Thursday, August 28, 2014

You can wash and wash Gap’s black denim, but the Film Noir blood just won’t come out

It’s funny that Gap, with its new David Fincher ads, has had to go back to the 1940s and ’50s to find some semblance of “normal” for our stylistically fractured age.

In fact, Film Noir, from which Fincher lifts the Drive ad’s aesthetic, could be defined as a classic movie genre about people who are pushed far outside their normal—crime, sex and mayhem. But then nobody ever said fashion advertising makes sense. Wholesomeness and sleaze are hinted at in equal measure, as if the concoction averages out to achieve some predetermined sales metric.

“The uniform of rebellion and conformity,” declares the text on the screen, after the lithe young women in the Drive ad takes off her jeans and throws them into the front seat where two other handsome young people are sitting, looking quite serious. Not only do the words contradict each other, they don’t connect with the images, either. Disposing of the evidence after disposing of the body of a murdered lover in a river, as a noir heroine might do, hardly counts as “rebellion” (or conformity, for that matter). The image here is all desperate depravity, playing against the words of modern marketing.

Then the lightness of Fincher’s Stairs conjures all the sexual charge of a 1980s Sprite commercial done in ’50s jazz style.

The Fincher commercials create a mystery which is then answered (but not solved) by the celebrity endorsements of the print ads. The familiar faces of Anjelica Huston, Elisabeth Moss and Zosia Mamet provide recognition in lieu of meaning; they are talented actors filling in the holes of a dodgy script with their performances. You can sell tickets to any unholy mess if you have the right cast.


All the murk disassociates Gap’s “normal” from the normcore trend of hipsters dressing in unedgy clothing, even as the campaign capitalizes on it. “Normal” has insider meaning to those who follow style trends, but, at the same time, can be interpreted as an opportunity to be stylistically lazy, old-school "normal," for those who don't.


No wonder Fincher’s Gap ads retreat into history. Like a sci-fi time traveller who goes to the past to change the present, Gap must scour other eras to dislodge “normal” for the purposes of selling black denim. They have to make “normal” mean exactly nothing…. And, therefore, everything.

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