I chose Diesel’s SS16 campaign advertisement. Nicola Formichetti was the artistic director for this capsule, and decided to make the campaign less gender and more equal, endorsing non-binary fashion, as well as dressing models with androgynous looks.
I chose this advertisement in particular because it’s a beautiful picture, which at simple glance makes you believe the model is a woman, actually this model is a man. In other videos of the campaign the same model is shot in underwear including a bra, as well as holding hands with both men and women.
I believe the campaign had great ideas, but I feel like it was still playing it safe; yes, it did mix genders and promote equality, but at the moment of dress certain garments and especially accessories were exclusively worn by one specific gender, for example in the campaign you only see women with purses and only women have there shirts cropped or tied up; there’s a kind of discrepancy where there talking about no gender, because at the same time they’re not mixing shapes, cuts, colors, garments.
Susan Kaiser writes “A feminine borrowing or appropriation of masculine power seems to be more logical than a masculine borrowing or appropriation of female power. Who has something to gain, and who has something to lose (i.e., power)? The context of cross-dressing, in turn, seems to follow from this principle of hegemonic masculine power.” (Kaiser 2012, 345)
In the campaign when they portray genderless models, they dress them with dark colors and simple garments, and this is an issue I think many non-binary fashion brands have: they don’t allow themselves to mix garments structures that are “exclusive” for women or exclusive for men, they just create average, plain garments that don’t really combine both sides of what gender “is supposed to be” or represents.
I also noticed most non-binary campaigns tend to use a lot of text to express that they’re genderless, why? I don’t think it’s necessary to write on garments to state your idea. I think there’s way more layers to making non-binary fashion than what is usually seen as gender neutral fashion.
Works Cited:
Kaiser, Susan. 2012. Fashion and Cultural Studies. London: Berg.
Links:
