Sex after death. Advertising combines humanity’s two prime obsessions.

From WebUrbanist: “Guerrilla Art Versus Guerrilla Advertising: What’s the Difference?”

Subtopia enthusiastically writes about Amnesty International’s Counter Terrorism With Justice campaign — a scaled replica of a Guantanamo Bay maximum security isolation cell traveling the country. Visitors are encouraged to experience isolation and share their thoughts in video (Flickr set.) Great post on the “symbolic implication of the replica cell itself, as if it were a mobile unit of detention being put on real display at a trade show or something, selling its exportability, strapped down on the back of some shipping vehicle as simply as any old box of trade goods, or a prefab architecture kit.” Amnesty has done such a great job using public space to deliver their message. This follows their famous (and best campaign) using transparent billboards as an example of to effectively get the message out to a mass audience.

“Your mom build fighter jets.” These are some incredibly funny parodies of Canadian Club’s lame “your dad drank it” ads. (via.)

A gallery of earthquake-related public service ads for the Red Cross Society of China. (via.)

Rip Mix Stitch: Free Fashion Culture

What would happen if the Gossip Girl cast were to design an ARG? It might turn out like middlebrow-luxury handbag house Coach’s college outreach campaign. It starts with a fictional girl who lost her Coach bag, complete with a fake myspace page, fake facebook, and fake blog!

coachad.jpgVisitors to the blog (encounterheidi.blogspot. com), which drew more than 15,000 hits after the posters went up, learned that the bag was a gift from an ex-boyfriend serving in Iraq.

One day, Cee blogged that another student had returned the bag. A day later, she wrote that on closer inspection, the bag was a fake and she had been scammed for the reward.

Outraged (”EFFING COUNTERFEIT!” she wrote), Cee blogged that she was researching the world of counterfeit goods. She discovered, she wrote, that they’re linked to criminal activity, child labor and terrorism. She even posted a video to YouTube about counterfeiting, “Break the Chain,” and organized an anti-counterfeiting event on campus that drew a crowd with free food and T-shirts.

But here’s the thing about Cee: She’s fake, too. A public relations class at Hunter invented her last spring. The course was funded by a $10,000 grant from Coach and was part of a college outreach campaign by the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a trade group that includes Coach and other brands like Apple, Levi Strauss & Co., Louis Vuitton and Rolex.

But it gets dirtier. This is the work of a teacher and class at Hunter College.

A well-known sculptor in the 90s painted fast food containers with the Louis Vuitton monogram. I can’t remember who it was but if I could, this right here would be an insightful paragraph comparing his art with Takashi Murakami’s Louis Vuitton store at the Brooklyn Museum, with some added remarks on how and why the times have changed.

Since then, Adbusters and street artists have expanded on the concept. Now Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles (via) has a solo show for Peter Gronquist with designer labels on everything from chainsaws to electric chairs:

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A writer from Jezebel once sewed designer labels in lower-priced clothes and asked for offers from consignment shops.

The Final Tally:

  • H&M dress (original price, $39.99) masquerading as Isaac Mizrahi: 2 for 3, with highest offers of $130 and $190.

  • Club Monaco jacket (original price, $199) masquerading as Richard Tyler: 2 for 3, with offers of $90 and $110.
  • Club Monaco skirt ($129) masquerading as Donna Karan: 2 for 3, with offers of $78 and $135.
  • Club Monaco sweater ($99) masquerading as Calvin Klein: 1 for 3, with offer of $50.

Ours is the first generation that truly defines itself by brands, as Rob Walker’s new book “Buying In” explains. But reputation alone doesn’t explain it, nor does personal identification with the product marketing. When it comes to luxury goods, there has to be some added magic to the product. That’s why no matter how many counterfeits flood the market, Louis Vuitton can command a high price.

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In “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Dana Thomas reports 40 percent of all Japanese own a Louis Vuitton-monogramed item. Her book is nostalgic for the days when high-end good meant quality, patiently crafted items that might last a lifetime. As LVMH changed hands, their standards declined. Meanwhile, expensive seemed attainable to those without qualms carrying credit card debt. Veronica Horwell writes in a review, “significant percentages of the global population have caught, or been taught, the mad idea that they can acquire the signifier of modernity, immunity, celebrity, identity - Thomas can’t or won’t define what the fantasy they’re after is - for the price of a Prada bag, or failing that, a Gucci wallet.”

