This (above) is Lara Chapple. And this (below) is her account of what it's like to join W+K as a new recruit.

The giant playground.

Push through the looking glass, and
bang! You’ve jumped into Alice’s Wonderland. Welcome to the Wieden + Kennedy reception.

Bits and bobs and games and toys, all muck in with rows of home-made
self-portraits. These are the faces behind thumbed cats and butter. Walk in
stupid, Blender Man will keep an eye on the happy chaos.

Whirl down the spiral staircase
and you’re underground, plunging feet-first into creative juices. Observe
W+Kers bubbling over meetings; the toast gannets and coffee addicts. You are cordially invited to the Mad
Hatter’s Tea Party. Please, sip from dinky cups in puddled saucers, reach
from tiers of crumbling cookies. Let’s chew over status in a Pink room… meet
clients in the Oval… Now, criss-cross-across to the Cross room. Make sense? Good.

On with the show.

Back up those stairs – don’t trip
over the bicycles – and re-group in the library. Ssssh… Quiet around the books
and planners, please. Take a peek behind the velvet curtains…

Time’s up – you’re late for the
suits upstairs! Meet the fully-buttoned shirts, so-east-it-hurts Account bods. Hear
the harmonised frenzy of squeaky trainers and tapping keyboards, they tick off
to-do lists with a clickety-click. Now, up to the ice-cream van and crawl
inside the green padded cell. Enough bouncing off those walls on conference
calls, there’s work to do.

Rumours of a W+K penthouse
featuring a roof garden? Final stop! Pace up those stairs, sweep by the
multi-coloured cove, burst out into the November day, and you’re on cloud nine! But
London’s raining on the roof garden parade.

Back down to Earth.

Sit, desk, screen, tea.

The Giant Playground. It’s
stuffed with big, chattering toddlers, Cheshire cat grins, faces scrunched
behind laptops. They’re hopping and laughing between desks, whilst others are
settled in thought, brain held between headphones.

This is work. Busily we buzz in
the advertising hive, filling honeypots to spread over telly, sticking it to
billboards, it trickles through the web. This is the work.

Publishing legend James Brown has written a great piece in Sabotage Times about the new Southern Comfort campaign by our compadres at W+K New York. He cites the ad as the cultural spark for a new men's movement celebrating comfort in girth. I'll drink to that!

Not only is the new Southern Comfort commercial the best on television right now it also applies an aspect of feminism for barrel chested beer bellied sex gods.

So have you seen it yet? The advert some are the calling the best ever made? Certainly the funniest around right now. It was made by Weiden + Kennedy New York  for Southern Comfort and stars Mike from The Cuban Brothers but all of that is all by the by, it’s the resulting work we are focusing on right now.

A fat guy in the tight brown trunks, shoes, and shades trudging purposely down the beach. His bare naked bulk glistening in the sun. A man undisturbed by the beach life around him, ploughs through the sand, stylish, confident, sexy and packing hard fat beer belly and barrel chest. “I gotta be me” is the line sung by Odetta over and over again.

This is a man at ease with himself, bathing in the power of his own self confidence, he veers off camera and reappears immediately with a drink in his hand, and then continues on and out away from the camera, dropping his shoulder nonchalantly as some tanned beach babe slides by.

If you haven’t seen the ad then it’s here below, but if you want to track feedback just click Southern Comfort on Twitter and you’ll see a week’s worth of discovery and delight. “This must have been made by the Coen Brothers” reads one, “Pity it’s for Southern Comfort says another” and then there are endless superlatives “brilliant”, “hilarious” and repeatedly “genius”.

On Tuesday this week I was enthusing about it with three Sabotage types @deadbloke, @davelee1968, @profanityswan, and many other gentleman of Twitter who are unlikely  to ever trouble a size 30″ waistband again and it struck me that the reason we love it isn’t just because of star Mike Cuban’s majestic stroll but also because it’s not only how many of us are but also how we can be. It’s feminism for fat blokes, defying the preferred male body politic to show a man at ease with himself.

To this end I’ll claim The Comfort Man is probably the first ever Masculinist commercial. If Reebok’s superbly terrifying play on the big balloon in The Prisoner, ‘Belly’s Gonna Get Ya’ played on the fears of lardy guts with rolls of doughy stomach flesh The Comfort Man’s feminist play on a male physique, is positively Maculinist. This is about acceptance indeed pride in how you look.

For all the Men’s Health covers, the Beckham physiques, the Gosling shirt removal scenes there’s an army of men who just go ‘as if’ and know that for those guys it’s a job. There’s certainly constant commercial pressure to look a certain way, maybe not as much as women experience but it’s there all the same. Compare posh young metrosexual Hugo on I’m A Celebrity to the The Comfort Man and despite Hugo’s good looks and ambition The Comfort Man has more, he oozes experience. He’s saying if you’ve experienced life, you’ll probably be like this.

He’s driving a big Masculinist truck through the Gym To Stay Slim outlook. Staying classy doesn’t require gym work, you’ve either got that archetypal Gillette physique or you have to work at it, but Comfort man says ‘Fuck that. I’m big bad and proud and you love me as I am.”

The Comfort Man positions Fat Man as flash man, Romanesque in stature not profile, like a battleship crashing through the sea, a Chess castle controlling the flanks, it’s Jan Molby, Mel Sterland, Tony Soprano, Barry White. Who’s going to argue withe men who could tip a car over with one hump.

Why is he a heavyweight? Because he can afford to be? Size equals power. These are the messages. Why go twig when you can be the trunk?

This is not only a funny advert, an effective ad… but it strikes a new pose for men. This is the birth of Masculinism.