louis vuitton fonzie

research & publishing department six-monthly publication – june 2013
Research
Report,
o
n 20.
Images in Question
Images in Question
Editorial
Today, the image is the centre of attention. But what exactly does this
extremely broad term cover: self-image, public image, art, advertising
images, image in the press? Here, we do not intend to attempt a synthetic approach, which in any case seems misleading. We want to avoid
generalisations and instead highlight a level of diversity that is a source
of wealth and interest through specific studies, some of which cover the
qualities of the image itself and others its use or the way it is received.
We would also like to point out what makes this issue of Mode de
recherche a little different. We asked a number of IFM graduates whose
dissertations were particularly remarkable and worthy of publication to
write an article based (or not) on part of their research. We would like
to thank them and all our contributors.
The research & publishing department
is supported by the Cercle IFM
that brings together the patrons of the
Institut Français de la Mode:
armand thiery, chanel, chloé international,
christian dior couture, disneyland paris,
fondation pierre bergé-yves saint laurent,
fondation d’entreprise hermès,
galeries lafayette, groupe etam, kenzo,
louis vuitton, l’oréal luxe, printemps,
vivarte, yves saint laurent.
Contents
These Images that Sometimes Watch Us…
Jean-Michel Bertrand
.4
Luxury Commercials under the Influence of the Cinema
Li-Jun Pek
. 12
Fashion, Television Series and the Wearability Equation
Benjamin Simmenauer
. 23
The Advertising Image: Total Language?
Vincent Guillot
. 35
These Images that
Sometimes Watch Us…
Jean-Michel Bertrand
“There is the visible and the invisible.
If you only film the visible,
then you’re making a TV movie”.
Jean-Luc Godard
We think we know everything about the image.
Not because we actually know anything about
it (meaning its properties, organisation, workings, and effects) but because, in addition
to the visible that literally hits the senses, it
is present in our daily lives to such an extent
that a number of observers or journalists have
thought it apt to dub our civilisation the “civilisation of the image”1. But today, what do we
mean when we talk about image in the singular? While the notion itself is polysemic, the
main use of the term has been spectacularly
shifted to designate, in a narrow and limiting
fashion, the advertising image and to a greater
extent the attributes and character traits of
influential individuals or those in a position
of power. Whether it means the President of
the Republic, a morally guilty minister on
the way out or a footballer selling his name,
polling organisations continually measure
and comment, thus building up or destroying
the images of public men and women, all of
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which is reproduced in the press using their
narrow, short-sighted spectacles. Image, when
measured according to the advantages it is supposed to provide becomes an exchangeable
piece of merchandise and constitutes a capital
that must be managed: “I want to develop my
image” is regularly heard loud and clear from
those who owe everything to the media and
the way in which news today has been transformed into a permanent show. But this is a
poor, or at least astonishingly limited definition of the term image, as it involves above all
pinpointing representations, descriptions or
distinctive traits that can be expressed in words
and adjectives (or in “numbers” which testifies
to the stranglehold of the neo-liberal model)
and feed not so much the imagination but the
disposition or the affects of the opinion.
The time is long gone when thinking on the
image involved phenomenology and its capacity for reflecting on the senses, the conditions
of visibility and the appearance, or a reflection on painting, or even through cinema and
Godardian aphorisms – “Pas une image juste,
juste une image” (Not the right image, just
an image), “Le cinéma, 24 fois la vérité par
seconde” (The cinema is the truth, 24 times
per second) – that aimed to qualify the act
of seeing, the viewer’s point of view, a link
between the ethical and the aesthetic (the
search for the right distance or, differently,
the moment: the obsession of all great photographers). The level of impoverishment in
thought and writing about images is in correlation with the construction of a subject who
is subject to or put in the position of end-user
or consumer faced with an image whose final
aim is to impress in order to sell. So the image
is only measured by its codified and vaguely
academic aesthetic and its capacity to sell or
make people believe in its importance which
is generally hugely overestimated.
In addition, in order to fully take on board
what makes the image powerful, it is useful
to broaden one’s field of vision in order to try
to grasp its essential role in the way our relationship to the world and our identity are built
and to thus get a handle on certain aspects of
the unconscious. We are convinced that many
of the studies carried out on advertising or the
reputations of public figures would be much
more relevant and consistent if they were not
limited to the recognition of certain effects and
above all, if they committed to a detailed comprehension of the relations we can have with
these images that, in their own way are watching us, put us on show or, in another way,
invade us, fascinate us and at times render us
indifferent or revolt us, as any form of waste
or mediocrity can revolt us.
Broadening the spectrum or the field of vision
would first of all enable us to grasp the image
in its triple reality and to reflect on what is
really going on in each of the dimensions and
meanings of the term. As the image is first of
all and essentially what I see when I see the
world, what my eye and then my brain form
as an image and the question will then be to
determine the nature and the consistence of
this perceptive and visual link between the
body and the world. The image is then, in the
more usual sense of the term, the re-production and the re-presentation of a figure or an
object and finally it is, in a more metaphorical
way, what my imagination or subconscious
makes of it.
A relationship to the world: the double
chiasmus
The image we have of the world seems to be a
neutral image, equal for all and capable of offering us an objective vision of the outside that
we live in as conscious, full and autonomous
subjects. But this evidence fades away under
the joint effect of knowledge, whether this be
the “scientific” knowledge of vision specialists
but also of that of phenomenonology which
questions the lived, even pre-reflexive relationship to the world that traditional science
is unable to comprehend2. Thus, the view
we have of the world is nothing like that of
a passive subject immersed in an objective
world that can be mapped according to the
principles of Euclidian geometry. The act of
looking does not just mobilise the sense of
sight or memory, but also, as Maurice MerleauPonty points out, that of touch. The world
seen is also a world touched by the look and
vision is not just optical, it is also “haptical”.
In other words, as many art theorists and of
course artists have underlined, to look is to
touch something, to envelop, to pay attention
to the world’s materials. This world can thus
be doubly touched by my body defined by its
mobility. What is important to underline and
that which makes Merleau-Ponty’s thinking
original and valuable is what the emphasis on
the reversibility of touch and look, the double
chiasmus seer/seen and toucher/touched gives
rise to, that is an “entre deux” between man
and the world that is metaphysical (of the
Being) in the literal sense. Concretely, man
is a seer, but this seer is also seen and visible
to another; he is apt to touch and be touched.
This reversibility (“My body shapes things
and things shape my body.”) designated by
the concept of the chiasmus3 underlines the
fact that there is interlacing between the experience of the world and the world, that is to
say that my inner, sensitive, intimate feeling
of the world penetrates the intelligible world
(which then ceases to be totally exterior) while
at the same time the outside world is in me.
The chiasmus enables us to think the inseparability (and the gap) between man and the
world and to found the concept of “flesh” to
designate this relationship of exchange and
contact. The flesh is more than the feeling of
stimuli. It testifies to the existence of a network
of sensations and perceptions that makes the
living felt. The flesh connects the body and the
world so that the body is the “ramification” of
the world and the world the “ramification” of
the body: one and the other continuing one in
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the other in a shared vibration. The flesh is the
invisible but sensitive and present fabric where
the experience of the world is constituted.
The phenomenological approach is obviously
in opposition with cartesiansim for which the
expanse or the space are above all a question
of geometry (from which springs the primacy
of drawing over painting) and the subject of
the look is a localised subject, with no girth or
active body. For the Cartesian subject, space
or a given object speak to knowledge provided by the mind or the understanding like
the illustrious example of a piece of wax mentioned in the second Méditation métaphysique:
“But what is this wax which is perceived by
the mind alone? It is of course the same wax
which I see, which I touch, which I picture in
my imagination, in short the same wax which
I thought it to be from the start. And yet, and
here is the point, the perception I have of it
is a case not of vision or touch or imagination - nor has it ever been, despite previous
appearances - but of purely mental scrutiny;
and this can be imperfect and confused, as it
was before, or clear and distinct as it is now,
depending on how carefully I concentrate
on what the wax consists in (…). I judge and
then I understand, and so something which
I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact
grasped solely by the faculty of judgement
which is in my mind”4.
The writer shores up his demonstration by outlining that the shape, smell, appearance and
image of the wax are all subject to modifications while the piece remains wax, whatever its
state. This permanence can only be conceptual
and comes from the nomination or the scientific knowledge of the matter itself: “It would
be necessary, through reasoning, to remove all
of the elements that are identical in the wax in
all states and in all pieces of wax”. Two opposing visions of the image and knowledge thus:
one discredits the activity of the senses, reducing the field of knowledge to that which is
“mathematicable” and searches for the essence
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under the misleading mask of appearance,
the other, without denying science its specific but circumscribed approach (“Science
manipulates things and refuses to inhabit
them”), emphasises, in a prolongation of the
Kantian approach, an interrogation of the
phenomenon surrounding and the conditions
of the apparition while all the while considering the experience lived is also, but in another
way, the subject and source of knowledge.
Painting and clairvoyance
The approach explored by Merleau-Ponty
results in giving the visible and sensible a thickness that harks back to the question of image
and more precisely that of painting. In fact,
if the world echoes in each one of us and if
the body can render this echo to the world,
painting and art are the privileged “means”
by which this restitution occurs in as much as
the painter is a clairvoyant. To see and above
all to watch the world. Contemplating, in the
silence that Cézanne required for example, is
not quite as simple or as frequent as we think.
On this point, phenomenology can easily fall
into line with Bergson who underlines the
essentially practical and functional nature of
our ordinary interaction with the world. When
we look at the world with the intention to act,
we opt for the selective intake of information,
so that the vision we have remains partial,
biased and inattentive. Thus, for example, the
climber who looks at the Sainte Victoire to
choose a path up the side will ignore the reflection of the colours and the way the light plays
or vibrates, the appearance of the cliff. His
attention will be mobilised in the search for
grips, checking for the dangers in the cliff-side.
While seeing means taking the time needed
to grasp the forces at work (painting a tree as
a living being, not a static object), to set up
camp in the heart of things, in the event of
the piece. Art, painting, teaches us to see by
opening us up to a world that was previously
inaccessible, as Paul Klee said so beautifully:
“art does not reproduce the visible, it makes
things visible”. But being a seer does not simply
mean seeing better or seeing more attentively.
The painter, in his work, testifies both to the
insertion of the sensitive body into the world
and the sensitive character of the world for
the body. In other words, as Merleau-Ponty
put it “seeing as things and my body are made
from the same fabric, its vision must be made
inside of them in some way”5.
This affirms a true means to grasp painting
and many critics, theorists and painters concur.
A grasp and a conception that is not without
certain consequences. The first being the relationship to the world, the second is linked to
the nature of the work and its representational
dimensions or in other words entirely to its
way of being present.
The first point has already been touched on
and concerns that which in painting speaks
to a propaedeutic of the eye which makes the
invisible the carnal depth of the visible. It is
in this way that images watch us while all the
while informing our vision. And how better to
express this idea than the Marcel Proust did in
La Recherche: “And from then onwards I felt
less admiration for Bergotte, whose limpidity
began to strike me as insufficient. There was a
time at which people recognised things quite
easily in pictures when it was Fromentin who
had painted them, and could not recognise
them at all when it was Renoir. People of taste
and refinement tell us nowadays that Renoir
is one of the great painters of the last century. But in so saying they forget the element
of Time, and that it took a great deal of time,
well into the present century, before Renoir
was hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in
gaining recognition, the original painter, the
original writer proceeds on the lines adopted
by oculists. The course of treatment they give
us by their painting or by their prose is not
always agreeable to us. When it is at an end the
operator says to us: “Now look!” And, lo and
behold, the world around us (which was not
created once and for all, but is created afresh
as often as an original artist is born) appears
to us entirely different from the; old world,
but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street,
different from what they used to be, because
they are Renoirs, those Renoir types which
we persistently refused to see as women. The
carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and
the sky: we feel tempted to go for a walk in the
forest which reminds us of that other which
when we first saw it looked like anything in
the world except a forest, like for instance a
tapestry of innumerable shades but lacking
precisely the shades proper to forests. Such is
the new and perishable universe which has
just been created”6.
Proust underlines the transitive dimension of
painting, even if he does give it pride of place
by inverting the terms of the relationship (here
the painting is not only an “image” of the
world) by making our world a world revealed
by the power of the painting. The world then
becomes “in the image of ”… which before
was not recognised as an image but as a shapeless work (“everything except a forest”)!
But one shouldn’t believe all the same that
a painting is, in the end, nothing but the
possible image of its subject and ignore this
strange truth: if the painting is so, it is because
it cannot be considered as an image or an
object. Even when it is a question of painting
a portrait and working on a resemblance – or
to attempt to achieve, as Francis Bacon proposes, resemblance without using the means
of resemblance – it is not the image that makes
the piece “hold” and gives it its artistic dimension. This is the essential difference between
the painted piece and the image or imagery
that enables, for example, to differentiate the
pictorial and the “picturesque”, this rhetoric of
landscape that enables us to access the show by
transforming the world into an image, albeit
composed, but above all recognised.
7
Of course the image sometimes delivers information but the art of the painter is not in the
imitation of the model. Even when a commission or genre imposes the “motif” or the
subject to be painted, the painting cannot be
reduced to a collection of signs that “codify”
the subject (pretty, pleasant, agreeable?)
aesthetically. As it is also made of shapes,
rhythms, blends of colours, lines, surfaces and
figures so that a painted hat or the roof of a
house are also in black and red: “He could only
grasp mysterious exchanges, that penetrate in
one another the shapes and tones, by a secret
continuous progression that is uninterrupted
by bangs or jumps…” says Élie Faure about
Vélasquez in a long written piece quoted in the
incipit of Pierrot le fou. What Velasquez paints
can offer an image that resembles, founded
on the analogy, but what is important to see
is that only this image, this part of the painting is the analogon of the subject. The image,
but not the pictorial matter that participates
in the event of the appearance7.
So we understand that the perception that the
painting supposes (that which knows the work
“in the specific gesture that founds it”) is radically distinct from the “natural” and above all
“image-ing” perception. What gives painting
and sculpture power is the capacity to grasp the
world in its appearance, that is to say, in the
gap between the one that is daily constituted
in our usage. Not because this “originating”
world is truer but because it is richer: rich in
the powers that run through it, the ambiguity
and multiplicity of the visible. Considering
painting as merely using coloured surfaces
that are only connected in order to “signify”
the subject or object represented would be to
miss the point entirely by omitting the power
of the look it supposes and demands.
