Anleu

Katya Anleu
Ashley Humphries
ENC1101
March 22, 2015
Do you want to know a secret?
The Kenzo 2014/2015 Winter campaign advertising shot by
Pierpaolo Ferrari is said to capture both the photographers creativity
and the brands uniqueness hand in hand. The certain color scheme
and fantasy events clearly attract the fashion groupies who are
constantly refreshing their favorite fashion blog in order to be the first
to check out what weird trend is in this season. This particular Kenzo
advertising was chosen to be the main advertising for this seasons
collection, and its continuous appearance on billboards and magazines
caught my eye. This advertising itself is proposing a mystery waiting to
be solved. The use of neon colors highlights both the models facial
expressions and the abstract environment transmitting a dark feeling
to the viewer. Just by looking at this advertising, the unexplained body
parts popping out of black holes and certain body parts being hidden
underground bring attention to the fact that the brand is purposely
making the viewer look at this and try to uncover the hidden meaning.
The idea of unexplained creation that is happening all over this
advertising led me to reveal the truth of the secrets that fashion
companies touch little upon: child labor and animal abuse.

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The main theme I kept throughout the changes I made on the

original advertisement was the color scheme. The additions I made are
purposely within the same color scheme in order to emphasize the fact
that Kenzo believes that the truth is as easy as blending it in and
leaving the matter hidden. Similar to the original, the anti-ad wants to
appeal to the same audience of fashion junkies. This anti-ad wants to
transmit the truth of Kenzo as a company and praised fashion as a
whole to its consumers.
One of the two major additions in my anti-advertisement is the
little kid, who happens to blend in with the green background, working
on the purse. The hand popping out of the wall represents all children
hiding under the shadow of the company. The darkness of where the
hand is appearing represents the developing countries full of unfairly
paid workers, who are forced to work. It is a known fact that most of
these unpaid workers are children who work under hard conditions,
trying to earn enough money to not starve. This is known as child
labor. Did you know that the biggest industry to pay off child labor is
the fashion industry? Makes sense, to hire foreign people who will work
under low wage conditions and still do a phenomenal job creating what
will be marketed as a 4 thousand dollar purse. I purposely chose to
expose this problem in the Kenzo adverting because Kenzo, just like
Armani or Marc Jacobs, refuses to communicate information on labor
and working conditions. This brings up the idea that if they were in fact

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not involved with child labor, they would have no problem sharing such
information. For example Stella McCartney is a member of the ETI. This
is a community that has credibility in labor unions, and is interested in
improving the work conditions being worked on for the company. (How
Sustainable Is Kenzo?) As the majority of renowned fashion brands
continue to be foreign, the power of currency change has allowed them
to faux the wage amount deserved by workers. Most of these children
who are put under sweatshops in developing countries are between
the ages of 5 and 15. (Goodweave, Robin R.)
In 2013, the U.S. Department of Labors Bureau of International
Labor Affairs reported found the worst kinds of child labor in 143
countries sourcing from countries in Asia, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia
and Nepal. (McGeown, Jason.) What keeps these children employed is
the clothing and textile industry, which put children to work
unreasonable hours and in unreasonable conditions. The report states
that children face hard and dangerous days, surrounded by huge
machinery that not only can kill them if gone wrong, but also pollutes
the air these children breathe. They are expected to carry heavy
amounts all to produce goods that will sell for 5 times the price they
are getting paid for. These Children are forced to drop out of school in
order to concentrate on producing more merchandise and kept from a
life of no worries, as it should be around that age.
If you look closely at my anti-advertisement, you can see that

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the brand KENZO has whips hidden into the font. These whips
represent the forced involuntary labor done by children in developing
countries. This is a problem that is continuously committed by fashion
industries that have found a way to produce their products for cheap
wages. The whip is held by KENZO and many other fashion industries
that abuse children and whip them into labor.
The stem of the letter E in the brand name KENZO is the shape
of a butcher knife. This knife represents another fraud committed in
the fashion world: animal abuse for the sake of the muse. In my antiadvertisement I uncover the truth behind animal use in fashion
companies. Fashion is known to overprice a lot of garments, yet the
higher prices go to the pieces made from animal skin or leather. In my
anti-advertisement, I placed an alligator coming out of a dropped vase
in order to create the affect that animals are killed for the use of their
exotic and expensive skin, and the rest of the animal such as its organs
are probably hidden in vases. I placed an alligator in a swirled position
in order to look as if it were coming out of the dropped vase, which
makes the alligator look as if he has finally escaped and it is crawling
out of the vase before it is skinned to death. There is something about
the position of the alligator that gives off a desperate vibe which
becomes a problem when you see that on his body, there is a pattern
of a soon to be handbag. This desperate look and cookie cut out bag
create a negative feeling towards the company KENZO because it