Notice no one really pokes fun at Hermès, as they do Gucci, Prada, and LV. Although they charge twice more than Gucci and Louis Vuitton combined ($38,000,) there is no branding and no advertising to the masses. Unless you are in a select tax-bracket, a Birkin bag is understood to be impossibly out of reach. Writes Globe and mail’s Leah McLaren:

Earlier this year, I had my first-ever celebrity-bag sighting. I was eating lunch alone at an overpriced hotel when a cosmetically altered matron of indeterminate years pulled up a stool beside me, ordered a $22 glass of champagne and placed her black crocodile Birkin bag on the bar for all to see.

I couldn’t help staring and she didn’t seem to mind. No one spends $40,000 on a purse to hide it, after all. Sure, I’d clamped eyes on a few Birkins before (in the window of Hermès, on the arms of fashion editors at the shows in Milan and Paris), but this was my first sighting in the wild.

She’s reviewing Michael Tonello’s new book about getting rich off of buying and returning Birkin bags. How is that possible? you might wonder. Well, you can get some pocket change, as I have in the past, buying broken designer bags, taking them to tailors, and selling them. Ebay facilities so many new ways of commerce.

One Ebay, you can even buy a fake “vintage” bag. A few years ago, I came across the sort of deal one can only find via internet auction. Stuffed in a trunk “lot” full of some now-deceased grandmother’s treasures, was a vintage Gucci handbag, unmarked in the title by the seller, worth about $200. So I placed a bid for far less than that, planning to resell it and make a tiny profit. When the bag arrived and looked like it couldn’t be older than the age of the sweatshop workers in whichever third-world country it came from. I donated it to salvation army.

The irony is my fake is in far better condition than a real vintage would be. It has no scratches or damages; but feels dead in my hands. Why do I like vintage in the first place but for the totemism; the feeling that I am participating in the history of an object. The other irony is that Gucci’s quality has declined over the years. The material they use is easy to replicate, they have long since abandoned the sturdy canvas that made their items lovely. Yet, the prices are still the same.

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For sale at the Brooklyn Museum.

Right now monogram-bag makers fight counterfeits for trademark infringement or dilution. But the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (pending in the Senate) offers stricter standards. Designers may register their clothes with the U.S. Copyright Office for about $100 each. The law would protect the patterns for three years.

“Fashion will become very boring if this legislation passes,” Omid Moradi of sometimes knockoff-er Faviana, tells Fortune, “All this will do is create a backlog of lawsuits - the only ones who will win are the lawyers.”

“[Pattern marking is] a craft, not an art. There is only so much you can do with a silhouette, a collar, a drape.” Ilse Metchek, executive director of the California Fashion Association, told the LA Times. “This act is a double-edge sword, because designers think they’re going to be able to protect themselves from knock-off artists, but they are going to have to make absolutely sure there is pure, unadulterated originality in everything they do…Wouldn’t anyone run afoul of things eventually?” says Ivan Arnold, co-owner of LA-based Tokitoki.

It is a particularly dumb move by one industry that is still doing well in this economy. Tech Dirt explains fashion thrives because of lack of IP protection.:

Fashion is a trend industry. You need a trend to make something popular and the only real way to get a trend is when designers are copying each other. Without that ability trends don’t show up, and the demand for the latest “trend” dries up. On top of that, having copycat designs on the lower end actually act as a “signal” that a high-end designer is on to something. It helps prop up the price of those name-brand designs, while making similar copycat designs more affordable to a lower end of the market that would never buy the high end designers. It’s both a way of establishing a larger market and doing price discrimination.

For another example of this read Daniel Pink’s cover story in Wired a few months back about the fan market for Manga.

Currently designers have the option of filing for patents, but there are ways of outwitting copycats without getting lawyers involved:

Meanwhile, some labels are trying to outmaneuver the pirates. Copycat designs often show up in stores within weeks of a fashion show, while the authentic clothes don’t arrive for months. Halston, which is owned by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, is one of those pushing to make its catwalk fashions available right away, on the online retail site Net-a-Porter.com, in hopes that shoppers will choose immediate gratification over price savings.

Weitzman and others are making some of their couture designs a little more haute so pirates can’t rip them off at all. For his spring collection, Weitzman created unusually shaped heels for a $299 shoe called the Bowden-Wedge. He is also experimenting with materials such as titanium and steel, which he says are too expensive for the knockoff artists. If they try something cheaper, like painted wood, the heels will snap. “I used to make whimsical and outrageous shoes for display only,” Weitzman says. “For the first time, they’re becoming part of sellable footwear.”

