Fashion advertising is a branch within the advertising field that focuses on creating promotions for the fashion industry. The fashion industry has a number of unique needs from a promotional perspective, which can make it challenging and exciting to work for as an advertiser, and some of the most famous advertising campaigns in history have been campaigns for major fashion houses. Advertising in this field includes ads for garments, purses, shoes, and similar products of fashion houses, along with high end perfumes.
How can fashion advertising promote fashion brands?
The goal of fashion advertising is to connect potential customers with the brand, as with other forms of advertising. As with other brands, fashion ads promote a lifestyle just as much as the product, teaching consumers to associate a particular brand with a specific lifestyle and social class.
The tone and content of ads may vary, depending on which market the company is trying to target, ranging from very wealthy individuals to people with less disposable income who could still be a valuable customer base.
Print advertising appears in many magazines and some newspapers in major fashion markets like New York City and Paris. Ads can also appear in the form of television commercials, billboards, and so forth, and many fashion houses also rely on the free publicity that comes from seeing their products on celebrities and high profile individuals in the news.
A designer who gets his or her garments onto movie starlets walking down the red carpet, for example, will see an uptick in demand from people who see the designer’s clothes, shoes, and accessories such as jewelry and purses.
In addition to working with fashion houses such as Gucci and Yves St. Laurent, fashion advertisers also work with retailers who carry clothes and accessories. Stores use advertising to promote themselves and the products they sell. Whether high or low end, department stores want to present consumers with images of a specific lifestyle, using ads which tell a story to appeal to consumers and encourage them to buy the company’s products.
Often, fashion advertising is heavily linked with sexuality. Scantily clad women in suggestive poses commonly appear in advertisements, whether they are marketing dresses, perfume, or anything else, and groupings of models may be used in print ads or commercials to create suggestive imagery.
Some ad campaigns have crossed the lines in the view of critics, and have generated a great deal of controversy from people who feel that such ads are inappropriate, especially when they can be seen by young children.
Fashion Photos and Advertising
America took the lead in pioneering the evolution of photographic advertising during the early 1920s, with Clarence White, who had founded a school of photography in New York in his own name in 1914 and the Art Center in 1921, becoming one of the first apologists for its application.
The modern style he advocated was based on sharp focus, simple geometry, and oblique perspectives, and manifested itself in the photography of the school’s most well-known graduates, Edward Steichen and Paul Outerbridge.
The former promulgated the idea of straight photographyin advertising campaigns for Realsilk hosiery in Ladies’ Home Journal between 1927 and 1937, and the former in his campaign for the Ide Shirt Collar, which was photographed in stark isolation against a checkerboard and published in Vanity Fair in November 1922.
In Europe, similar ideas had taken root during the 1920s with the advent of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Thus, László Moholy-Nagy, in “How Photography Revolutionizes Vision” (1933), espoused a battery of different techniques, including photomontage and the photogram, and a range of different stylistic approaches to the object, such as the introduction of the greatest contrasts, the use of texture and structure, and the use of different or unfamiliar perspectives that offered “new experiences of space.” All of these formal concerns are evident in an advertisement in Punch in 1933 for Austin Reed shirts featuring a color photograph of bales of material, which invites us to contemplate everyday objects from a fresh vantage point.
The photographic forms of fashion advertising that had begun to supplant the use of hand-drawn illustrations during the 1930s continued unabated after World War II. By the mid-1950s the market for teenage and youth fashions had also influenced the sexual iconography of many advertisements.
A common motif in press promotions during the 1960s for designers as diverse as Mary Quant and Dior, and garments from miniskirts to coats and trousers to tights, was the woman-child, represented clowning in playful poses or pouting provocatively.
Between 1961 and 1963, photographs by David Olins of “the girl” wearing a man’s shirt were also deployed in poster and press ads to promote the Tootal brand. At the same time, the male consumer was drawn into this ornamental realm of desire and in promotions for Newman Clothing during the 1960s was depicted as the object of the adoring female admirers who surrounded him.
But it would be erroneous to argue that men had not been objectified in this way before; in poster advertisements for Pope and Bradley in 1911-1912 and in many of those by Tom Purvis for Austin Reed during the 1930s, as well as press advertisements for multiple tailors like the Fifty Shilling Tailors, the fashionable peacock was connoted as someone who could turn women’s heads.
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