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makes you feel how the alligator is probably feeling. That is the outline
of a KENZO handbag that is ranked at $850. The beauty of such bags
blinds fashion consumers that they forget that they are paying for the
extinction of certain animals. The price reflects how rare that animal is
now a day. The alligator is pink in order to tie the idea that fashion
brands make their flaws, between the labor and the murder, seem so
easily unseen.
The abstract idea of having the models stepping into a black hole
and having legs pop out of the right hand side of the wall gave me the
idea of the bloody shoes. We cannot see exactly what these models are
stepping on, yet when you see the black shoes coming out of the
similar setting, you complete the picture. The unfinished human bodies
add to the infinite illusion of the black hole that allows the secrets of
the company to be exposed. I splattered the seen booties with blood to
bring awareness to the fact that the company, represented by the
models, are stepping on animals and killing them. It is right under
our noses, but fashion mania has blinded us, which is indicated by the
unseen feet.
After staring the original advertisement for a long time, I realized
the stares of the models are in the middle purposely to intimidate the
viewer. These haunting eyes make you, the viewer; want to look at the
advertisement corner to corner in order to come to an understanding
as to why they seem so villainous. That hand handing what is probably

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a very expensive bag, coming out of nowhere draws your attention

back to the look on the girls face and represses the thought that
maybe that arm belongs to a child in Cambodia, sweating and working
their ass off for no money whatsoever. Parallel to her eyes are his,
which are conveniently next to the set of legs popping out of a dark
space. This to me foreshadows the secret of what companies are doing
to animals: literally stepping on their heads and killing them for their
exotic skin. The purpose of my anti-advertisement is to unmask the
analysis of the original advertisement and make KENZOs wickedness
more obvious.
The whole idea I got from the original advertisement is that even
fashion; a luxurious industry has the deepest darkest secrets. By the
look on the models faces, this secret is an untouched subject that
intimidates you, the viewer, to even think about. Their piercing eyes
stare right at you as if they were saying, Think about what youre
going to say. Hopefully after seeing my anti-advertisement, you
realize that KENZO is one of the many brands that practice child labor
and animal abuse. The unevenness in the girls yellow skirt is due to a
patch of cow skin directly sewn on. This emphasizes that indeed,
animal fur and leather are components of the garments. We finish off
the advertisement where we began, the eyes of the models looking as
us as if they are meaning to say: They know.
Ideally, this advertisement would go into an ELLE magazine or

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VOGUE. Locating this advertisement in these magazines not only would

attract the audience I am reaching out to, but also it would change how
the whole magazine is seen. These magazines come out with monthly
issues that fill up 300 pages with high fashion advertising. If this ad
were to appear in here, it would stimulate your brain to look at the
other 130 printed advertisements differently. This anti-advertisement
would help the viewer uncover the truth from every other
advertisement and maybe even change how they feel about these
world known brands committing fraud.
If I could do this advertisement any different, I wouldve
definitely have given it a more Photoshop feel to it. I would have
incorporated a cows face into the girls skirt and make it seem as if the
cows body was now shaped into a skirt. I would have also moved the
left wall over to the right in order to create a scene for that hand
popping out of the dark hole. It would have been directly connected to
a childs hand inside of a sweatshop. The color scheme would have
been a grey and realistic in order to create a statement by the drastic
change in colors. I would do the same with the right hand wall, and
have kids holding up the model through the hole, in order to get her
booties in the shot. This would emphasize the fact that without the
children in these countries, there would be no KENZO.

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Bibliography
Goodweave, Robin R. "Textile Industry: Child Labor Still Common." - Fashion.
FashionUnited Group, 8 Oct. 2013. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.
"How Sustainable Is Kenzo ?" Kenzo and Sustainability: E-label. Rank a Brand
Foundation, 28 June 2013. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.
McGeown, Jason. "Latest Product News." Verisk Maplecroft. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr.
2015.