That a painted work is not only an “image”
does not mean that it does not, one day,
become just that unfortunately. As, in the
era of technical “reproduction” on varied items
and in any format, the fate of works of art
8
is to end up as an image: stamps, chocolate
boxes, photographs, internet sites, circulate
reproductions that are evocative of a lifeless
visual gimmick to the extent that it can be hard
to look at a painting by Watteau or Vermeer
(worn out imagery), unless we are capable of
erasing the cliché caused by all the reproductions and losses.
Image efficiency
The semiological approach with its air of
formal science seems best adapted to the type
of image that takes part in generalised commerce and “monopolises” the attention, while
it fails to comprehend art and de facto reveals
its limits. Semiology postulates a universality of methods and “readings” that neglect
the materiality of painting, transforming the
painting into an object, aesthetics into a code,
shapes into signs and style into a “want to say”.
In fact, semiology can provide options when
it takes an interest in images that “communicate” and are organised to signify or sell
something, because it can also isolate and
identify commtable or interchangeable signs
whose combination defines the content or
the “concept” they are supposed to illustrate.
When the image is a message, its elements are
subordinated to a “want to say” that aims to
crystallise or produce admiration and belief.
And it is this famous “power of the image” that
explains its role in the forms of expression of
propaganda, whether religious, political and
now commercial “propaganda”.
In a book (drastically under-read these days)
entitled Voyage en Italie, Taine describes the
opposition between the Protestant culture,
the primacy given to “reasonable” reading
of the Book and the Catholicism of the postreformation era marked by Jesuit thought, the
power of sight and images that later on became
known as the baroque style: “but to take the
foot off one break, one must put the foot on
another. The Protestants built a dam against
the deregulation of half-unleashed instincts,
through the awakening of the conscience, the
call for reason, the development of ordered and
laborious action. The Jesuits looked for one
in the methodical and mechanical direction
of the imagination. Therein lies their genius;
they discovered an unknown and deep-rooted
layer in human nature that is used as a base
for all the others and that, once inclined, communicates its inclination to the rest so that,
from then on the slope chosen is used. Our
innermost selves are not filled with reason or
reasoning but images. The sensitive figures
of things, once transported into our brain
are therein ordered, repeated and deepened
with involuntary attachments and affinities;
then when we act, it is in the direction of and
through the impulsion of the powers thus produced, and our will comes out in its entirety,
like a visible growth from invisible sowing that
inner fermentation helped to germinate without our participation. Whosoever is master
of the dark cellar where the operation happens is master of men”8.
Taine underlines, describes, guesses the
power of images (churches, statues, paintings,
stuccos, decors), without always explicitly pointing out where they get this power. Amongst
the different factors that need to be pointed
out, we can list three: the link or proximity
between images and dreams (manifestation
of desire and the unconscious), the operation that consists of confusing the sign and
the thing and the spaces of identification and
the projections they enable.
In fact, images like dreams know nothing
of negation (how can you say in images “he
did not enter this room”?), nor for example
of the complexities of temporal modulations.
To the extent that images in their present,
do not express logical, deductive thought or
the principle of non-contradiction and seem
to be closer to the primary process that prolongs our monadic-fusional stage, and tends
toward hallucinatory satisfactions in the
quickest way possible9; one of its distinctive
traits is to limit itself to images that please
unconditionally and for themselves, without
searching out any type of reality further down
the line. The homology between the “language
of dreams”, the associative figures that preside
over their developments and series (condensation, displacement), and the rhetoric of the
image (metaphor, metonymy) was extensively
covered by Lacanian psychoanalysts and by
Daniel Bougnoux in La communication par
la bande.
This, the efficiency of images, due to their
nature, is obviously doubled by the quasi-animist process that affects us when faced with a
fixed image where someone seems to be speaking to us, for example, through a written text.
What all the qualitative tests and post tests
show is that the relationship is not felt to be
mediate and artificial. The reality of the set
up is denied and we have the feeling that the
character is speaking directly and effectively to
us. This idealising elision bears witness to the
disappearance of the distance between representatives and represented and the confusion
between the sign and the thing that is at the
basis of idolatry. Monotheistic religions are
confronted with this difficulty specific to the
regime and status of the image which led them
to ban religious imagery or, as Christianity did
during the Council of Nicea and then at Trente
– that in particular outlined the doctrine relative to belief and sacred representation – to
remind us of the need to distinguish God from
his image and to underline that the representative signs do not “contain” the represented
divinity. The image is presence but in absentia
and the religious re-presentation is both the
presentification of the absent and the autorepresentation “instituting the subject of the
sight in the emotions and the senses”10.
The third factor that merits our attention when
we are outlining the principles of effectiveness
of the image is that which links the imagination of the looker and the “world”, the image
9
being looked at. Decors, characters, actions,
context and relationships are the possible
means of identification. What is it about? A
feeling of proximity that abolishes the distance
or exaggerates it in the aim of “aesthetic” fascination. The trap set up by the advertising
image is to solicit a mechanism that constitutes the identity (all of the identifications
through which each person goes, notably when
younger) by overplaying an aesthetic singularity. And in this type of image, the “code”
is truly an autonomous code, an add-on, without any real connection to the subject as it
is that which is worst in the notion of style: a
certain virtuosity, an affectation, a collection
of gratuitous effects, that is to say unnecessary.
This gratuitousness helps the very commercial part of the message go down and enables
the “aesthetic” part to go beyond the simply
cosmetic, the “surface” or “made-up” side of
things with which it nevertheless has a certain affinity.
The image quarrel?
Advertising images or images that sell and
show are often criticised by people who make
images (film-makers, photographers) for the
same reasons that make them so effective
in their targeting. The reproach is that they
“show”, that is to say control the way they are
looked at and the interpretations they want
to produce, instead of just letting people see.
This difference is not just linked to the level
of generosity they display, or not, but to the
effect of “inauthenticity” that they create, the
link between ethical and aesthetic. In a very
long, raging and poetic text, the film-maker
Wim Wenders declared his enthusiasm for
the United States, synonymous with freedom,
cinema, rock and roll and wide open spaces.
And then, one day, “after having mistaken
New York for America” he switched on the TV
and claims to have “gotten to know America”
through hours of TV series, shot and reverse
10
angle, advertising and, according to Wenders,
vulgarity. What he outlines in these terms, that
can always be argued against, but represent his
feelings quite accurately is the lack of authenticity in the flux of images: “In the news, or what
they call the news, in the shows, in the series,
there wasn’t the slightest connection between
a humanly comprehensible and transmissible reality and the product that appeared on
the polished glass. All of the images, without
exception, were reduced to artifice and were so
calculating that I thought they corresponded
more to advertising and propaganda. Wenders’
American dream turned into a nightmare but
it was not just because Wenders felt trapped
by images that remove knowledge but because
these images that are closed in on their own
world propose fake, exaggerated, codified
and salacious representations of all feelings.
Worse: he could only come to the conclusion
that Americans express themselves by borrowing from these grimaces: they cry, laugh
and love according to the model proposed
by television’s uninterrupted flow of images.
As these images only ever work in networks,
in a system of connections that make sense,
to the point that they saturate and block all
imagination.
An attempt at a conclusion
These chains of images are more a question of
the individual and social unconscious rather
than the imagination. In one of his reflective
films, Ici et Ailleurs, Godard emphasises this
notion of a chain that harks back to editing
(to edit a film is to make a chain or to emphasise the improbable links there can be between
two images). Godard filmed Palestinian militants in 1970, came back to France and couldn’t
show the images and sounds according to
the schema he had planned. He showed
that this “revolutionary” schema would have
used and betrayed the images. So he began
to question them, to denounce the set ups
they came from, the references they displayed
(declaiming, revolutionary theatre, emphasis).
Contradictions appeared when the lyrical or
propaganda-based images, the “conforming
visuals” found themselves confronted with
a terrible reverse angle: the silent image of
dead bodies: “all of the actors in the film are
dead” he pointed out. In his clairvoyant lucidity, Godard defeats the logic of ready-made
formulae and announces his point of view:
“…A vague and complicated system, the whole
world, however… Any image can be part of
the complicated and vague system where the
whole world comes in and out every instant…
The whole world, is that too much for one
image? No, it is not too much answers international capitalism that has built its fortune on
this truth: “there are no more simple images,
only simple people that are obliged to remain
simple, like an image!” This is how each of us
become too numerous inside ourselves and not
enough outside where we have been replaced
by uninterrupted chains of images, enslaved to
one another, each in their place, just as each of
us is in his or her place in the chain of events
over which we have lost all control”.
Obviously, these words are pronounced in
tandem with images and sounds that echo
what they are saying or contradict them and
constantly push meanings that inform a
concept of the world. What images? What
sounds? But this type of sound and image
cannot be told. So, can watch and learn to
see, if only to find one’s place and the correct distance (the one that lets one play, or get
back some of the control?) in the representative system of images that is trying to inform
our relationship to the world.
It is also important to point this out: the link
between our creative or reproductive imagination and the way we act or think. Talking
about chains of images, beyond the polemical
charge, is like insisting on images (including
those that come from phrases or clichés) as
an unquestioning collection of systems of
representation, content, thought (or opinions!),
convictions, or beliefs. The distance is never
huge between images that pretend to make
sense of the world and the individual and
institutional unconscious that is sometimes
referred to as an ideology, an ideology whose
strength is to render itself invisible among
overly obvious images.
Jean-Michel Bertrand
Associate Lecturer, IFM
1. Do I need to point out that this journalistic cliché
is a weak shortcut and is no more than a testimony
to the abundance of images? It has nothing in common thus with Heidegger’s presentation on modernity in his essay Die Zeit des Weltbides. Heidegger
proposes an interpretation of the ontological status
of images in modernity that he describes as being
characterised by a double movement through which
man becomes the subject as the world becomes an
image, in as much as it is given to the subject of the
representation.
2. It is interesting to note that two of the big philosophy renewal projects of the 20th century (Husserl
and Bergson) shared a preoccupation with the need
to fill the hiatus between firstly the conscience and its
images and secondly the world and its “things”.
3. The chiasmus is a literary concept. It is a figure
of speech that criss-crosses terms or syntagems. For
example: « Et rose elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses »
(Malherbe). “I had a teacher I liked who used to say
good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and
disturb the comfortable”. (David Foster Wallace)
4. Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques, seconde méditation (1641), Hatier, p. 37-39, § 13-14.
5. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, L’œil et l’esprit, Folio
Essais, p. 21.
6. Proust, Marcel, Du côté de Guermantes, t. 3, Paris,
Gallimard.
7. Cf. Maldiney Henri, chap. « L’efficace du vide dans
l’art », Art et existence, Paris, Klincksieck, 2003.
8. Taine, Hippolyte, Voyage en Italie, t. 2, p. 252 et 253,
Le regard littéraire, Paris, Ed. Complexe, 1990.
9. Bougnoux, Daniel, La communication par la bande,
Paris, La Découverte, 1998.
10. Marin, Louis, Des pouvoirs de l'image, Gloses,
Paris, Seuil, 1993, p. 14.
11
Luxury Commercials
under the Influence
of the Cinema
Li-Jun Pek
The luxury commercial has evolved.
Advertising has been approaching the cinema,
either by increasingly taking on the form of
a film with a more complex narrative structure and less direct camera techniques and
effects, or in some cases, through references
to prominent figures and works in the field.
This article explores the rising phenomenon
of luxury-cinema, with a focus on the following three aspects. Firstly, the nature of
luxury as well as factors in the present day
climate pushing the luxury commercial to
evolve in this direction is evaluated. Next, the
concept of the cinema is scrutinized, exploring
its compatibility with commercials from the
perspective of cinema lovers. Finally, four commercials influenced by the cinema in various
forms are analyzed in terms of the strength
of their storytelling, and the effects of their
rapprochement to the cinema, culminating in
an evaluation of the success factors for luxury
commercials’ move towards this modern art
form.
The rising phenomenon of
cinema-advertising
Cinema and advertising have never been fully
separate entities. Film star brand ambassadors,
product placement, film directors doubling
up as directors of commercials… these all
have been frequent, historical interactions
between the two worlds. However, 2001 can
12
be considered as the start of an advertising
revolution1 marking the sharp augmentation
of brands’ collaborations with film directors
and the evolution of the commercial. That
year, the high-end car company BMW brought
the term “branded content” (or “advertainment”) into the spotlight with the release of
a series of eight short films on the Internet
over two years, each produced by a different
world famous director (Ang Lee, Tony Scott,
Wong Kar-wai, Guy Ritchie, etc.), and all of
them integrating the luxury German car into
the narration as an indispensable element,
without specifically calling attention to it.
“Branded content” can be defined as “a relatively new form of advertising medium that
blurs conventional distinctions between what
constitutes advertising and what constitutes
entertainment”2. While this concept has been
applied to a wide variety of evolved, interactive
mediums, its influence on the commercial specifically has intensified and metamorphosed
the collaboration between film directors and
brands, and more generally, the presence
of the cinema in advertising. The cinema’s
influence in advertising can manifest itself
in various forms. There is the commercial
that re-creates or imitates a scene in a movie
(such as Chanel’s Le Rouge directed by Bettina
Rheims), the commercial that makes references to one or various films (Chanel’s Bleu
de Chanel directed by Martin Scorsese), the
commercial inspired by and trying to reproduce the style of a famous director (Dior’s The
Lady Noire Affair by Olivier Dahan), and the
commercial directed by a famous cineaste who
reproduces his own style (BMW’s The Follow
by Wong Kar-wai), to name some commonly
observed trends.
The extent to which lines have been blurred
between cinema and the commercial is
strongly illustrated by the début of Wong
Kar-wai’s episode for BMW “The Follow”
at the Cannes Festival in 2001. The multiplication of such “film-commercials” has
taken on such a momentum that the category
“Branded Content and Entertainment” was
actually added to the same renown film festival in 2012, and one notices a multiplication
of journalistic inquiries into the rising phenomenon of cinema-advertising mélange. It
is important to note that the cinematic commercials mostly have artistic aspirations: the
directors chosen are often highly acclaimed
and/or award-winning, imitations or references are usually made to “classic”, respected
or cult films or film-makers.
