épater les bourgeois!

At Wieden + Kennedy we're all for a bit of relevant and appropriate provocation. But there's provocative and then there's...dumb. And in the latter category, I venture to suggest, is the new Alexander McQueen campaign advertising their autumn collection for the street-fighting urban warrior.

Now, I realise that these aren't grubby, oppressed, contemporary rioters. This is an image of chic, intellectual French rioters from the 1960s.

"Sacre bleu, Jean-Paul, but you cannot possibly wear those pantalons to man the barricades, they are so annee derniere."

But when I look at these pictures they make me think of  Basra. Or Belfast. Pas bon, hein?

Fashion toys with cheap shock tactics as a matter of course. There were the famous Benetton and poster FCUK campaigns. More recently there have been the Gucci beaver shot and even the very silly D&G 'knife' ads:

It's all daft and entertaining, like fashion itself. But this latest appropriation of 'shocking' imagery seems tasteless, irrelevant and unlikely to build any positive assocations for the brand. Of course, it's possible that I'm just so out of touch with youth rebellion that I should start reading the Daily Mail. But it's not as if McQueen's clothes are worn by teenagers, is it? Here's their own explanation of the campaign from www.m-c-q.com

"Galen, I'm worried by all this talk of a 'gorilla uprising'."

Clearly a lot of nonsense and a sign that if you're going to peddle flim-flam you should never make the mistake of 'explaining' it. Meanwhile, I intend to use the phrase 'feeling the force of anarchy on the left bank' in my next meeting with a client procurement department.

Comments

[radovan grežo]

DG went too far, but McQ seems fine with me. rebellion is one of the usual suspects in advertising and why not go retro and associate your clothes with the free thinking era of the 60s?

[neil christie]

Funny. it's the other way round for me. Because McQueen has co-opted real, reportage imagery, whereas D&G is just some strange men posing awkwardly in funny clothes.