Fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who has documented streetwear through the decades, once described fashion as “the armour to survive the reality of everyday life”. Spanish fashion brand Zara may have taken it all too literally with its latest advertisement campaign for a line of jackets, featuring models in a bombed-out war zone, between mannequins with missing limbs and statues wrapped in white shrouds. Amid a tousled mess of corpses waiting to be buried, the metaphor for the Gaza genocide seems to be a deliberate and morbidly hideous marketing construct more than a genuine concern for the unhinged destruction that continues there. If anything, a European model trampling the ruins of war is deeply emblematic of Western greed that can appropriate human tragedy and cast itself in the role of a saviour, the kind that can end the clash of civilisations.
Though calls for boycott ultimately forced the brand to recall the campaign, with many pointing out how the company’s top echelons have been pro-Israel and had run-ins with Palestinian models, the fact is Zara seized the moment. Whether it was to make a statement about equalising Israeli victimhood or crying about Gaza, it made headlines enough to keep it in conversation. This was a perfect example of what many brand gurus call “moment marketing,” or using a news-making moment to get maximum splash value for the brand under the guise of spreading a message. In this case, Zara saw value even in negative publicity, what with cringe content getting monetised the fastest on social media. Not that Zara’s publicists didn’t anticipate the backlash. But then its Instagram account saw thousands and thousands of protest posts and comments beneath photos of the campaign, many with Palestinian flags, and “#BoycottZara” has been trending for a couple of days. Sure, it got unimaginable traction for a jacket collection that is no head-turner. But can that mediocrity be glossed over by the cheapest gimmickry? Can the death of children, women and the rampaging destruction of war ever be justified as an aesthetic statement or posited as a marketing opportunity?
The dead are not meant to be bartered away as spoils of war, objectified or commodified. And certainly not by a brand which has 2,000 stores in 96 countries, including Muslim ones. Since all of them do fairly well, with Zara’s market stretching from the US to Southeast Asia, it really didn’t need any heavy dressing or sensationalism to become a trending topic. For a brand which has made everybody feel the need to look beautiful and commands loyalists across generations, Zara’s move is not just inelegant but grossly insensitive. Any other move, be it sending food and clothes supplies to the Red Cross in the conflict zone, would have won it easier brownie points.
Zara seems to have taken down the posts just before the boycott threat by Palestine and other Arab countries seemed real enough to hit its revenue. However, it’s not the first brand to leverage a conflict zone for promotions and relevance in an image-conscious world that needs a talking point by the hour.
The US brand Miracle Mattress faced severe backlash for its “Twin Tower Sale” ad inspired by the 9/11 attack. During the Russia-Ukraine war, no less than Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife Zelenska referenced the war theme in the backdrop during a cover shoot for Vogue magazine. Needless to say, Zelensky, who had posited himself as a hero, was heavily criticised for glorifying his struggle at the expense of his citizens who could barely get by.
Controversial advertising has also built brands by chasing altruistic themes like equal rights, diversity and democracy. The trend was set by the Italian retail brand United Colors of Benetton in the late 1980s. While its diversity campaigns on equal rights were appreciated, it provoked public outrage when it used the photo of HIV activist David Kirby, captured on his deathbed. There was more: A soldier holding a human bone, a newborn infant still attached to its umbilical cord. But the one that drew the maximum flak was depicting the kiss between Joseph Ratzinger and the Imam of the Cairo Al Azhar Mosque, Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed El-Tayeb, for its “Unhate” campaign. Benetton made it political, raising uncomfortable questions in public discourse and creating a coalescing point for public opinion, spilling it out on the streets as the campaign was placed near the Vatican. But the “shock” value did little to soften the Western fear-mongering or stereotyping of Islam. The ’90s saw frontal sex storyboards — used by the likes of designers like Tom Ford for Gucci — becoming the metaphor of a new world order based on the WTO, a globalised world finding a parallel in more open conversations about gender, sex and the human body. Did these blunt the edge of toxic masculinity as it exists today?
While advertisers and fashion designers can argue themselves out of controversies, saying they exist in the realm of art, there are limits to that stretch of reasoning. A brand may reference socio-political issues but cannot cross the thin line between decency, empathy and public morality. And while makers may claim that fashion is an extension of the human condition, death can never be aspirational or get mixed up with the democracy of ideas. Let’s leave it to the gravitas it deserves.
rinku.ghosh@expressindia.com
