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A colleague in my ‘Writing with Media’ class recently presented on the topic of advertising and its different forms. I seemed to be most surprised when Tom Ford’s advertisement to promote his new fragrance appeared with a bold and provocative image of a bottle of his fragrance wedged between a woman’s thighs. Overwhelmed with phallic symbolism and exploitation of a woman’s body, I couldn’t seem to understand how such an ad even slightly defined high fashion. My astonishment was only exacerbated when another slide appeared later: Dolce & Gabbana’s advertisement with a scene evoking a gang rape. What disturbed me most was not the exploitation of and offense to women—a phenomenon that is not relatively new in the world of business, music videos and ads—but rather, the fact that such was done by the largest, most recognized, and most profitable luxury fashion brands in the world. To me, it also seemed that D&G was using an explicit degradation of women to sell to women. In the twenty-first century and in the world’s most developed countries, even the largest, most prestigious luxury fashion brands continue to employ explicit sexism and exploit women to promote their products, with the assumption that all women believe in the necessity of being pleasing to men, attractive, and sexually-desired. Such images and advertisements are perhaps what largely undermine the hard-earned achievements and continued struggle toward equity in gender relations. They promote not products but the long-held and demeaning misconceptions of the nature of women and womanhood.