The “why” in luxury film-commercials
These film-commercials are particularly prominent in the advertising of luxury brands,
due to the intrinsic and evolving nature of
luxury, interacting with several overlapping
worldwide developments that have acted as
catalysts in this advertising revolution.
The definition of luxury, which according
to Michel Chevalier and Gérald Mazzalovo
in their book Luxury Brand Management,
used to be “selective and exclusive… almost
the only brand in its category, giving it the
desirable attributes of being scarce, sophisticated and in good taste”. However, as Mark
Tungate explains in Luxury World: the past,
present and future of luxury brands, “when established luxury brands fell into the hands of
giant corporations with profit-hungry shareholders, this courtship of the mass market
accelerated and intensified” with the use of
entry-price products, the democratization of
luxury let “commoners” enjoy the treatment
and status of the “aristocracy”. The journalist Dana Thomas in her book Deluxe: how
luxury lost its luster criticizes this evolution of
luxury, stating that “in order to make luxury
‘accessible’, tycoons have stripped away all
that has made it special”. Finally, again in the
book Luxury Brand Management, we find an
updated definition of luxury, which can serve
as a general, moderated consensus – while the
aspect of scarcity and rarity in luxury has diminished considerably, luxury still provides an
essential “additional creative and emotional
value for the consumer”.
This explains the intrinsic need for storytelling on the part of a luxury brand, which
uses images and narrations, as well as public
buzz and opinions strategically as the building blocks of its “brand capital” and justifies
the exorbitant efforts towards conventional
and evolved advertising. As summed up in
a journalistic exploration of this rising phenomenon, “en faisant appel à des réalisateurs
stars, les marques de luxe cherchent à s’approprier un territoire chargé d’imaginaire”, “sans
parler du ‘buzz’ et du ‘rédactionnel’ qui va
s’ensuivre”3. Furthermore, and very importantly, the desired artistry present in these
film-commercials (also seen in advertising
posters inspired by classic paintings) elevates
the luxury brand culturally, portraying it as
surpassing the purely commercial/capitalistic
domain. The material desire for a product is
often a manifestation of the consumer’s desire
to buy a membership into the realm of the
brand, hence it is necessary that the consumer
enjoys an emotional connection with what the
brand symbolizes; what is cinema, if not the
art of storytelling and of forming emotional
connections through images?
Aside from the luxury brand’s inherent need
for storytelling and hence natural inclination
towards modified forms of advertising, there
are also cultural/social and economic developments that have amplified this need. The
democratization of the Internet with its multiple and diverse sources of free information
and entertainment on-demand has emancipated the consumer, gifting her with an
ever-stronger autonomy, rendering her “more
active, selective and critical”4. She is hence
more immune towards, and even bored of,
“classic” commercials, pushing advertising
agencies and brands to invent new forms of
communication, namely “the most effective
13
advertising” which “tends not to look like
adverts”5, among which lies that which is
art-inspired. The on-going financial crisis
has exacerbated this “cynicism”: consumers
turned away from flashiness and the hit of
the moment, demanding greater value, elegance, quality, and emotion, as reported in
the Journal de Textile in 2011. According to
Natacha Dzikowski, director and founder of
Luxury Arts, TBWA Paris interviewed in 2010,
in explaining how the crisis has affected luxury
consumer –“Plus que jamais, nous avons faim
d’histoires”. The transformation of the commercial in branded content (what the luxury
brands would like to call cinema) provides a
purer form of this storytelling, and corresponds
with the desire for elegance and emotion. The
crisis has also further amplified the importance of the emerging countries as markets
for the luxury industry. China, the second
largest luxury market is predicted by Bain &
Co. to be number one in two years. The cinematic commercial provides a means of making
strong connections with certain countries:
it is not by chance that Dior commissioned
Lady Blue Shanghai from David Lynch, or
that Cartier’s L’Odyssée traverses the BRIC
minus Brazil. Finally, in a present day market
where “luxury brand codes are increasingly
copied and duplicated by low-mid range chain
stores (with Zara next to Van Cleef & Arpels
on Fifth Avenue in New York)”, luxury brands
can combat this by offering something “different, more virtual and mythical than what
is done by the Spanish store, whose boutique
aesthetic which is carefully constructed and
impeccable confuses the codes that separate
luxury from mass products”6.
Finally, the Internet, besides being an impetus
for this advertising (r)evolution as mentioned
earlier, also permits luxury brands to fulfill
this increasingly important need for storytelling by providing a means for them to
showcase the film-commercials, removing the
time guillotine that cuts the lengths of classic
14
TV commercials. Film-commercials running
six minutes have the time to develop a story
in a language far more profound and paced
than the impatient advertising visual lingo.
Furthermore, the credibility and effects of a
commercial are heavily augmented when it is
the internet user who chooses to be a viewer,
and shares it with the people he knows, as
opposed to being forced to endure it on the
television. This changes the relationship of
the brand with the viewer. With 1.7 billion
people with computers in 2010 (and continuing
to rise sharply) according to the Blackstone
Group, the effects are far-reaching and the
costs divided manifold. However, it is important to note that not all the advertisements
jumping on the cinema bandwagon are limited
to the medium of the Internet; the TV commercials have also been influenced, and will
similarly be examined in this article later.
Is advertising compatible with cinema
as an art form?
Looking at this contemporary alliance from
the perspective of great cineastes and critics,
the inevitable conclusion drawn is that the
two realms, despite their technical and visual
similarities, can never truly intersect, due to
fundamental ideological differences.
For André Bazin, renowned film critic, this
modern art was “part of his passion for culture,
for the truth”7. This quest for “the truth”
manifests itself in varied nuances among those
who have committed their lives to seeking
it out, inevitably converging in the endless
journey towards knowledge and understanding of humanity. It is perhaps Wim Wenders’
response to the question “why do you make
films?” in his book The Logic of Images that
best explains this notion of truth; the German
cineaste quotes Béla Balázs, film critic and
writer: “He talks about the ability (and the
responsibility) of cinema ‘to show things as
they are’”8.
Cinema as “an art of showing”9 encapsulates the
myriad complexities associated with this art
form – a composition of visuals that have to be
“read” and messages waiting to be “decoded”10.
The spectator is required to play an active,
effort-filled part in this: “showing” is “a gesture that demands looking and watching”11.
On the part of the cineaste, “showing” implies
a direct connection with the truth: it is neither
invention nor glorification, it is taking the eye
of the spectator and pointing it in a certain
direction, towards real, immutable, emotions,
lives, thoughts. Showing, permits the cinema
to form what Daney describes beautifully as
“the promise of a counter society, a counter
society within society, which believes itself to
be superior, which holds society in contempt,
which denies society and thinks of itself as
the carrier of what society doesn’t recognize
or fights against, with this idea that one day,
later on, always later, we will see what we will
see”12. Showing, is also the act of overturning
finely-woven silk carpets to uncover, reveal,
expose, all that is miserable and ugly that the
society – the unthinking majority or those in
power – have tried to dissimulate.
It is resoundingly clear that this vision of the
cinema by men who have all played a part in
shaping its history, and some who continue
to mold its present, cannot be reconciled with
advertising commercials. The idea that commercials under the influence of cinema become
more than commercials, transforming beyond
even branded content into films, seems absurd
given the unyielding, diametrically opposed
worlds occupied by these two medias representative of two ideologies as viewed by Daney
and Wenders. For Daney, images which are on
“the side of promotion and advertising, which
is to say the side of power… are no longer on
the side of the dialectical truth of ‘seeing’ and
‘showing”’13. The world with “images among
others on the market of brand images… is precisely the world ‘without cinema’”14. Wenders
distinguishes cinema as “art” that “tells stories
to the public”, whereas the “industry wants
to make its profits from the storytelling”15.
In his dichotomy, advertising comes under
the umbrella group of “industry” which also
targets big budget Hollywood movies for
compromising what is real, “only telling the
affirmative type of story”16.
Analyzing the art of storytelling and
cinematic inspirations through four examples
While the juxtaposition of the respective ideologies belonging to advertising and cinema
may be clear and their disparities unbridgeable, a more concrete, constructive and
optimistic perspective of this “marriage” can
be obtained through the analysis of varied
luxury commercials influenced by the cinema.
Although the press and luxury brands often
indiscriminately proclaim all these commercials as artistic works that pay homage to
certain directors or films, there are, in my
opinion, story-telling, cinematographic successes like Bleu de Chanel and The Follow,
that sharply contrast incoherent attempts
at easy “cultural capital boosts” such as Le
Rouge or The Lady Noire Affair. Comparing
the commercials in the two camps permits
the derivation of certain conditions judged
essential to the successful cinematic evolution of advertising.
The TV commercial Bleu de Chanel tells the
story of Hector, a young recently successful
actor who rejects the expectations and lifestyle that come with this celebrity. While at a
press conference, Hector’s mind wanders back
to the past towards his old loves, Sophie and
Theodora, in flashbacks. He is brought back
to the present by a question asked by someone
in the audience – it turns out to be his first
love Sophie asking the question, and this acts
as a catalyst that helps him decide to walk
away from everything in his life, in a quest
for freedom. Bleu de Chanel makes references
to the films Nottinghill, directed by Roger
15
Michell, and the cult classic Blow Up, directed
by Michelangelo Antonioni. In Nottinghill,
famous actress Anna Scott meets and falls in
love with everyman William Thacker, ultimately deciding to spend the rest of her life
with him despite the disparity of their worlds.
Bleu de Chanel refers to the scene of the press
conference in Nottinghill where William, after
having refused to be in a relationship with
Anna, regrets his decision and makes a public
apology in an effort to win her back. In Blow
Up, Thomas is a famous fashion photographer who is disillusioned with the superficial
and decadent life that he leads, and harbors
the dream of becoming a “serious” journalistic photographer. Bleu de Chanel makes
a reference to the well-known scene at the
beginning of Blow Up where Thomas takes
photos of Verushka, a famous model, putting
Hector in the place of Thomas, and Sophie
in the place of Verushka.
The reference to Nottinghill, while evident,
does not appear particularly meaningful.
Although Anna Scott and Hector are in largely parallel positions, they end up making
gender-stereotypically diverging choices – the
woman prioritizing love and a family, and the
man putting his liberty above all else. The
rapprochement between Thomas and Hector
is more interesting and coherent, both being
young, conventionally successful male protagonists who are fundamentally dissatisfied
with their lives and on a quest to find greater
meaning. Ultimately, however, while there is
no dissonance between the commercial and its
references, the commercial’s strengths lie in
Scorsese’s personal talent, and are not parasites of what has been borrowed from other
films, despite the cultural capital intrinsic to
Blow Up.
Watching Bleu de Chanel for the first time is
a very confusing experience due to its narrative density – a large number of scenes are
compressed in a minute, sometimes changing by the millisecond, and there are abrupt
16
chronological jumps in the story as a result of
the flashbacks, in particular the system of the
flashback within the flashback. Scorsese does
not aim for easy comprehension. Instead, he
creates a false impression of time, especially
with regards to Sophie’s and Hector’s relationship – the viewer feels privy to years in
the couple’s lives, in just a few seconds. There
is also a praise-worthy visual richness in the
variation of colors, textures, rhythm and the
utilization of pictorial metaphors. The atmosphere, packed with suspense and excitement, is
amplified by the blue toned ambient lighting.
The unnaturalness of the blue-toned lighting
takes the commercial out of the drudgery of
realism, instantly establishing exoticness in the
physical set-up of the commercial to accompany the idealized, romantic vision of the
protagonist, while constantly reminding the
viewer of the name of the perfume, Bleu de
Chanel. The different women Hector loved,
brunette Theodora and blonde Sophie, are juxtaposed by distinctive mini-universes: the first
cold, elegant and unwelcoming with static,
formally composed shots, the latter blurred,
varied, colorful, warm, with hand-held camera
shots. This vibrant ambiance culminates in
the exhibition of Hector’s strength as a man,
literally represented by the collapsing of the
press conference’s walls, and his choice to walk
into the darkness – he chooses the realm of
limitless possibilities above the multitude of
material and sexual pleasures we have witnessed earlier.
Le Rouge, in blatant opposition, is a commercial that relies entirely on a superficial,
physical imitation of a modern cultural classic
Le Mépris, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, to
mask its lack of inspiration. This 30 second
TV spot advertising a Chanel Allure lipstick
features model Julie Ordon naked, teasingly
posed on a white bed, with a voice-off (presumably Ordon’s) asking an anonymous male
figure who holds and manipulates a lipstick
in his hand, extending and retracting it, if he
loves her lips. The man does not reply and the
commercial ends with her taking the lipstick
from him and applying it on her lips. This is a
recreation of a famous early scene in Le Mépris
where Camille, played by Brigitte Bardot, asks
her husband Paul a series of repetitive questions – if he loves each part of her body (feet,
thighs, breasts, etc.) one by one, to which he
responds yes each time, leading her to conclude
that he loves her “completely”.
That Chanel would use this masterpiece by a
director whose name is monumental in French
(and International) artistic cinema is understandable, in terms of the artistic and cultural
capital gained. Furthermore, Julie Ordon
gains an instant association with beauty and
sex symbol Brigitte Bardot, which is bestowed
onto the product. However, although the commercial has been referred to by both the press
and the director as a tribute to Godard, the
dissonance between it and the film can only
be described as tragic.
The choice of the commercial to reproduce
this scene is questionable: the scene is separate
from the rest of the film, created to satisfy the
American producer’s insistence on the exhibition of Brigitte Bardot’s body. The isolation of
the scene is conveyed through the disconcerting, unnatural switches in ambient lighting
inconsistent to the narrative. Bardot’s series of
questions reduce the individual to a series of
body parts, objectifying the body in the style
of pornography that often isolates images of
sexual body parts. However, during the scene
and the series of questions, the camera rests
primarily on Bardot as a whole. This, together with her conclusion at the end (“so you
love me completely”), can be seen as a rejection or a mockery on the part of Godard to
this objectification of the body. In the commercial, the ambient lighting is constructed to give
the impression of natural daylight, effacing
Godard’s intentions to establish an isolation
of this particular scene. Ordon asks only one
question in the style of Bardot, whether the
man loves her lips, establishing the isolation
of a body part, and an objectification of the
body, without any counter-attacks. The commercial’s incomplete extractions of elements
from the film results in a very literal, vulgar
reprisal of the scene Godard meant to be an
ironic critique of his American producers and
the general public’s demands.