But why stop at fashion? Might Marianne Faithful come along and request I grow my bangs out? Maybe Nicole Kidman could protect plastic surgeons from copying her most-requested nose. For all the talk of our celebrity (and spawn)-obsessed culture, I am delighted to see Baby Jolie isn’t even first page Google result for “shiloh”. Nevertheless, her babymama (unsuccessfully) sued a perfumer for using a name that happened to be the same as her child’s.

Previously:

Related links:

Posted by Joanne on May 6, 2008 | Link

“Focus group hypnosis is increasingly becoming a ’secret weapon’ for Fortune 500 companies… Once they are in an ‘alpha’ state of relaxation, the hypnotist will ask them individually about topics like the first time they experienced a product. ” - Brandweek. Adverlab wants to know, “Has anyone tried administering thiopental sodium (truth serum)?” Proposed explanations for hypnosis are often pseudoscientific, but it’s no pseudoscience. A West Sussex hypnotist recently went without anaesthetic for his 83-minute operation. And who knew self-hypnosis videos abound on youtube?

Amnesty International has run some of the most haunting ad campaigns in history. These transparent-seeming signs are unfortgettable, as is this video called “The Execution.” A new video reenacts waterboarding.

The New Wave of Neural-Advertising in Michael Crichton’s “Looker”

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Michael Crichton was a promising young director until his books started receiving Hollywood check-sized advances. His 1981 movie “Looker,” starring Albert Finney as a Los Angeles plastic surgeon and Breck-girl Susan Dey, (his love interest, disturbingly enough); sways like a sailor aboard a sinking ship, from misogynistic to feminist and then back again. Take some pre-Tron computer graphics, a time and space-defying raygun, and throw in, as the IMDB plot keywords states, a “Body Landing On Car” and you’ve got a middling techno-fetishing new wave thriller. (The trailer is here, if you are willing to sit through the IMDB ads.)

The L.O.O.K.E.R gun isn’t just a raygun but time-paralysis stunner than magically stops a person in time, giving the shooter invisibility. In retrospect I wonder if that might have influenced my favorite TV show in elementary school, Out of this World. Maybe it’s DARPA’s inspiration for “LED Incapacitator.” Some bad guys are using the Light Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses gun on the models at a Los Angeles agency, as they undress in their highrise apartments. The “Body Landing On Car” is actually a pretty amazing stunt with a lanky model in her undies falling out the window five flights on top of a tan Camero, post-stun. Is it suicide or…????

These same models once used Albert Finney’s services, although he told them, with no ulterior motives, that they were beautiful just they way they were. Still the numbers don’t lie. The modeling agency has the scientific tools to quantify a woman’s looks. For some reason models can’t plateau at near perfection– a 99.4 will eventually be a 99.2 again — and that is precisely why the models need to be die.

looker_shot4l.jpg The music is great with a theme by a Kim Carnes-soundalike and a Muzak-version of Goblin instrumentals when the pretty girls are under watch. Lots of close-ups on doors with card swipes and plenty of digital animation — that neon-on-black 80s 3D-modeling. It was the first film to create a realistic computer generated human. It was also the first movie to create 3-D shading with a computer (via.)

In my favorite scene, the modeling agency madam shows Finney a commercial with a dot representing his visual fixation (this is of course the least plausible science, as everyone knows now men look at crotches.)

“I have this feeling like I live in the future. I think things have happened when they haven’t yet. It’s just so self-evident they will happen that I begin to act like they’ve already happened,” Crichton says in the commentary. I have to agree with Dan Swensen’s take on Cyberpunk Review, “Looker seems both surprisingly relevant and woefully dated at the same time.”

You have to give Crichton credit for the paranoia and early critique of neural-advertising. The idea of a focus group deciding the shape of a woman’s nose, just likely they would the font or color of an advertisement, is a scary one.

Plus, his film was one of the first to discuss plastic surgery, which was widely understood but a very private, potentially embarrassing matter. Ironically, none of the models in the movie could make it in LA today, where the advent of airbrushing has created demand for the most airbrushed-looking women. There is no such think as a perfect looking woman, which is why “99.4s” often worry about their looks a heck of a lot more than us civilians.

Crichton says he directed movies between writing books, because writers were advised against writing “more than one book every three years” (those were the days!) When you consider Looker, Coma, and the really fantastic Westworld, it’s not out of bounds to think he could have been, if not Ridley Scott, than maybe the sci-fi Brian De Palma.

Related links:

  • Cyberpunk Review, which has a ton of lost classics (have you heard of “Magdalena’s Brain“? “Texhnolyze“?)
  • More on Out of this World from YouTube (very funny clip)
  • News on the Westworld remake (Breach writer/director Billy Ray is currently attached.)

Posted by Joanne on Apr 10, 2008 | Link

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