Bjornborg to love you...

Here we have a two-page advertisement for what seems to be love (but is actually for underwear) from the popular fashion magazine Nylon. I am not a reader of the magazine, so what I can say about the audience is pretty limited. From as far as I can tell, readers of Nylon are defined by the magazine as being predominantly white, female, middle/upper middle/upper class and most definitely heterosexual. Naturally, what I understood as the audience that the magazine addresses is what I garnered from the images in the magazine. But the fact is that anyone can read this (for instance, this is not my magazine, but it is the property of another male)... there is no specific audience other than the one the magazine tries to demarcate for itself.

The ad itself is blatantly heterosexist as all other human beings present in the images are shadows, leaving only two scantily clad human beings that are truly "alive". Not only that, but the surroundings are defined as being Other by the appearance of a Chinese newspaper in both pages. Both of the models in the ad are white, young, but my reading of the image in terms of class is a little more hazy. When I first saw this image the first thing that came to mind was "BLADE RUNNER" when I was looking at the woman sitting on the street corner in the rain on the right. Her umbrella and big hair brought me back to a particular scene in the movie where a sexual vaudeville performer is chased down by Harrison Ford and exterminated. So there was already a relationship in my mind between the occupation of the character in the film (as a member of the lower class, since she is, in essence, selling herself with her act) and the image of this woman in the ad.

But what struck me as most fascinating about this ad is its formal qualities. 

First off, the reader is presented with two very different spatial locations. The locations are split by the framing of the magazine pages. However, the rainy environs of the images, as well as the Chinese newspapers, imply that these two people are at least in the same general area as each other. In the corner of the first image is written "There is someone for everyone" and then a web address for what I assume to be an online dating site run by the company (no doubt to get more information on its "audience"). 

At first it seems like the producers actually care about us poor, lonely humanoids. How kind of them to try to bring us together with this website! But let us think more critically about what is really going on here... Here are two people, both wearing the same underwear outside. What the ad is really saying is "There is someone for everyone... everyone who has bought this underwear!" This is proven by the ad through its own construction. Although the two models are portrayed as being in two spatially disparate locations, the similarity of their Bjornborg underwear joins them together (in the same way that their dating site supposedly will... yeah, right). Ironically, the very improbability of people walking around in their underwear in a rainy city foregrounds how improbable it is that buying this underwear will get you that special someone. This ad is playing with human fantasies and desires like crazy.