If we disregard the commercial’s botched
appropriation of the film, all that is “original’ to the commercial is an overt sexuality
that verges on, and crosses over into crudeness: the phallic shape of the lipstick, and the
manner that it is called to attention as the man
holds it in his hand, clicking and un-clicking;
Ordon’s silent pin-up girl posing in bed. There
is neither narrative nor visual inventiveness –
without the forced association with Godard,
the commercial is simply uninteresting.
Despite their cinematic influences, Bleu
de Chanel and especially Le Rouge, are still
anchored to traditional advertising with classic
time limits and product presentations at the
end of the commercials. The Follow and The
Lady Noire Affair are both internet “film-commercials” around six minutes long, each an
“episode” in the non-linear collection created
by different famous directors. The analysis and
comparison of these two structurally similar,
yet fundamentally diverging works, give us a
more insightful understanding of how luxury
commercials can both move more faithfully
towards the cinema in the case of the former,
and conversely, in the case of the latter, make
a sham of this contemporary art form.
In The Follow, as in all the short films of this
series, Clive Owen plays The Driver, someone
who is hired to accomplish a mission in his
BMW. In this particular story, The Driver is
hired by the nervous manager of a film star,
The Husband, who suspects that his wife is
cheating on him. The Driver’s task is to trail
The Wife and report back on her activities.
The Driver accepts the job reluctantly, and
follows her in her daily life all the way to the
17
airport where she has bought a ticket to return
to Brazil to see her mother. He discovers that
she is bruised, and makes the conclusion that
it is The Husband who has physically abused
her. He leaves and later returns his payment
to the manager, claiming to have lost track
of The Wife.
Notwithstanding the commissioned nature of
The Follow, this short film is still identifiable
and true to the world-famous Hong Kong
director in terms of its themes and style, to
the extent that it has been recognized as “a
miniature Wong Kar-wai film in all aspects”17
by film historian Stephen Teo.
Isolation and loneliness, one of Wong’s principal recurrent themes, structures The Follow
like a skeleton, constructed by the film’s
estranged characters and motifs, both cinematic and visual, of solitude. The Driver is a
solitary, mysterious figure who works alone.
The only romantic relationship directly portrayed in the short film is one that is overtly
dysfunctional, between an abusive, jealous
husband and his suffering, victim of a wife.
Aside from these plot elements, one of Wong’s
classic stylistic devices which signal characters’
alienations from one another, the voiceover
monologue, is used frequently by The Driver.
These monologues have been used to great
effect in many of Wong’s other films, such as
in Fallen Angels where one of the protagonists
Ho is mute and his voice is only heard in these
voiceovers where he communicates his motivations and sentiments. Wong also enriches
this theme of solitude through the use of two
motifs. The first is completely visual, that
of a solitary moon suspended in a black sky,
repeated in long fixed shots, reminding us of
the “one” in alone – the driver’s way of being
kind to The Wife is giving her her liberty,
by taking his leave, so that her husband will
no longer be able to find her. This image of
the solitary moon is visually recalled at the
end when The Driver has refused to continue
the mission and drives off alone, through the
18
reflection of tunnel lights on the windshield
of his car, forming a single white round spot
that moves out of view and is soon replaced
by another identical reflection.
The second motif, this time cinematic literary-style, is that of the road. Wong uses the
basic, enforced plot to enhance the theme of
isolation and loneliness: the film begins and
ends when The Driver is in a car, portraying
him as a roaming spirit with no attachments
or anchors. Much of the film also takes place
on different sorts of roads: the highway, streets
in the city, winding roads by the sea. When
the scene does not take place on the road,
it takes place at temporary locations, either
physically or metaphorically speaking, such
as the airport.
Two other favorite themes of Wong’s – the
eternal impossibility of love, and time – are
echoed in The Follow, and finally tie back
to the theme of loneliness. There are strong
romantic overtones between The Driver and
The Wife, despite the fact that she never ends
up knowing him. The Wife is portrayed very
picturesquely by the camera – the opening
shots takes her out of focus from the back
in a flowing white dress in front of an open
sky. The theme song “Unicornio Azul” (Blue
Unicorn), a sentimental, wistful Spanish song
is played loudly during the scenes where The
Driver is following The Wife, and the ambient
sound is either muted or dimmed, creating a
dreamlike atmosphere that one identifies instinctively with romance. The impossibility of
a relationship or a rapprochement of the two
is consistently visually manifested. Awkward
camera angles are chosen to obscure the view
of The Wife when The Driver is following
her – symbolic of the inherent barrier (The
Husband) between them. It is also important to note the natural, organic, beautifying,
alchemizing effect that The Wife has on The
Driver’s otherwise sterile, cold life, manifested
visually through the warm lighting and sepia
or natural coloring of the scenes when he is
following her, that contrasts the faded, green,
artificial lighting the film ends with when he
drives off alone.
Aside from these distinctive, principal themes
and the stylistic devices employed to illustrate
them, Wong’s films are also fundamentally
anti-Hollywoodian in the subtlety of their narrative development, belonging to the realm of
art films. Great importance is given to looks
and gestures as opposed to direct disclosure,
and events are often accompanied by no additional verbal explanations. Wong remains
faithful to his style of discretion even in this
commissioned “film” – no direct reference is
ever made to the turning point of the narration, where The Driver discovers The Wife’s
bruised eye, which takes place without any
dialogue and uses revelatory shots that invite
the viewer to piece the story together, and infer
the Driver’s conclusion that The Husband
is abusive.
The Lady Noire Affair tries to emulate the success of The Follow with a similar structure, and
an equally stellar director and cast, but falls far
behind. Marion Cotillard plays Lady Noire,
a mysterious, elegant, brunette woman on a
mission to save “James”, who is held captive
alone in a room in the Eiffel tower. “James”
is connected to a “big boss” figure in a luxurious apartment running some operation that
apparently does not go as planned. The air is
thick with a conspiracy theory: Lady Noire
is detained by the police with a bag check in
some sort of hotel, when she is impatiently in
search for “James”; someone whose identity is
unknown is dismantling the lock of the door
to where James is held captive. Her Lady Dior
bag is removed. Lady Noire retrieves her (or
another similar) bag at the concierge with a
number conveying some message/information
from or about “James”. She runs to the Eiffel
tower and takes the lift up. Dangerous men
in black coats with guns arrive and start running up the stairs of the Eiffel tower. Gunshots
are heard. When the lift stops, Lady Noire
climbs onto a beam of the tower to avoid being
detected. A helicopter arrives to her aid. She
opens the locked door to the room where James
is held, transformed by a change of hairstyle,
make up and dress.
This extremely confusing story scripted by
fashion bloggers is officially communicated by
Dior as a film noir tribute to Alfred Hitchcock,
renowned for the direction of mystery/crime/
horror thrillers, certain of which have become
cult classics, such as Psycho and The Birds.
There are also several references to Hitchcock’s
well-known mystery thriller Vertigo, in which
a retired policeman Scottie unknowingly
abets an old schoolmate’s murder of his wife
Madeleine. The music in the film-commercial primarily made up of strings instruments
and composed by Guillaume Roussel, recalls
the opening and recurring strings music in
Vertigo by Bernard Hermann as it is repetitive, haunting, very suspenseful and fatalistic.
The recurring zoomed image of an eye or eyes,
during the credits and at a moment in the
film-commercial, is a close replica to certain
shots in the movie. Finally, the transformation of Lady Noire from brunette and elegant
to blond and showy at the end, recalls a key
element in Vertigo’s plot, the dual identity of
“Madeleine”, who is actually played by an
actress called Judy.
Aside from the references to Vertigo, Lady
Noire touches on a few of some of Hitchcock’s
pet themes, namely that of moral ambiguity,
fear/paranoia, and role-playing. In Lady Noire,
all the characters appear suspicious, even the
policemen, due to their overtly mysterious,
inexplicable actions. The confusion in the
moral alignments of the characters creates
the heavy paranoid atmosphere of a conspiracy theory, sustained by Lady Noire’s fear.
These themes are also reinforced by some of
Hitchcock’s stylistic devices. For example, the
slight disparity between the visual and the
audio, manifested in the oppressively loud,
foreboding, and very dramatic music from
19
the opening song even during scenes where
nothing technically exciting/dangerous was
occurring. The troubled atmosphere is also
created through the alignment of the weather
– the stormy grey threatening skies as Lady
Noir runs towards the Eiffel tower – with
Lady Noire’s anxiety and fear. The chiaroscuro
lighting, and the repeated superposition of the
Eiffel tower’s menacing lattice of iron on Lady
Noire’s face as she gets closer communicate
her single-minded distress. Utilizing the weather, the lighting and “special” montage effects
are all techniques of German expressionist
cinema, which influenced Hitchcock’s work
such as in Rebecca or The Wrong Man.
Yet despite these similarities, comparing the
advertisement to Hitchcock’s works is like
comparing an accomplished parrot’s speech
to a human’s – the parrot might use some of
the same words but its words ring empty. For a
luxury brand like Dior, the advertisement has
strict objectives and limitations; certain themes
are taboo, such as violence and death. The
viewer has the impression that there are no real
consequences to its plot. Lady Noire is never
in any danger – be it of failing her “mission”
or of suffering personal injuries. For example,
when Lady Noire is at the Eiffel Tower, supposedly the scene of great “suspense”, there are
gunshots, but Lady Noire is safely in the elevator away from the gunmen on the stairs and
no one else is hit. In Hitchcock films, people
often die in dangerous moments, sometimes
very brutally or unexpectedly, or even if they
finally end up surviving the spectator is kept
on the edge of his seat until the outcome is
clear. This is what charges the atmosphere
in his films, what has established him as the
“Master of Suspense”. In contrast, if there are
no consequences, there is no real engagement
with the spectator’s emotions, and the commercial is just a paper caricature of a film noir
more suited to children.
Another disparity between the commercial
and Hitchcock films is Lady Noire’s lack of a
20
convincing, illuminating ending that acts as
the backbone for the entire plot. One of the
great strengths of Hitchcock’s works is the
twist ending that elucidates the mystery. For
example, in Vertigo, the actress Judy shares an
uncanny, surreal resemblance to “Madeleine”
because she was this character for most of the
film, hired by Madeleine’s husband to play the
role of Madeleine, pretending she was crazy so
that the murder of the real Madeleine could
be accepted as suicide. Scottie eventually discovers the truth because he chances upon
Judy in the streets after Madeleine has “committed suicide”, and is obsessed with her due
to her resemblance to the dead woman. In
sharp contrast, the commercial begins with
many deliberately mysterious elements that
do not become important plot elements in
the course of the film, and concludes with the
viewer having gained absolutely no additional
knowledge on the situation. The contrived storyline is linked to both the desire to refer to
Hitchcock, as well as a result of the intrinsic
advertising nature of the “film” already mentioned above, which creates and propels events
by the desire to showcase the handbag and
other products, as opposed to what is crucial
for a good story. The zooms on the eye(s) of
Lady Noire, and the bizarre transformation
of brunette Lady Noire to blonde Lady Noire,
are both direct references to Vertigo that never
attain their own significance within the commercial. Unanswerable loose plot ends cripple
the story, while this same ambiguity and obscurity attack the characters. At the beginning,
as at the end, we have no idea who the characters Lady Noire, the man being held captive
(except a name “James”) or the “big boss” are,
nor gained any insight on their motivations.
All the lack of information greatly weakens
the story-telling capacity of the commercial,
because there finally isn’t really a story. This
lack of conviction further condemns the “film”
as a complete caricature, as it has no substance
to justify the very dramatized atmosphere.
Looking at the four luxury productions
influenced by the cinema, the two most cinematographically successful share two essential
similarities. Firstly, all the directors had a liberty
in their construction. Chanel has said that they
left Scorsese with a “carte blanche” and Wong
has testified to the freedom that he was given
as director. This is compared to The Lady Noire
Affair where Olivier Dahan worked around a
script by fashion bloggers. Secondly, and most
importantly, both commercials are largely
and richly original, despite the references to
or inspiration by films. Logically, this seems
intrinsically linked to the idea of directorial
liberty. While Bleu de Chanel uses references
to two films, these were woven into a third
story that could have forgone the visual clin
d’œils without losing its narrative complexity
or the richness of its imagery. The Follow was
faithful to Wong’s trademark themes and style,
but without direct recycling of plot or visual
elements. It is important for any aspiring commercial “film” to be able to stand alone based
on the eloquent fertility of its own content.
The examples of Le Rouge and Lady Noire provide proof in negative forms of this assertion
by displaying the danger of clutching parasitically to cinematic successes, hoping to ride on
other films’ or directors’ celebrity. The inspiration by the cinema should rest an influence,
not consume the production; imitation does
not suffice, and cannot replace the brilliance of
creation. Thirdly, both Bleu de Chanel and The
Follow are respectful of their viewers, giving
their intelligence enough credit to believe that
the story does not have to be handfed to them.
Bleu de Chanel for example, in Jean-Michel
Bertrand’s words, uses “the narrative and above
all temporal complexity that obliges the spectator to work a little to (re)edit the scenes into
a chronological order. Forcing the spectator
to make an effort is no longer that common
in the cinema, but it is often the condition for
giving a film an edge that is more than strictly
consumerist”18. The Follow’s anti-Hollywoodian
narrative style mentioned earlier also demands
this degree of effort from the spectator.
There is significant merit in an imaginative,
original and cinematographically rich commercial. Personally, I feel that this evolution of
the luxury commercial is culturally favorable
in terms of increasingly creativity and intelligence, since luxury brands have the resources
to engage experienced, competent film directors and to fund their demands.
While the ideological and artistic chasm
between cinema and advertising can never
be crossed due to the divergent intentions of
luxury brands and cineastes, this does not
mean that advertising cannot arrive at a middle
ground between the two worlds. André Bazin
has said that “the cinema more than any other
art is bound up with love”19; engaging those
that love this art and giving them the liberty,
respect and resources to create, even with
vested interests, could be the closest that advertising can get to the “supplementary country
called cinema”20.
