Advertising CK One.
An investigation into representations of gender in advertising.
Contents. Orginal Averts
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Switching Roles
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Use of androgynous/ Genderqueer figures
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Using abstract images of people. No use of people within ads.
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Original Adverts.
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The first adverts released positioned this fragrance as a unisex frangrance ‘for a man or a woman’, but later this was revised to read ‘for all forever’. While the strapline now included people who may not fit the binary, their images stilldepict cis, heteronormative people. 3
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Switching Roles. My first practical experiment took the typical roles associated with men and with women and switched them, to show opposite traits to those which the models are assumed to possess by virtue of their gender presentation. The first image depicts a woman showing her physical strength, and the second is a passive, nude male, whose gaze does not meet that of the viewer. The issue with this is that it still depicts gender stereotypes, the only difference being the bodies they are applied to. Also, this concept reinforces the idea that there are only two genders. The only positive aspect is that these traits are shown as flexible in their application to gendered bodies.
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Use of androgynous/ genderqueer figures. The second idea I tried was using somewhat androgynous models. While this does highlight gender non-conformity and non-binary models of gender more broadly, these images only show certain people in certain situations, they cannot possibly represent all non-binary identities. Images that toy with gender as presentation in this way must do so via established markers of masculine or feminine appearance. Models assigned female at birth and presented masculine of center have become shorthand for palatable, attractive androgyny. This does little to challenge orthodox ideas about gender, instead it constructs a pristine image of idealized androgyny from repurposed gender markers.
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Using astract images of people. In the previous experiment, I realised that using images of a few selected people would never represent the diversity of gender fully. I thought about using abstract images of bodies and body parts that are generally universal and relatable for the audience. The idea here is to highlight similarities between people, rather than exagerating the differences between bodies, as many adverts do. I thought this was a better idea, but still flawed. I spent some time trying to source abstract images of bodies where establishing the assigned birth sex of the model pictured was difficult. It became clear that gender stereotyping is programmed to such an extent that most people gender, and by extension, sex bodies based on whatever clues they can find, and that this has become a subconscious and involuntary process for many. While this kind of advert is perhaps the best attempt out of these experiments, there is no guarantee that the images will not be gendered and sexed by the viewer, which carries over to the product itself.
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No use of people within ads. The final practical experiment was more of a spoof than a serious one. Taking into account what I’d discovered creating the previous adverts, I realised that the only way I could avoid the image being sexed or gendered by the viewer would be to not use images of people at all. This advert strips everything away but the product, advertising it based on exactly what it is. If adverts avoid using anything other than the product itself, the only way the product could potentially suggest gender or sex would be it’s packaging. However, the CK One packaging is so minimal that it can’t necessarily be assigned to a gender or sex. The issue with this type of advertising is that marketing in this way is a thing of the past. Brands are used to advertising their product on merits other than the product itself, a brand that tried to take this approach today would probably not succeed. Instead, we can only hope for better representation of sex and gender in advertising in future, even if there is no way of perfecting it.
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Alcohol Denat, Water (Aqua/Eau), Fragrance (Pafum), Acrylates, Octylacrylamide Copolymer, Butylphenyl Methylpropiona, Citral, Citronellol, Coumarin, Evernia Prunatri (Oakmoss) Extract,Geraniol,Hydrolyzed Jojoba Esters, Isoeugenol, Limonene, Linalool,Tetrasodium Eau De Toilettea
Calvin Klein It’s Perfume.
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by Kirsty Shaw