Marc Ecko Manufacturing recently started a degrading, sexually explicit ad campaign featuring the slogan, “hot girls make great clothes.” After seeing a small pop-up ad for Ecko on Facebook, I decided to further explore what seemed like an offensive joke. I went to http://www.eckomfg.com and was immediately greeted by a series of videos and photos of “factory workers” wearing black string bikinis. The company’s mission statement is quite informative, stating, “At Ecko Manufacturing we do things differently, we make jeans with love... We only hire the sexiest women on the planet because as everyone knows, hot girls make great clothes. Every pair of jeans comes to the customer from the gentle, smooth hands of a highly skilled employee, who has injected every inch of the garment with love. Love, sex, and jeans. What else do you need, really?” I wonder what the underpaid laborers in a third-world country would think of these sweaty, nearly-naked bodies taking credit for all of their back-breaking work.
The women shown in this campaign are of different ethnicities (primarily light-skinned), but their figures are virtually identical-- slim and toned, yet large-breasted. (Each employee has a profile on the website with suggestive photos, her body’s measurements, and a brief, innuendo-laden biography.) These females fit perfectly into our society’s standard definition of “beautiful” (and by “beautiful” we often just mean “sexually desirable”). Ecko’s campaign is obviously targeted towards heterosexual men, after all, they are the group wearing the denim oozing with “love.” Women who are looking for a carefree job or a work environment similar to a never-ending slumber party may also be enthralled by these ads. This type of advertising could certainly contribute to the increasing obsession with body image, dieting, and plastic surgery; the campaign effectively relays the idea that women should look good, no matter what they are doing. Even if no men are present in the “factory,” images of the female bodies are recorded and dispersed in print sources and online. Marc Ecko certainly wouldn’t want their factory workers to be unappealing to the male gazer.
More disturbing than the campaign itself is the fact that some people think this scenario is completely real. Naive buyers may believe that their jeans actually are made by these “hot girls”; they are entirely unaware that the scantily-clad women don’t manufacture anything except a lie, an intricate dreamworld. Mike Golden, Ecko’s chief marketing officer said that the “[hot girls] campaign allows...customers to gain insight into...unique production process and techniques." Gain insight? Really? Before watching the video of thong-wearing sweatshop worker grinding metal and dancing amidst the sparks, I guess I had no idea where designer jeans actually came from.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-MlbJ6c73c&feature=user
1 comment:
So now you know why I quit working at Ecko/Complex.
This pretty much sums it up!
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