Sorry to channel The Elephant Man there, but John Merrick’s infamous cry was the first thing I thought when encountering Wrangler’s new “We Are Animals” ad campaign.
These disturbing images, seemingly evoking discarded dead bodies, were created by French ad agency FFL Paris. Clearly their brief was to move the Wrangler brand away from folksy cowboy imagery and into the edgy territory already occupied by Diesel. It’s very tempting to join in justifiable criticisms that these ads are aestheticising violence against women: to decry the “deeply screwed up culture” behind the imagery and ask angrily if murder is the new black.
But as Trendhunter notes, the TV commercial puts the confronting print ads a little more in context. The models in the ad are meant to look like wild animals caught on film, and the jeans are meant to be their skins or pelts. Read the rest of this entry »
