Cheerio London, Guten Tag Munich
May 2, 2005Well, London is no more. I am pleased to report that for our last day, Celia and I were pleasantly surprised with the Big Smoke. We had a spot of afternoon tea (which in turn kept us up all night) and checked out the uber-cool Old Operating Theatre Museum. More on those lovely sites to come. But for now, I wanted to leave y’all with an ad that was all over the Underground (click for larger image):
I know the picture is not the best, but hopefully you can still see why this ad blew me away. If this ad were in the US, Dove wouldn’t sell one single bottle of this stuff because people would say these women were fat. Now, there’s certainly an assload of super-skinny Brits out there, but just the fact that popularly they seem to have such a more realistic idea of what women’s bodies ought to look like was amazing to me. I tended to think this whole “the anorexic look is cool” was a Western trend, not some peculiarly American thing. And it’s funny too since Americans are so much more obese than Europeans in general.
Anyway, just something to think about. That is, until the Germans do something to amaze and bewilder me…
I’d tend to think that, to americans, this *IS* anorexic looking :)
I don’t believe brits think that the standard of beauty is this little chubbiness. I however think that this is an advertisment. And people grew tired of ads they wouldn’t relate too. When a model says “look I’m beautiful because I used this or that lotion”, hardly anybody buys it(buy like “believing”).
Maybe the fact that girls tend to get fatter totally disconnected them from the old skinny standard of beauty. In england the “fat people rate” is about to catch up the USA’s one. And we, In France, are on the way too…
Comment by david — May 3, 2005 @ 3:41 am
Okay, those women are nowhere near anorexic looking! They have hips and thighs and stomachs. Have you seen the twiggy looking women in American ads? These girls would never cut it. Come on Kim, Cecelia. Someone back me up here.
Even if it’s just that the Brits want people they can relate to in their ads, it doesn’t matter how little women can relate in the US, they still won’t see normal looking ladies in underwear ads, or beauty ads, or whatever.
Comment by master — May 7, 2005 @ 5:34 am
hey, i was reading what you’ve written about this advertisement, it isn’t meant to represent the women look beautiful and slim, but if you look in the bottom right of the picture it has the skin product “Dove”. the company is trying to tell the viewer that you do not need to be a mdel to have good looking skin, you just have to use their product, personally i think that it is a good advertisement.
Comment by shaun — November 12, 2005 @ 11:39 am
Yes, I got that the ad was trying to show that “normal women” can look good and I certainly have no objections to that. In fact, I think we should see a lot more normal women in ads and in the media. I don’t get why we see starving chestless waifs selling us sexy lingerie, etc. My point was mostly that I was surprised to see a company take a risk and put up women like this to sell a beauty product. I really didn’t think people would go for it (regardless of whether they should or not) But a few months after I wrote this, I realized that I had to eat my words–these as were all over Chicago for a while. Maybe this is a sign of change…
Comment by master — December 24, 2005 @ 8:24 pm