Li-Jun Pek
Consultant in communication,
Qualitative Market Studies
1. Fabrice Bousteau, “Pourquoi les marques singent
de plus en plus l’art”, Beaux Arts magazine, no 315,
septembre 2010, p. 80.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branded_content
3. Véronique Richebois, “Quand les grandes marques
font leur cinéma”, Les Echos, 4/06/2010.
4. Fabrice Bousteau, op. cit., p. 79.
5. Paul Springer, Ads to Icons. How Advertising Succeeds
in a Multimedia Age, Kogan Page, 2009, p. 316.
6. Véronique Richebois, “Le luxe mise sur le
contenu pour retrouver son identité”, Les Echos,
04/06/2010.
7. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 2, translated
by Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 1972,
p. 6.
8. Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images, translated by
Michael Hofmann, Faber & Faber, 1992, p. 1.
9. Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema, translated
by Paul D. Grant, Berg publishers, 2007, p. 64.
21
10. Ibid., p. 31.
11. Ibid., p. 64.
12. Ibid., p. 111–112.
13. Ibid., p. 32
14. Ibid., 35
15. Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images, op. cit.,
p. 45-46.
16. Ibid.
17. Stephen Teo, Wong Kar-wai: Auteur of Time,
British Film Institute, 2008, p. 154.
18. http://www.ifm-paris.com/events/septembre10/
BleuChanel-GB.asp
19. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 2, Foreword
by Hugh Gray, op. cit.
20. Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema, op. cit.,
p. 35.
22
Fashion,
Television Series and
the Wearability Equation1
Benjamin Simmenauer
Series make fashion
Over the past few years, television series have
had a growing influence on fashion consumers:
“In the last decade, the once-unchallenged role
of movies in shaping public tastes has been
largely usurped by television”, wrote Ruth La
Ferla in the New York Times2 back in 2010.
Fashion items become best sellers just because
they are seen in a popular TV series: Manolo
Blahnik stiletto heels in Sex and the City in the
nineties, Gabrielle Solis’ (Eva Longoria) Juicy
Couture tracksuit and Bree Van de Camp’s
(Marcia Cross) red lingerie from La Perla
in Desperate Housewives are often quoted as
examples.
TV series do not just influence consumers
however, they also influence brands and
the trend industry (designers, unions, press,
trend bureaus, advertising…). Take the “Mad
Men effect” which designates the extent of
the influence of the series’ aesthetic on every
level of fashion. In the 2008 Autumn/Winter
runway Michael Kors show and the 2010 Prada
and Vuitton A/W shows, we were treated to
flower prints, high-waisted silhouettes, straight
skirts, blouses, twin-sets, tweed and Peter
Pan collars. The Vuitton campaign for that
season mirrored the visual codes of Mad Men
to the letter. Women’s magazines celebrated
the return of breasts, hips and buttocks as if it
were a cultural revolution. Mattel launched a
set of Don and Betty Draper Barbies. Banana
Republic launched a Mad Men collection in
tandem with AMC that made it possible for
everyone to “Add some vintage elegance to
your professional dress with classic designs” at
a reasonable price. And finally Estée Lauder
brought out a collection of limited edition
Mad Men products (blusher, lipstick, nail
polish) in 2012 and 2013, sold in retro packaging with Constance Jablonski channelling
Betty Draper as the cosmetic line’s muse.
The shows’ costume designers have been elevated to the position of style guru and act as
consultants for brands and their own clientele. Thanks to the success of Gossip Girl, the
stylist Eric Daman collaborated with DKNY
on a line of tights, designed jewellery for
Swarovski, and was hired by the American
franchise Charlotte Russe as Artistic Director.
In 2010, he also published a fashion self-help
bible entitled You know you want it: style, inspiration, confidence filled with tips for how to
dress (unfortunately as yet untranslated in
French), the doctrine of which is that style
depends above all on self-confidence: “The
key to style is confidence. And the secret to
being confident is being prepared”. Patricia
Field (Sex and the City), Eric Daman (Gossip
Girl), Janie Bryant (Mad Men, Deadwood) and
others are now today’s recognised style arbiters: their expertise in terms of styling goes way
beyond the sets of their television shows.
Film and TV
How can we explain the level of influence TV
series have on fashion? We could say it’s like
the cinema, after all, films can also be at the
origin of fashion trends. At the moment for
example, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby,
with costumes designed by Prada and Brooks
Brothers is creating the same level of media
23
frenzy as Mad Men. Films and series work
as image catalogues that fashion, the art of
borrowing and recycling par excellence, appropriates and recycles. The reason for fashion’s
dependence on fiction, both filmic and televised, comes from the importance of narrative
in the way desire is constructed. In order to inspire desire, a non-functional object like a piece
of clothing must “tell a story”, thus constituting a base for fantasy projection. Fiction
has precisely the power to shift objects into
our imaginary world “in harmony with our
desires”3. The item of clothing worn by the fictional character can thus become a “trait” that
the viewer, who has made this character an
“ideal self” (someone they aspire to be), adopts
through a partial identification process. This
is why some fans, particularly teenagers, dress
like their favourite TV characters.
This schema (from Freudian psychoanalysis)
enables us to understand in general terms,
the nature of the influence the filmed image
has on consumer behaviour, and notably on
fashion consumption. But the difference
between TV images and cinema are too great
for us to think they influence their viewers
in the same way. Cinema is, as David Foster
Wallace posits, an “authoritarian medium”4:
through the way it is set up, cinema substitutes
the viewer’s immediate environment with a
fantastic world that it imposes on the viewer
until the end of the screening. The Searchers
begins with a black screen. Dorothy Jordan
opens a door and the landscape of Monument
Valley takes over the screen. Ford thus puts
the hallucinatory essence of the filmic process
en abyme with the tryptich of the darkened
cinema, the unique light source (the projector)
and the immensity of the image onscreen.
The reality effect, meaning the impression
the viewers have of actually “being there” is
dependent on these artefacts. But, when the
cinema image is not broadcast in these conditions, it loses some of its power to charm: “In
the dark of the cinema lies the very fascination
24
for film. Evoke the opposite experience: on
TV where you can also watch movies there
is zero fascination: the darkness is gone, the
anonymity covered up; the space is familiar,
articulated (by furniture, objects we know),
organised”5. The televised image is part of the
viewer’s usual universe, it does not replace it
with anything like the cinema image. Far from
interrupting one’s everyday life, the series prolongs and enriches it. Through its form first
of all: the long-term but cut-up temporality of
the TV series turns viewing into a ritual. Also,
because all series without exception are themselves the representation of someone’s daily
life. What is the underlying narrative of a series
made of? Like the cinema (in a Hollywood
frame of reference), it is a fable: a collection of
facts presented from the angle of “seemingly
true or necessary”6, that is to say, tied together according to causal laws that organise
their continuation. But not only this, as on the
edge of the narrative arcs that constitute the
action of the series, the serial narrative takes
time over the most ordinary facts and gestures
that the film made for the cinema can only
suggest due to its tight window. This is how
a series manages to create the “real effect”7,
which also captures the fact that the characters are simply there, they exist, delivered from
the artificial dramaturgy of the fable. In order
to convince ourselves, let’s compare the film
The Hobbit directed by Peter Jackson and the
series Game of Thrones (two recent examples
of the success of the fantasy genre): in Game
of Thrones, there is a lot of walking around,
eating, trying on new outfits, talking, training, waiting, lighting fires, confiding feelings,
memories, regrets, dreams, having sex, taking
baths. But there are very few battles, summit
meetings, coronations or weddings. The Hobbit
is a succession of scenes of bravura, Game Of
Thrones has very few: while the film retraces
the big events of a certain period in the history
of Middle Earth after Smaug has hunted the
Dwarves off Erebor, the series, dedicated to
the rivalry for the control of Westeros shows
the underside of history, and shows us what we
will never know of Gandalf, Bilbo or Thorin,
meaning the intimacy and daily lives of the
heroes8. Game of Thrones, compared to The
Hobbit, is reality TV!
TV series thus create a feeling of proximity
with the viewer through scenes that are seemingly useless in dramatic terms but decisive
in terms of the assimilation of “everydayness” by the viewer and the transformation
of the viewing experience into an addiction.
Following a series means we soon start to
miss the presence we had gotten used to, and
that we want to make it come back, over and
over. This characteristic of the serial format
becoming a routine predisposes it naturally to
“softly” pushing beliefs and representations,
in short, influencing the viewing public9.
The wearability of clothes
Now let us observe how these generic differences between cinema and television are
expressed in terms of costumes. In the cinema,
the most spectacular accoutrements can seem
absolutely normal: Tyler Durden (as played
by Brad Pitt in Fight Club) wears a shirt with
a long pointed collar covered in toucans and
a red leather jacket, the driver in Drive (Ryan
Gosling) loses none of his virility despite the
satin, champagne-coloured baseball jacket
he wears, and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) in Wild
at Heart in no way embarrasses Lula (Laura
Dern) when he exclaims that his snakeskin
jacket is “the symbol of my individuality and
my belief in personal freedom”. Obviously,
if someone were to dress like that in real life
they would look like they were going to a fancy
dress. Dressing like a film character one loves
presents the same risk as wearing an outfit
exactly as it was worn on the runway: one is
not dressed but wearing a costume. In film,
as in a runway show, the looks going up and
down are “made of the vain substance that
makes up dreams” (those of the designer and
of the public). With no camera or projector,
exposed to the harsh light of day, stage costumes squash the wearer and turn out to be
unwearable. If TV series have acquired the
power of influence we mentioned earlier, it
is precisely because they who fashion items
worn by their characters that are wearable.
This wearability factor is less often mentioned
when describing the psychology of the fashion
consumer, than the distinctive, original and
newness factors. However, it would be unwise
to underestimate it: while the latter can trigger
the purchase of a fashion item, the lack of the
former can prevent it. Wearability is the regulator of the desire for distinction: the consumer
is quite prepared to stand out, but not to the
extent that it makes them a laughing stock. In
addition, that which is chic is never eccentric:
on the contrary, it is the singular interpretation of conformism. People who are said to
be elegant usually dress in quite a traditional
manner, obeying the norms of their group,
only taking liberties in terms of localised shape
or colour, and thus simultaneously affirming
their membership and their difference10.
Everyone knows that the purchase of a piece of
fashionable clothing involves the question of
wearability: “am I really going to wear this?”
(A tendency to reply to this question in the
affirmative however, varies to a spectacular
extent according to the individual). Wearability
is an equation with multiple parameters. It
includes the practical and objective properties of comfort, functionality and resistance:
a garment that squishes the body, prevents
movement, or threatens to fall apart will not
easily be considered to be wearable. But these
material aspects don’t count as much in the
wearability judgement stakes as the social
validation factor. Something that is wearable
must get a pass from the group, or more to
the point, it is more generally through the
negative that the property of wearability is evaluated and formulated: something wearable
25
is something that causes no eyebrows to be
raised, no ridicule (or any other hint of consternation). However this is a parameter that is
difficult to establish because it is firstly very
context-sensitive11, each social group having its
own frame of reference in terms of wearability,
and secondly, because the wearability judgment call is made according to the personal
convictions of each individual member of the
group, but also according to meta-representations, meaning beliefs held by each member of
the group about the personal convictions of the
other group members12. The social wearability
of a garment is not an intrinsic property: it is
a function, at a given moment, of a collection
of representations and meta-representations.
The first criteria that decides the wearability
to a greater or lesser extent (the “wearability
value”) is not based or rooted in the object, and
depends only on the synthesis of opinions and
judgements about what the opinions might
be: the best strategy, in order to avoid a faux
pas and to dress with discernment, does not
consist of finding one’s own style, but of calculating, to the best of one’s ability, the consensus
of outside opinions with which one may be
confronted. This mechanism gives rise, in
principle, to an infinite regression (or arbitrarily finite which is the same thing) of set
beliefs. Let’s suppose that Paul finds himself
having to evaluate the wearability of a garment G. So:
– At phase 0 of the process Paul has personal
convictions of varying strengths (intuition,
or knowledge linked to his education or his
culture) as to the social wearability of G13. He
knows however that it is not his own taste that
will solely define the wearability value of G,
but that of the entire community.
– At phase 1 Paul calculates the consensus of
other peoples’ opinions about the wearability
of G to the best of his ability.
– But at phase 2, Paul, guessing that others
are doing the same thing as him, that is to
say calculating the opinions of the others in
26
the group to the best of their ability to establish the wearability of G, starts to calculate
the consensus of opinions of others about the
consensus of the opinions of the group about
the wearability of G.
– Thus, for n, we can always define a phase
n+1, where what Paul calculates is the
consensus of the opinions of others about the
consensus calculated by Paul at phase n.
If we reasoned like this in the real world, the
fashion industry would collapse, as no one
would be in a position to decide as to the wearability or unwearability of a given garment: an
infinite number of mental calculations would
be necessary before making a judgement which
is impossible for a human being. So how do
fashion consumers avoid this situation of
“undecidability”? Thanks to the existence of
conventions that belong to clothing alone, that
create a middle ground between the decent and
the obscene, the formal and the casual, the
discreet and the gaudy, the flattering and the
ridiculous, and pass judgement on the representations of what is wearable as everyone is
convinced that these conventions are common
knowledge14. So all is well as long as each
person feels incited and feels that others are
incited to act according to these conventions:
the motivation that pushes a member of a community to follow them is precisely the belief
that everyone else will do likewise. But the reasons for thinking that some people ignore or
do not respect the conventions of wearability,
or worse, that some believe that others ignore
or do not respect them are legion: the rules of
etiquette are notoriously volatile, and it is reasonable to doubt that the people whose opinion
matters to us keep up to date with their fluctuations in real time. Just like in the financial
markets, where investor confidence depends on
the fluidity of trade, fashion consumers must
be provided with some form of guarantee.
Precisely, TV series can be seen as sartorial
insurance policies for four reasons.
