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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Muscle-bound models sporting "big butts" star in Nike's fall ad campaign. Can this real-women marketing craze be real?
Aug 18, 2005 | It was just a few weeks ago that the Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" ads featuring recognizably curvy women got plastered on the walls of major metropolitan bus and subway stations. Only days ago, the unexpected media storm about the campaign reached a late crescendo with an Op-Ed in the New York Times. And now, seemingly out of nowhere, come the Nike Big Butts and Thunder Thighs, protruding from the pages of fashion magazines as part of the company's "Just Do It" campaign for fall.
One of the most provocatively placed posteriors shows itself a few pages into the September issue of Glamour, whose cover blares "800 Sexy Looks for Every Size!" Flip through a couple of images of actress Jennifer Connelly (who comes in one size: twig) and there it is: a big old can, clad in taut full-coverage underwear. Next to the image curve 19 lines of ad-copy verse:
My butt is big
And round like the letter C
And ten thousand lunges
Have made it rounder
But not smaller
And that's just fine.
It's a space heater
For my side of the bed
It's my ambassador
To those who walk behind me
It's a border collie
That herds skinny women
Away from the best deals
At clothing sales.
My butt is big
And that's just fine
And those who might scorn it
Are invited to kiss it.
Just do it.
It has to be said: The ad kicks ass. Sure, it's a little grrrrrrl-y, but that's a small bone to pick with two pages of advertising in a big fall-fashion issue of a major women's magazine, where we're traditionally treated to photographs of kohl-eyed consumptives peddling pencil skirts.
While the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign is riddled with contradictions (the "real" women celebrating their "real curves" are "really selling" cellulite cream, a balm for an imaginary flaw), the Nike ads are harder to fault. They seem to be selling Nike, the brand, rather than specific products. At the bottom of each ad is a link to Nikewomen.com, a Web site where viewers are asked the question "What story does your body tell?" and then shown the ads for each of the company's six anatomically specific celebrations of self. There are photos of knees, shoulders, hips, thighs, butts and legs, each with badass, and sometimes head-scratching, doggerel alongside. Web visitors can then view and purchase products -- shorts and sports bras and shoes -- made for that body part.
Nike spokeswoman Caren Bell said that the idea was conceived internally and by Nike's ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy. It launched this week in print ads in women's magazines, as well as in digital online publications such as Seventeen.com and Style.com. The body-part models, said Bell, are not professionals, but plucked from gyms around the country. "It's not about the ideal; it's about what's real," she said, adding, "We recognize that you can be fit and not be a model; you can be athletic and not be sample size."
Perhaps the Dove campaign and its attendant coverage have warmed us up for this vogue, which, according to Wednesday's New York Times, also includes a Chicken of the Sea tuna fish ad in which a svelte woman lets her gut hang out in an empty elevator. But it's still arresting to open up InStyle and see a pair of bulging, fleshy legs, flatteringly photographed in black-and-white against a paint-splotchy background, next to the words, "I have thunder thighs."
It's especially breathtaking to see it amid the typical fall fashion ads. Besides Glamour and InStyle, this month's Nike campaign is running in Lucky, Marie Claire, Self and, surprisingly, that paean to emaciation Vogue. In each of the magazines, the Nike ads look downright subversive, nestled as they are between images of women with visible rib cages and exposed breasts, modeling thousand-dollar jackets and go-go boots. Neighboring pages carry pictures of languid amazon Uma Thurman caressing Louis Vuitton bags, while gaggles of anonymous babes who haven't seen sunlight -- or hairbrushes -- for weeks populate Marc Jacobs' pages. A Gap "favorite fits" campaign spotlights jeans "designed uniquely for your body" in "original," "curvy" and "straight" shapes (all of which look "skinny" in the photographs) but somehow fails to showcase "bloated" and "pear-shaped" fits.
But the most memorable -- and funny -- thing about the Nike ads isn't even the images, but the voice of the campaign, those little ditties that veer all over the map and often end up in crazy-land, beginning with those butt-as-border-collie and space-heater metaphors. But that's nothing. Booty appreciation is old hat since the J.Lo-ification of the American rear. It's a whole other ballgame to show pictures of sleek stems next to copy that reads "My legs were once two hairy sticks," but now "They are revered./ Envied for their strength/ Honored for their beauty/ Hairless for the most part ..." This is the United States. Women don't grow hair on their legs. Especially in fashion magazines. Granted, the legs in the Nike ad look like they have never been inhabited by so much as a follicle. But the phrase "hairy sticks," even in reference to little-girl calves, is not one we imagine being bandied about on Madison Avenue as a savvy way to refer to gams.
And what about the shoulders, which "some say ... are like a man's"? The verse continues, "I say, leave men out of it." There's a hips page that orgasmically asserts, "My hips return to puberty/ When I'm in dance class ... And I don't understand them/ And sometimes they/ Don't understand themselves./ When the music stops/ They're still charged/ Don't touch me/ Sparks will fly." And the topper, the smoothly scarred knees, described in the ad as "tomboys." "My mother worries/ I will never marry/ With knees like that./ But I know there's someone out there/ Who will say to me:/ I love you/ And I love your knees./ I want the four of us/ To grow old together."
Huh. Banged-up knees and spinsterhood: the long-ignored connection. What's going on there? In part, the "leave men out of it, my well-used body does not inhibit my desirability" vibe makes a brawny statement about female empowerment. "It is about independence and being proud of who you are," said Bell.
