A tale of 2 Supre ads. Which do you prefer?

So, I’m sitting in my car behind a bus, looking at an ad for Supre Jeggings. The girl is very thin. Very thin. Her legs don’t touch. They bow outwards, like empty parentheses. And she’s wearing just jeggings (the fashion offensiveness of which are another post altogether) with no top and her hair covering her tiny breasts.

I don’t know how old she is (wait, I found out, apparently she’s 21) but she looks 14. Perhaps she was cast because she looks like a teenager? Who knows.

First up: no, being thin doesn’t preclude you from being beautiful or normal or healthy. Or sexy. Or fashionable. Not everyone who is thin has an eating disorder. Who knows the story of this particular model? I would never dare to presume.

But.

As it has been explained countless times by me and others, advertising and magazines don’t just create glamour and fantasy (and even if they did, I would dispute that an emaciated topless girl who looks no more than 14 is glamorous and let’s not even talk about whose fantasy she might be…). They calibrate what’s NORMAL. What’s desirable. What’s aspirational.

And to say that this image is those things? Well, I’m going to firmly disagree. Oh so firmly.

The ad that appeared on buses has a TV version as well. It goes like this:

According to industry website Mumbrella, here’s what happened next:

The ad used a young topless model to promote ‘jeggings’, a cross between jeans and leggings, and was slammed for inappropriately targeting young women.

Despite the advertiser challenging the ASB, stating that although “a sexy image”, it did not breach any form of discrimination or vilification towards women, the ads have been taken down.

One complaint read: “With only hair over her breasts and not completely covering them this picture immediately invokes the idea of pornography. I do not know if the woman is a real model or computer image but she looks about 15 years old – hence child pornography. I do not believe that such nudity should be forced upon the community.”

Complaints have also been made about a TV ad for Supre. The ad features a young girl thrusting her rear at the camera and rolling her tongue over her teeth. The ads are under investigation by the ASB.

Advocacy site Collective Shout have led the campaign against the ads, you can read about that here.

But it didn’t have to be that way. In South Australia and NZ, the ads above were not approved to run and a different jeggings campaign ran on outdoor media there. It looked like this:

Yeah, it’s still way re-touched and she’s still thin but to my mind, it’s many shades of better than the ad that’s caused the controversy. What do you think?

It also raises an interesting point about certain stores and who shops there. Apparently, Supre has moved its target market upwards, away from tweens and teens to the more lucrative 18-35 market. Hey, I shop there. I also shop at Sportsgirl.

Is that inappropriate? Do you feel self-conscious about WHERE you shop? Or doesn’t it matter what the label says, so long as you look and feel OK?