The fashion coach series
Reason 1: the length of exposure helps to get
used to something
Repetition over time in TV series establishes
a particular relationship between characters
and their costumes. The use of narrative continuity has two opposing effects, both absent
in the cinema. Either a character wears the
same thing all the time, like The Fonz and
his black airman’s jacket in Happy Days (a
Western Costumes mythical garment now
on show at the Smithsonian Museum), and
the series becomes an amazing long-term
showcase for a product that it automatically
promotes. Or the opposite, the return of a
character on screen leads to an exploration of
their wardrobe: so for each character a style is
displayed like a look book for a seasonal collection. In Gossip Girl, even though Chuck
Bass changes his suit a number of times per
episode, he is no less individualised through
his clothing style than the Fonz in Happy
Days, with his exuberant and brightly coloured
reworking of the American dandy à la Gatsby/
Ralph Lauren. Whether it is on the scale of
the room or the wardrobe, the serial narrative
form means that the dress behaviour of the
characters is seen by viewers as a habit. And as
Montaigne said “habit is second nature, and
no less powerful”15: the stylistic constancy of
the characters unconsciously establishes the
equivalence between the worn and the wearable. To perceive something as normal is a
mere question of recurrence: what one sees
often becomes natural. This explains how
fashion creations that in theory are far from
our own frame of reference can become familiar and desirable through the intermediary
of a TV character.
Since 2007, the Faroe Islands-based firm of
Gudrun & Gudrun, that specialises in organic
chunky hand-knits has had untold success:
orders are flowing in from England, the US
and Japan. The main target of the frenzy is a
“traditional” white jumper with black snowflakes, thousands of which are sold annually. It
is priced at 290 euros and one would have imagined it reserved to a clientele of enlightened
connoisseurs of Faroe folklore and fans of
the Horse and Hound look. The snowflake
sweater became an international best seller
thanks to the Danish series Forbrydelsen (The
Killing) that after being broadcast domestically on the national Danish channel DR1
was bought by BBC 4 and a number of other
broadcasters around the world. The main character in Forbrydelsen, the far from glamorous
deputy Sarah Lund, wears the Gudrun sweater
in seasons 1 and 3. One would have a hard
time imagining Lund as a muse for a perfume
or any cosmetic line: she hardly ever changes
her clothes, wearing the sweater with baggy
jeans and a boiled wool overcoat. Lund seems
to have given up on making even the slightest
effort to look pretty or important and is quite
unremarkable at first. She is rather beautiful
but her face is marked with fatigue and worry.
She is entirely absorbed by her job to the point
of obsession and self-sacrifice, and looks for
clothes that are comfortable and functional
like the snowflake sweater so as to be able to
forget them. But from the point of view of the
viewer of Forbrydelsen the opposite occurs: the
Gudrun fisherman’s sweater rapidly becomes
an emblem, signifying, in the words of the
actress Sofie Gråbøl who plays Lund that “a
person who doesn’t use her sexuality – that’s a
big point. Lund’s so sure of herself she doesn’t
have to wear a suit. She’s at peace with herself”.
Forbrydelsen defends the notion of sartorial
honesty: we are always at our advantage in
an outfit that shows who we really are, rather
than in a disguise aimed at making ourselves
look more powerful in the eyes of others. In the
end, this asexual and garish Gudrun sweater,
that at first may seem to viewers difficult to
integrate into their usual environment, evokes
a promise of emancipation and authenticity
that makes it quite wearable.
27
Reason 2: everyday familiarity that reassures
Series tend to focus on the everyday lives of
their protagonists and when we start to follow
a series, our own daily lives become mixed
up with that of the series. So the proximity
of the characters renders their clothing wearable: they are being worn by people who
are familiar to us. It is of course an illusion,
as like in the cinema, the series absorbs the
clothes into a symbolic system of images and
desires which is not simply a question of the
simple reproduction of an average everyday
existence. The clothes acquire a new meaning that make them more distinctive and
potentially attractive. But, at the same time,
because the series narrative creates a routine,
the gap between the fantasy and the ordinary
narrows and the costume becomes a mere garment once again.
Gossip Girl (The CW, 2007-2012), a series that
presented itself as “Your one and only source
into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite”,
provides a paradox for analysis that is nothing
if not ironic: while the heroes all belong to
the billionaire elite of New York’s Upper
East Side, Gossip Girl influenced fashion
consumer behaviour in its young viewers (1530) more than any other teen series. Serena
Van der Woodsen (Blake Lively), Blair Waldorf
(Leighton Meester) and their friends belong to
a world that is straight from a magazine: their
luxury wardrobes seem as inaccessible to the
common or garden viewer as their autarchic
way of life from townhouses, to penthouses,
five-star hotels, limousines and summers in
the Hamptons.
In fact, the theme of the rich among themselves and the implacable determination of
these well-born people to maintain the integrity of their circle that cannot be accessed
with money alone as one must be to the manor
born, is at the centre of Gossip Girl. The everyday lives depicted in this series are out of
reach to most people. This is what makes the
outfits worn by Serena, Chuck or Blair so
28
attractive: even in our democratic societies,
the people covet the attributes of the elite.
Wedding dresses designed by Vera Wang or
Elie Saab (31000$) inevitably reactivate the
princess fantasies of young and not so young
viewers. On this point, Mona Chollet or Alice
Augustin16, for whom the whole interest of
the series lies mainly in what it shows, the
decors and costumes, are not wrong. In fact
Gossip Girl perfectly captures the collusion
between high society and the fashion industry:
Eleanor Waldorf, Blair’s mother is at the head
of her own couture house, Jenny Humphrey
is a trainee designer, the young ladies of the
Upper East Side occasionally model, act as
muses for designers and a shopping trip to
Barneys is hardly more exotic for them than
a trip to the neighbouring mall is for the average young American. But the question of
wearability comes back: by focussing on a
world of absolute opulence, are we not running the risk of dissuading the viewer from
taking the heroes of Gossip Girl seriously as
stylistic models?
The Gossip Girl dilemma is similar to that
facing luxury brands: to awaken the desire in
everyone for something that only few own, to
suggest restricted or reserved access while at
the same time not discouraging or excluding.
Gossip Girl solves this problem in an exemplary
and perverse manner, giving the chronicle the
cheap format of a soap. The powerful, not like
in Bossuet or Saint Simon, where the grandeur
is praised, are watched from above: the very
format of the soap requires a frenzied narrative
focussed on love stories, capricious behaviour,
vices and underhand dealings that must blend
endless U-turns and spectacular revelations.
Subject to this regime of social trickery and
short-lived crushes, the heroes of Gossip Girl
have none of the phlegm, cool headedness
or depth of the heroes of Mad Men. They are
under pressure from a narrative mechanism
that is morally neutral while being dramaturgically inflexible. The result means that the
viewer forgets the difference in earning with
the series’ protagonists and considers them as
friends: their extreme level of comfort works
as a magnifying glass on the universal questions of the heart, snobbery, family ties, and
the status of the work of art17, which interest
everyone and are given free rein in the series
thanks to the fact that the heroes are under no
pressure in terms of time or money. By creating this complicity with the oligarch (without
which a series about the super-rich would be
impossible to take), Gossip Girl sets up a framework that encourages the wearability of
the clothing styles depicted. The styling of
the series reinforces the wearable character
in three complementary ways. First of all,
each protagonist is characterised by a very
codified style: Blair’s style is sexy but preppy,
with pleated skirts, plain shirts and hairbands
covering up her alluring lacy lingerie, while
Serena revisits the pop arty seventies-inspired
style not unlike the other boho muses such
as Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) in
Sex and the City and Jessa Johannson (Jemima
Kirke) in Girls. This enables the viewer to
develop aesthetic affinities with a particular
character and to take inspiration from their
outfits when shopping for their own clothes
without necessarily trying to reproduce a
head to toe look: the series acts like a magazine, but in a more effective way because the
models are characters we frequent every day.
In addition, the styling of Gossip Girl repeats
the successful recipe of mixing luxury and
high street brands: it is credible as the elite of
today stand out less through their particular
taste (as before one’s membership of the elite
was displayed by the exclusive consumption of
certain brands) than by the omnivorous capacity to pick and choose objects and references
from diverse sources that they put together
with no apparent hierarchical logic18, and
this also means that the outfits worn by the
heroines of the series are financially accessible.
For example, the Generra top Serena wears
in episode 12 in the first season only costs
68 dollars: so fans pounced on it, guided by
the broadcaster’s website. Finally, the costume designers’ strategy on Gossip Girl consists
mainly of recycling trends observed elsewhere,
mainly in Teen Vogue, rather than imposing
a particular aesthetic: the signature look for
season one – the combination of the uniform
from Manhattan’s private schools with luxury
shoes and accessories – was replaced (because
the heroines had graduated high school) by
a range of outfits that were on trend but had
already been seen elsewhere. With a sleight of
hand, what is presented to the viewer as the
choice of the elite is already something she
is aware of: the preppy girl, the bohemian,
and even Jenny Humphrey’s emo trash style
are all looks borrowed from magazines. The
fact that the characters dress like this or that
has no real value in terms of discovery, just
in terms of sanctification.
Reason 3: sartorial choices as plot lines
In a TV series that focuses on everyday gestures, clothes are elevated to the status of
narrative objects. They can then be given a
much more detailed and complex treatment
than in film: we have time to see a character
hesitate over a skirt or a scarf. Dressing practices are reproduced according to a drawn-out
mimesis of their consumption and use, while
in the cinema we are most often presented with
the character fully dressed. A series, because
it shares the dressing intimacy of the characters, constitutes a style lab for the viewer. It is
vain to criticise series such as Gossip Girl for
sacrificing the script in favour of the costumes:
the clothes are precisely a capital ingredient
in the story as they are a capital ingredient
in the lives of a great number of viewers.
Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), and
narrator of Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004),
a journalist living in a small studio apartment on the Upper East Side is not a member
of the moneyed elite as seen in Gossip Girl.
29
This doesn’t stop her from frequenting the
same stores and spending more than is reasonable on luxury brands: Blahnik, Jimmy Choo
and Louboutin shoes, Vuitton, Dolce and
Gabbana, Prada, Westwood clothes, Dior and
Gucci bags… In the gang of women friends
made up of Miranda, the career obsessed and
cynical lawyer (power suits, Helmut Lang),
Samantha, the nymphomaniac public relations expert (a Versace MILF) and Charlotte
the WASP gallery manager (Ralph Lauren),
Carrie is the poorest but the most striking. She
lives for and through her clothes, saying that
when she was young and broke, she preferred
to buy Vogue and skip dinner, as she felt “it
fed (her) more”. It is hard to sum up Carrie’s
varied style, an experimental patchwork that
at times lacks grace, revealing an overly enthusiastic and almost bulimic passion for clothes.
The tone is set in the opening credits when
we see her parading through Manhattan in
a tutu, getting copiously splashed by a passing bus (on which there is an advert for her
column in The New York Star).
Sex and the City most probably changed most
viewers’ perspective on their own fashion
habits. From afar, Carrie Bradshaw is an
amalgam of all of the misogynistic stereotypes
of city dwelling women: spendthrift, superficial, egocentric and inconstant. The fashion
victim in all her splendour and ridicule, but is
she? On the contrary, the series turns the value
system on its head: Carrie’s compulsion to buy
is not symptomatic of hysteria but a deliberate
life choice, opposed by Carrie to her contemporaries, so as she is less a brainless figure at
the mercy of an all-powerful industry than an
avant-garde feminist leader. The equivalence
between frivolity and freedom is the feminine
transposition of the baudelarian dandy19: the
originality and courage of her choices manifest a clearly autonomous taste, an affront to
convention and good morals. Everything plays
out clearly in episode 9 of the sixth season
(“A Woman’s Right to Shoes”) where Carrie
30
goes to a friend’s house for a party, the friend
is now married with children. At the door
guests are asked to remove their shoes to protect the floor. When leaving, disaster strikes:
Carrie’s sandals have disappeared. Then, negotiations begin between the two friends, one
demanding damages for what has happened,
the other claiming that the price of the sandals (“not sandals, Manolos!” Carrie yells)
is indecent. Two lines of argument become
clear. The mother says that “before I had a
real life, I used to buy Manolos too”. Carrie
is the same age, she should settle down, have
kids, give up her puerile consumerist and
now cumbersome libido. Carrie confides her
woes to Miranda who supports her entirely:
“if you had lost her baby at a party, believe
me she would be looking for damages”. This
clash reveals that the duty of motherhood is
not greater than “A woman’s right to shoes”,
regardless of how much they cost. Through
a fight caused by the loss of a pair of Manolo
sandals, the series expounds on the possibility of another fate for the thirty-something
woman. It is not surprising then that Sex and
the City enabled viewers to feel their fashion
consumption was legitimate regardless of how
extravagant or excessive.
Taken literally, what Sex and the City is saying
that wearability is of little import. Only individual style choices matter. Is this not in
contradiction with what we affirmed to begin
with, that series make the clothes worn by their
protagonist’s wearable? Without a doubt, the
outfits Carrie wears, already relatively risqué
in the rarefied New York circles she frequents,
would be totally out of place in the everyday
life of an average viewer. On the other hand,
Sex and the City promotes an individualistic
way of life and society, where the main values
are originality, personal accomplishment and
directing one’s own life. In episode 2 of season
4 (“The Real Me”), the organiser for a multibrand fashion show blending professional
models and high-profile New Yorkers asks
Carrie to take part. She hesitates, fearing she
would look ridiculous beside Heidi Klum.
Bolstered by encouragement from her best
friends, convinced that for an ardent fashionista like Carrie it would be sacrilege to turn
down the opportunity to be in a show, she
overcomes her complexes and says yes. She is
not out of the woods yet, though: at the last
minute she finds out she won’t be wearing
the pretty blue sequined dress but a pair of
gem-incrusted knickers. As if that weren’t bad
enough, once she gets up on the runway Carrie
falls in front of everyone. The voiceover begins
and as narrator she learns a very American life
lesson: “I had a choice. I could slink off the
runway and let my inner model die of shame,
or I could pick myself up, flaws and all, and
finish. And that’s just what I did because when
real people fall down in life, they get right back
up and keep on walking…” According to this
vision of existence, the value of an individual
depends on the intensity of what drives them
(for example Carrie’s sincere love of fashion):
it is a moral that pushes one going beyond
oneself, beyond the limits the outside world
places on the strength of individual will.
