into an outerwear torso teaser.
Unsurprisingly
it wasn’t long before underwear advertising became something controversial.
Wonderbra is a famous example of this. The huge OOH ads of Eva Herzigova bearing
her cleavage were blamed for stopping traffic and causing road accidents in
1994. You’d think things were pretty liberal by the 1990s but this was
considered a step too far. Likewise Kylie Minogue’s campaign for
Agent Provocateur was banned in 2001. [It shows her romping around on a
bucking bronco in nothing but Agent’s skimpy minis]. The public deemed it porn.
Yet
in 2009 Agent Provocateur got away with it with their Valentine’s campaign: ‘Love me tender…or else’,
even in raunchy viral video format. Why? Because this time the lace-clad
protagonist was empowered. Yes, she was still something to be looked at,
admired and everything else in this context…but she was the heroine not the
victim of the story. It was again
legitimised by the use of celebrity and maybe the fact that Agent’s at the top
of the premium scale. Miss Huntington- Whiteley takes her prisoner and she gets
her revenge.
Today
it’s a power game. Underwear adverts are aimed at women who want to feel more
confident in their products and to give men a taste of what they want but won’t
necessarily get…unless they buy it for their girlfriend.
[Thoughts from Planning
newbie Alexa]