In a world like Carrie’s, the wearability of a
garment becomes a logical paradox 20: only
that which is unwearable is wearable and vice
versa. If a garment is unwearable, then he or
she who wears it stands out with distinction
from the group. But as recognition is given
only to that person that stands out if their
outfit, which was thought to be unwearable
by the others in as much as no one would
dare to wear it, betting on the social disapproval it would have caused, becomes de facto
wearable, that is to say approved by the collective at the very moment it is worn. Inversely,
that which is wearable is unwearable: conformity, in the era of personal development and
self-actualisation has become a vice that the
community disapproves of. The wearability
gauge gets more complicated in the world
of Sex and the City: in order to calculate in
advance what will be judged to be wearable,
to foresee not what the others feel to be wearable at a given time (t) but what they judge
to be unwearable and thus wearable at time
t+1. Is this necessarily the same in the world
of the viewer? The progress of the ideology
of self-actualisation on a planetary level is not
something one can reasonable doubt, but the
vision of the series in 2013 already seems a tad
anachronistic: belief in the all-powerful idea
of individual willpower now seems naive now
that our lives are dominated by connections
and membership of immaterial networks.
Reason 4: the group dimension and the
validation of the collective
In the past, series were, for the most part,
“finished off ” (each episode told a one-off
story) and focused on a unique hero whose
different adventures followed one another without a real evolution over time. Modern TV
series have a more “serial” nature (each episode is a part of the bigger picture that lasts
at least for the season), and are more about
a group, meaning that an equal amount of
screen time is allotted to a number of main
characters. This is a quality inherent to the
genre: it is impossible in feature films, unless
you give up on narrative continuity, to really
tell a number of stories, with a different hero at
the centre of each. The series format does this
easily, and this is one of its main attractions,
as the increase in the number of heroes means
and increase in the number of storylines: series
are all about weaving, interconnecting fates
that converge and diverge, which increases the
level of interest in each line and when each of
these lines cross over.
All series take place in a given society. And
the point of view of the series on its characters
and their behaviour is in general sociological,
where one observes perhaps not so much the
individual motivation but the way the group
functions. This preference in series for the
“social fact” in the Durkheim sense, meaning
31
for “a collection of ideas, beliefs, feelings of
all types that happen through the individuals”21 but which goes beyond their control
and constrains them, naturally means that
it is easy to feature clothing and wearability
issues linked to the social sanctions they are
so often used for. Better than any other form
of representation, the TV series can play the
role of arbiter of wearability: the clothes that
don’t set off any reticence on the part of the
local population within the little world we
belong to for the length of the viewing (and
no doubt for much longer as we are marked
by series quite extensively), are deemed to be
wearable there and so also wearable here, for
us. And the opposite is also true! In episode
6 of the second season of Girls (2013), a show
that chronicles the lives of a group of twentysomethings in New York, one of the heroines,
Marnie, who works in an art gallery, acts as
hostess at a party in the home of a conceptual artist Booth Jonathan, with whom she
also happens to have just spent the night. For
the occasion she wears a two-layered dress,
made of a tube top and mini-shirt in gold,
crocodile vinyl underneath a plastic transparent mini crinoline: a more decorative than
practical outfit verging on the ridiculous. But
why ridiculous? Because the dress produces a
cringe comedy effect? Because it is evidence
of Marnie’s mistake, as she thought she was
Booth’s new girlfriend when as far as he was
concerned she was actually working for him
(gallery hostess during the day, party hostess
at night). The plastic dress, as flamboyant as
it is uncomfortable, reminds Marnie of her
romantic naiveté as much as her social insignificance: the outfit that was to cement her status
as an it girl becomes a cumbersome wrapping,
through which her dashed hopes can be seen,
and in which the young woman surely feels
less like Edie Sedgwick and more like Gregor
Samsa. As a viewer I realise that something is
wrong with this dress: it is not wearable in the
context of Booth’s party, but it is not wearable
32
in my home either. To watch a series means
to adopt, for the duration of the viewing at
least, all of the tacit life rules it displays. Half
way through the second season of Girls, my
knowledge of these rules has filled out due to
the fact that I’ve been sharing the characters’
everyday lives, in a way I have integrated them
through force of habit, so well that I immediately and infallibly spot Marnie’s mistake,
and much better than she does, as my point
of view on the ins and outs of the protagonists
of Girls is that of the Girls society overall, and
not the partial, closed off point of view of an
individual member of this society. This type
of viewing contract, by virtue of the fact that
the world of series becomes that of the person
watching, explains that series lend themselves
to a type of collective consumption. Forums,
blogs, recaps, fan clubs and even conventions
are booming. Series also occupy conversations
offline. They are the basis for massive social
interaction, the form of which merits our attention: the pleasure involved in talking about
characters and the adventures they are caught
up in is the same as if we were talking about a
third party in their absence, with others who
also know them. The heroes of our TV series
are close to us and we share this with other
viewers. We, fans of Gossip Girl, see Serena’s
sky blue top and talk about it as if it were the
latest purchase by a chic girl in our social group.
At a time of digital influence, the sources of
sartorial influence that have the most traction
are no longer the recognised big authoritarian
figures and have gone down a more democratic
path where the most legitimate recommendation is that of our peers, so characters from TV
series are the new style icons. Because it does
not constitute a continuation of the everyday
life of each spectator taken alone, but of the
entire community that is following it, a series
can modify the conventions that rule over the
wearability of clothes in to our own environment: While I have identified by watching
Sex and the City, Mad Men or Forbrydelsen, a
sartorial practice tolerated in the world of the
series and thus in mine, other viewers of the
same shows have done the same thing at the
same time. I know that I am not the only one
to have recognised that sweater or those leggings as totally wearable: everyone knows that
every else approves also, and by definition this is
what constitutes the criteria of wearability.
The length of time the garments are exposed, a
sense of proximity with the characters wearing
them, meticulous attention to the signification of clothes as fact and the integration of the
social validation necessary for the evaluation
of the wearability: these are the four motifs
that explain why series play the role of “style
coach”. Clothes that are featured in a series
appear simultaneously desirable – this is the
effect of integrating objects in the narrative, it
also happens in the cinema – and as wearable
– is the effect that only the routine orchestrated by the serial genre can have. Beyond
these generic specifics of serial fiction, what the
analysis of the wearability gained by clothing
featured in TV series teaches us is how permanent the empire of television is on our lives and
representations. This empire was conquered
by TV because it distracts the viewer from
their solitude in two ways. Firstly it speaks
to the viewer’s secret need for voyeurism and
all-powerfulness by overdosing them with
images that can’t look back at the viewer. But
perhaps it reassures them even more effectively
as it places them in the centre of a network of
voyeurs that can’t see one another, but know
that everyone has also seen what he or she was
supposed to have seen alone.
Benjamin Simmenauer
Consultant, House of Common Knowledge
1. I would like to thank Denis Bonnay and Clara
Maignan for their precious advice and their re-reading
that was kind but without concession.
2. “Film and Fashion: Just Friends”, New York Times,
March 3rd 2010.
3. Michel Mourlet, Sur un art ignoré, Cahiers du
cinéma, no 98, August 1959.
4. “David Lynch keeps his Head”, in A Supposedly
Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1997.
5. Roland Barthes, “En sortant du cinéma”, in
Communications, 23, 1975, 104-107.
6. Aristotle, Poetic.
7. In a way very similar to the one Barthes mentioned
to characterise the abundance of descriptive details
with no relation to the plot in the realist novels of the
19th century Barthes, “L’effet de réel”.
8. A reader in the know might object that this difference between The Hobbit and Game of Thrones could
be simply explained not as we suggest by the difference between film and television but by the difference
between the novels that the adaptations have merely
followed: the rhythm and epic density of Tolkien’s
linear novel is counterpointed by the psychological
digressions and the contemplative slowness of Martin’s
polyphonic novels. We have two answers to this. First
of all, which the fact that Tolkien was adapted for the
cinema and Martin for television is not by chance: the
formal constraints on the work adapted vary according to the final format (big or small screen). And
then, let us challenge the reader in question to find
a series whose speed and density in terms of events
is comparable to those of a Hollywood film. Even in
24, the seriously fast-paced action series, the characters’ ordinary lives (breakfast, couples fighting, supermarket trips, babysitting, and flirts, partying with soft
drugs…) are the backdrops of the intrigue and form
an important part of the narration.
9. Cf. Benjamin Simmenauer, “La série télévisée : un
ars dominandi”, in Mode de Recherche no 19, January
2013, for a more detailed description of the techniques
of influence at work in TV series.
10. Cf. Georg Simmel’s analysis in “La Mode”, in
La Tragédie de la Culture, reworked by Guillaume
Erner in Sociologie des tendances, PUF, Que sais-je ?,
2008, chapter 5.
11. Outfits adored by graphic artists in Paris would
be intolerable if not totally grotesque for a pharmacy
owner in Cannes.
12. Let us suppose that to illustrate this point I am
tempted by a pair of red moccasins and I am wondering just how wearable they are. In fact, I am asking
myself two types of question. On the one hand, the
basic question that enables me to refine my direct
evaluation of the red moccasins: I wonder if they are
really to my taste, what they will go with in my existing wardrobe, or even if red is a shoe colour at all. On
the other hand I wonder on a different level if my wife
33
is not going to roll her eyes when she sees me in red
shoes? Am I running the risk of drawing too much
attention to myself at the office? Will I appear to be
a straitlaced man who only dares to jazz up his feet?
These questions are aimed at the representations of
others as I anticipate them to be.
13. For example Paul may thing that white socks are
not the done thing because his mother and sisters read
this on a fashion blog.
14. We recognise the mechanism by which prices on
the financial market remain stable. All of this wearability analysis reworks the “beauty contest” argument
used by Keynes to explain how the market price is
fixed (The general theory of employment, interest and
money, chapter 12, 1936), and the use of this theoretical model to analyse the social significance and
means of spreading trends by Guillaume Erner, for
example in Sociologie des tendances.
15. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, Livre III, chap. 10
« De mesnager sa volonté ».
16. “An episode of Gossip Girl is like a fashion spread,
successive tableaux where the occasion – a tea party,
a sleepover, etc. – dictates the story almost, analyses
Alice Augustin. In the end we don’t really care about
the story, we are just watching for the enjoyment factor...”, in Pierre Langlais, “Gossip Girl: la série magazine de mode”, Slate, 27/04/2010,
http://www.slate.fr/story/20357/gossip-girl-seriemagazine-de-mode; and “The plot lines are contrived,
the unexpected developments improbable. Everything
seems to be set up for the viewer to only half-follow
the dialogue (“You are my best friend, how could you
sleep with my boyfriend?”) and instead concentrate
on the decors, the characters’ wardrobes and every
detail of the luxurious universe they live in: Oh, the
dress! Oh, the hotel room! Oh, the necklace!, etc.”,
in Mona Chollet, “Gossip Girl: célébration des élites
américaines”, Le Monde Diplomatique, août 2010.
17. Through the character of the writer, Dan, who is
also the person behind the “Gossip Girl” blog and as
such the intra-diegetic narrator of the series, the theme
of the link between literature and life is major.
18. Cf the classic article on the subject: Richard A.
Peterson and Roger M. Kern “Changing Highbrow
Taste: From Snob to Omnivore”, American Sociological
Review, Vol. 61, no 5 (Oct. 1996), p. 900-907.
19. Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, IX, “Le
Dandy”, 1863.
20. According the liars paradox: suppose someone
shows up and says “I’m lying!” Is that true? If so,
then he is lying so he’s not lying otherwise he is not
lying so he is lying.
21. Durkheim, Sociologie et philosophie, Paris, PUF,
1974, p. 79.
34
The Advertising Image:
Total Language?
Vincent Guillot
The cult of the image and its omnipresence
on ever-multiplying screens, the weakening of
rhetoric in the public space, the proliferation
of signifying logos and pictograms that need
no translation… The thesis of the “civilisation of the image” is gaining ground, where
the visual plays the role of total language and
words are entirely disqualified.
While the advertising world regularly
highlights the disappearance of words, it is
always to announce their “comeback” and to
deplore the fact that advertisers and agencies
neglect the potential of words in terms of brand
impact, territory and identity. The debate
about the disappearance of text –in advertising and communication in general– poses the
fundamental question of its relationship to the
image: if the old adage is right and “a picture
paints a thousand words”, then to what extent
are the latter still needed in putting together
an effective message?
An example of effective advertising, with no
text
Decolar.com, a Spanish language airfare comparison site brought out an ad with no text
(except a logo) in 2009 that could be a case
study for this article. What is Decolar.com’s
message? “We are an internet site that enables
you to travel all over the world for the cheapest
prices”. The ad showed a spinning globe. It was
a little out of focus but entirely identifiable as a
globe. In the foreground, there was a pixelated
hand, the pointer of a computer mouse. In
fact, the Decolar.com advert depicted a game
we are all familiar with, spinning a globe and
putting one’s finger on it by chance to decide
on a destination (this theme was also used by
La Française des Jeux in 2002 in their “Loto,
à qui le tour ?” campaign). “Internet Site”,
“Travel around the world”, “cheapest prices”:
the three elements of the Decolar.com message are put across perfectly by this visual.
First of all the globe itself signifies the worldwide aspect of the internet. Then the computer
mouse, shown as a pointing hand, signifies
the “online” nature of the service proposed
by Decolar.com: an internet site. Finally, the
way the globe is out of focus, photographed
as it is moving, evokes the game, luck, and by
extension the ease of decision making, linked
to the “cheapest prices” that one is meant to
experience with Decolar.com.
How could a sentence have gotten this message across better?
“The death of words, the shock of photos”?
Paraphrasing Paris Match’s1 famous slogan, in
2001 the magazine Stratégies asked if words
were disappearing in favour of the sole advertising image. Within the profession, the thesis
for the total disappearance of text in adverts
garners plenty of support. When an ad without text wins a prize at Cannes, specialist
observers systematically come to the conclusion that text is dead, as if it were a technique
that had become obsolete. The image as a
total language now fulfils all of the functions of advertising by itself. The image grasps
the attention immediately: its “analog” code
requires no particular knowledge –unlike
35
words that demand an education, and the ability to decipher the linguistic code. Colours,
shapes… the image seduces, where text
can only inform. In a mature market, who
still needs to be informed before making a
purchase?
This question is echoed in the way advertising agencies put together their organisations:
the “creative team” (a model of creativity schematically composed of a copywriter for the
message and an artistic director for the image)
is regularly called into question in the specialist blogs. Emphasis is being put on more
“hybrid” profiles: a copywriter who thinks
“visually” and an artistic director who thinks
in terms of the message…
This lack of distinction between the two
profiles poses the question of the difference
between image techniques and word techniques, and what they both bring to the
advertising message. Is the vision one of evolution where one will be called on to replace
the other? What can the interactions, even
similitudes between visual and linguistic
techniques?
The impossible “society of the image”
The “society of the image”, which is understood in general to mean the disappearance of
text in favour of the image, has yet to happen.
In advertising, campaigns based on text are
still very successful (Oasis Be Fruit, Eurostar).
In Cannes, the adverts without text that win
prizes remain the exception (less than 10% of
prizes in press and posters over the past ten
years2). More generally, words are far from
having lost their power within the political
and social sphere (“balai”, “État membre de
l’UNESCO”, “mariage”…).
In the same way that text has not “ceded” its
place to images, the linguistic code (text) does
not match up point by point to the iconic code
(image). Roland Barthes proved that the schematic antagonism between “text=reason” and
36
“image=emotion” is false: in the same way
that an image can be informative (in an instruction leaflet for example), a word can bring
emotion, inspire, mobilise…3
What interpretative schema enables us to
understand, at the same time, the growing
weight of images in society, the persistence of text, and the relationship between
visual technique and linguistic technique in
advertising?
The postmodern society and the economy of
desire
At the same time as it gave birth to advertising as we know it today, consumer society
gave birth to the concept of postmodernity.
Postmodernity began in the seventies out of
the “crisis of meaning” inherited from modernity: the weakening of traditional structures
(family, church) left behind a “disenchanted”4
world, stripped of meaning and togetherness.
In this context, individuals looked to consumerism to fill the void left by meaning and
connection. Thus, Baudrillard posited that
“the order of consumption is an order to
manipulate signs”5, on which the postmodern individual founded his or her personal
identity and social belonging.
Far from the purely rational model of the
homo oeconomicus, “the postmodern consumer
puts excitement (the emotional) and interest
(the rational) on the same level”6. Unlike the
“society of the image”, the concept of postmodernity enables the inclusion of new “tribes”
–extensively used in advertising, these “emotional” communities that form around shared
affects that gather around their political,
artistic, sporting or sexual icons. Thus, if we
can’t talk of a “society of the image”, we can
nevertheless talk of a society and economy of
desire, that puts emotion back at the heart of
the social connection, and of which the image
is the main but not exclusive vector.
So we must make two observations about our
postmodern society. First of all, reason is not
excluded: the image can “inform” as much as
the text. Then and above all, language gets its
emotional value back. For what it’s worth, the
example of “Non mais Allô quoi”, brought up
to date by a reality TV “angel” illustrates the
extent to which words can shift so far from
any informative content to play a social, fun,
comical role that advertising would be wrong
to ignore (the expression in question is now
even copyrighted at the INPI). So, as the
face-off between text and image is no longer
relevant, it is now possible to study what each
technique brings to communication in advertising and their interactions.
The strength of images and the power of
words
Roland Barthes was the first to explore the
relationship between advertising image and
text, and to distinguish two main modalities of action of the text on the image: anchor
and relay.
With the anchor, the text exercises a “control”
over the advertising image. The latter can be
rich in (too) many significations, it is important to “channel” them in one direction that
serves the advertising message: “the linguistic
message guides the interpretation”.
With the relay, on the contrary, “the words
and the images are complementary (…).
[The text provides] meaning that is not in
the image”. In “Rhétorique de l’image”, Roland Barthes
bases the distinction between denotation (the
explicit meaning of a sign) and connotation
(the hidden meaning or meanings of a sign
that is subject to interpretation). Denotation
and connotation are “structures” that are
shared both by the linguistic code and the
iconic code. For example, the word “Italy”
denotes (designates) a country, but it connotes
(evokes) a whole universe of clichés, experiences, that are different to each person7. In
addition, while the image of a dove denotes
a simple bird, it connotes peace in many
cultures.
The thousand and one links between image
and text
While for Barthes, the text “acted” on the
image by “controlling” it or by completing
it, Laurence Bardin proves that the image
can also act on the text. Basing things on the
distinction between denotation and connotation, she builds a typology of 4 possible
messages8 and enriches the analysis with the
links between the advertising image and its
text:
– When the image and the text denote, there is
an informative message, where the two codes,
both linguistic and iconic provide an objective description of the subject of the advert.
An illustration that presents a child wearing
a “Nestlé Milk Flour” hat, sitting beside a pot
of the said flour, with the added text “Nestlé
Flour Milk, a complete food for children”, is a
perfect example of this type of univocal advert
where repetition is rife.
– When the image connotes and the text
denotes, there is message to legend: only the
text enables comprehension of the image. This
is the principle of the ad for Renault’s Zoé: on
screen the inhabitants of a city come together –in total silence– to destroy what looks
like the wall of a ring road. A cyclist takes
off his scarf that is supposed to protect from
pollution. The comprehension of this totally
unexpected, entirely mute scene comes with
the appearance of a vehicle and a slogan: “Zéro
bruit, zéro émission. Renault Zoé 100 % électrique” (“Zero noise, zero emissions. Renault
Zoé 100 % electric”).
– The image denotes, the text connotes, then
there is message to illustration: the image gives
a univocal meaning to the text. An Oreo advert
depicts this in a spectacular manner. This is
the slogan: “À prendre ou à lécher” (“Take
37
it or lick it”). In this case the accompanying
visual of an Oreo biscuit opened up to show
the cream that many consumers like to lick
off makes the slogan comprehensible, thus
building an effective advertising message.
– When the image connotes and the text
connotes, there is a symbolic message. In this
case, text and image can be interpreted in many
ways, and themselves need to be “anchored”
by other elements, like the logo or photo of
the product. The Air France advert directed by
Michel Gondry in 2008 was in this group. In
the video, a number of everyday scenes came
into contact with element linked to the sky:
a plane as a stylus on a record player, a cloud
as a pillow… Neither the video nor the slogan
“Faire du ciel le plus bel endroit de la Terre”
linked explicitly to air travel. In order to give
the advert meaning and a little soul, the “Air
France” logo had to appear at the end to “lock
down” the message. Laurence Bardin elaborated on this analysis of message with a theory
of reception, a blend of psychology and linguistics. By crossing message with reception,
she put together a table of 16 “communication
situations”, a veritable map in which advertising finds a very vast territory of expression
and reception. In theory, no “communication
situation” is barred from advertising. In practice, advertising was at first very marked by
informative messages, typical of the early 20th
century ad style, where both the image and
text “informed” the public as to the qualities
of the product in question. However, with the
advent of advertising that no longer sells products but “stories”, “worlds”, all configurations
of message and reception can be taken into
account –within the confines of the commercial effectiveness felt. This is how advertising
without text can coexist with adverts that only
have typography, playing on all available registers and tones, puns and Oasis situations, and
the at times very serious, silent and numerous
clichés of the luxury brands.
38
Words that perform
In its search for effectiveness (notoriety,
sales…), advertising cannot do without performativity, the capacity a message has to provoke
its own realisation (like a self-fulfilling
prophecy), and a specific function of language.
From the traditional slogan “Adhérez, Vibrez,
Laissez-vous séduire…” (“Come on board,
Vibrate, Let yourself be seduced…”) in posters or on TV, to the “Click here” on-screen
adverts, the order with a performative value
is a key element in the effectiveness of the
advertising message, at the moment when
the seduction is transformed into action: purchase, donation, vote… The hypertext link,
from the very beginning of the internet, is a
new “performative” form of text, where the
message is “realised” in one click. In the last
decade there was an explosion in the sales of
key words that function as hooks, enabling a
better targeting of one’s public according to
centres of interest, and that are today the basis
of the flourishing retargeting 9 business. From the traditional injunction to the hypertext link and the hashtag10, text can be dissolved
in computer code and guarantees an unprecedented level of advertising effectiveness, both
in terms of the conception and production
of a message, as its organised broadcast.
Words in advertising strategy
The co-construction of the impact, the message
and its effectiveness, these are all the things that
text brings to an advertising image. Essential on
the scale of an advertising campaign, the imagetext relationship occupies a central place in the
general definition of communication strategies. This major preoccupation of advertising
professionals is at the origin of “brand charters”, reference documents in which the rules
are set for graphics and sometimes language to
guide the brand in all of its communication. A
brand’s linguistic signature, its vocabulary, in
fact participates in the construction of a longterm identity. Hermès’ online communication
that projects an always light and at times funny
“spirit” is built around a visual and linguistic
“platform”. In the iconic code there is the colour
orange as always, and shapes that connote
lightness, freedom (powder, wind, wings,
transparent materials…). For the linguistic
code, Hermès uses the lexicon of spontaneity
and naivety (exclamations, repetition of simple
phrases…)11. Eurostar’s advertising campaign
around the time of the London Olympics was
based around a recurrent and simple iconic
code (plain background, Greek frieze), and a
humorous linguistic code that relied heavily
on clichés (“Ici Londres: la France a gagné
une bataille” (This is London: France won
a battle), “Natation: nouvelle journée sous la
flotte à Londres”… (Swimming: another wet
day in London). In the end, words participate
in the construction of the “brand image”. The
type of text, the genre, tone, way of announcing,
content, register…all of these elements constitute the material with which advertising must
construct a message that has impact, that is
effective, that stands out, as each time the
brand expresses itself verbally it is an avatar
for the brand image, that serves as the context
for expression and to which it must, or not,
conform. The ethics and technique of words
As the objective of advertising is to convince
(to buy, to give, to believe, to vote…), and
the technical, visual and linguistic means
having been established, does everything go?
Can a reflection on the relationship between
image and text and their advertising effectiveness do without “ethics”? For Philippe
Breton, the democratic regimes of the 20th
century have always associated manipulation
through images and word with totalitarianism.
“Propaganda” was retrospectively associated
with Nazism and communism, while in
fact it occupied a central place in the communication methods of democratic regimes
during and even after the war12. However, the
sociologist proves that in a democracy, advertising, and political discourse, have under
no circumstances left behind the manipulative techniques such as the calculated lie
(announce an untruth to start a debate), or
the manipulative reframing of something
(“forcing” someone to accept an argument in
conclusion that he would never have accepted
in introduction)13.
Beyond the ethics of images in advertising,
the existence of which can seriously be argued
(image of women, childhood, addictions…),
advertising today cannot ignore the need for
ethics in words, if it thinks a language of
seduction (why not?) and conviction compatible with democratic free will. In fact, post
modernity is not irrational, but it supposes
that individuals can freely put their reason to
one side, so as to enter into an emotional form
of communion with those like them. This is
what has been happening for centuries in literature, where the reader accepts the “reader’s
pact” that the writer proposes so the reader
doesn’t question some of his or her choices
(the absurd, the reality…) in the name of art.
It is the responsibility of the advertising milieu
with regard to manipulative techniques, and
the responsibility of the politicians also, to
provide an education in free will that familiarises citizens with the manipulation of the
image and the word.
Vincent Guillot
Copywriter
1. “Les jeux restent ouverts”, Stratégies.fr, 21/09/2001
2. Online archive of the Cannes Lions: http://www.
canneslions.com/inspiration/past_grands_prix.cfm
3. Roland Barthes, “Civilisation de l’image”,
Recherches et débats du Centre catholique des
Intellectuels français, Paris, Arthème Fayard, cahier
no 33, Dec. 1960.
39
4. Marcel Gauchet, Le Désenchantement du monde.
Une histoire politique de la religion, Paris, Gallimard,
1985.
5. Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation, Paris,
Denoël, 1970.
6. Nil Ozcaglar Toulouse, Apport du concept d’identité à la compréhension du comportement du consommateur responsable : une application à la consommation
des produits issus du commerce équitable (The concept
of identity, Thesis at The University of Lille2 – Droit
et Santé, 2005.
7. Roland Barthes, “Rhétorique de l’image”, in
Communications, no 4, Paris, Seuil, 1964.
8. Laurence Bardin, “Le texte et l’image”, in
Communication et Langages, no 26, Paris, Retz,
1975.
9. Advertising re-targeting techniques based on behavioural marketing, that relies on data generated by
the web user to propose personalised messages.
10. A hashtag is a word or group of words that follow
the # in a message on Twitter. It is a filtering system
for all contributions on the same theme (key-word).
This technique is often used in advertising to take
advantage of an audience searching for contributions
using key-words.
11. Examples from the Hermès Newsletter: “Nouvelles
et fraîches”, “Faites-vous la malle”, “Un monde en
soie”…
12. Fabrice d’Almeida, “Propagande, histoire d’un mot
disgracié”, Mots. Les langages du politique, 2002.
13. Philippe Breton, La parole manipulée, Paris, La
Découverte, 2004.
40
research & publishing department
Six-monthly publication in French and English: IFM Research Report
The publication is an informative research tool in the aeras of fashion and design on an international level.
No 1. February 2004, The Immaterial
No 16. June 2011, On Luxury
No 2. June 2004, Luxury and Heritage
No 17. January 2012, Social Innovation
No 3. January 2005, Brands and Society
No 18. June 2012, Craftsmanship, the Hand
and Industrialisation
No 4. June 2005, Sustainable Development in
the Textile Industry
No 19. January 2013, Soft Power
No 5. January 2006, Intellectual Property
No 20. June 2013, Images in Question
No 6. June 2006, Fashion as a Topic for
Academic Research
No 7. January 2007, Customisation:
Fashion between Personalisation and
Normalisation
No 8. June 2007, Fashion as an Economic
Model
No 9. January 2008, Fashion and
Modernity
No 10. June 2008, Management of
Design
No 11. January 2009, Perfume
No 12. No English version available
No 13. No English version available
No 14. June 2010, Define Design: Between
use, Aesthetics and Consumption
No 15. No English version available
41
research & publishing department
six-monthly publication
june 2013
ISSN : 2264-3702
Publication Director
Olivier Assouly
[email protected]
Issue coordinated by
Jean-Michel Bertrand
Contributors
Vincent Guillot
Li-Jun Pek
Benjamin Simmenauer
In charge of publishing
Dominique Lotti
[email protected]
Institut français de la mode
36, quai d’Austerlitz 75013 Paris, France
T. 33 (0)1 70 38 89 89 F. 33 (0)1 70 38 89 00
www.ifm-paris.com