Why are classic boring advertisements always aimed at women?

Have you ever noticed how these days the quality of advertising has improved?

The commercial break often is more entertaining than the TV-shows that are interrupted by them. It’s because marketers feel like people have become so overexposed to advertising that people have become extremely hard to influence.

To respond to this marketers have adopted a new vision on their customers. They no longer see their customers as people that need to buy their products. They see their customers as people that need to enjoy their brand and products. They try to make as intelligent, original and entertaining advertising as they can in order to influence their potential customers.

Have you ever noticed how about 95% of this new original, creative and entertaining advertising is directed to men (or both men and women)?

Have you ever noticed how about 95% of the old classic boring advertising is directed at women?

Marketing actions directed to women are usually clearly made by marketers that seem to assume that their customers are a brainless herd that needs to be directed in the right direction, their direction.

It often excels in a lack of originality. If you’ve seen one advertisement for washing products you’ve seen them all. If it’s something you haven’t seen a zillion times before, it usually is because it wants to give you something new to be insecure about. ‘You may not smell how much your house stinks, but other people do.’ ‘Have you ever thought about how ugly your armpits are?’

On top of that advertisements that are aimed at women, usually have a woman that you are supposed to want to be. In Italy where everybody has brown hair, this woman you should aspire, usually is a blonde. In Asia, Africa and Latin-America she usually is fair-skinned. So the message of these advertisements is: ‘you may not ever be able to be blonde like me, but you do can have a house that smells like mine’ or ‘you won’t ever be white like me, but you do can get lovely armpits like mine.’ One of the few examples of a diverse advertising campaign is the Ikea-catalog, Ikea, coming from the country with all the natural blondes.

Advertising directed at women often assumes women are stupid. It encourages old insecurities and creates new ones. The marketing industry is not dominated by men. There are nearly just as many men as women in it. In companies aimed at women there usually are more women than men working in the marketing department.

So the problem isn’t that men use marketing to make women feel down so they can more easily suppress them. The problem is that there are too many women and men in the marketing industry that see (other) women as idiots. The problem is that there aren’t enough women and men that are brave enough to create a marketing strategy aimed at making women enjoy their brand.

Victoria's Secret

I have written this post because I am participating in the FFB round-up of this month. I had written a post earlier that I find better suited for the round-up, but you’re supposed to submit only recent blogposts (I think), so I have decided to join the club of people that nag about Victoria’s Secret.

I feel like Victoria’s Secret often is depicted as the enemy of women. It has turned into the symbol of how women are objectified, but I find this extremely exaggerated.

First of all, they have advertisements and catwalk shows with women in lingerie, because it’s a lingerie brand. I don’t know how else you’re going to show lingerie.

Secondly, they indeed use only beautiful women, but so do all other fashion/beauty brands and 90% of all non-fashion/beauty brands.

They could also indeed use more different body types, but they don’t make bras for different body types. Their bras only go up to DD. I don’t think they don’t make these, because they hate women with big breasts. I think it’s more likely because bigger breast have different needs. A larger version of a good bra for an A-cup is not a good bra for an F-cup, because it wouldn’t offer enough support. Bras for big breasts are another product and it requires another expertise, an expertise that Victoria’s Secret doesn’t have.

It also is true that only a few women can still feel comfortable with their own body after watching a Victoria’s Secret advertisement, but removing beautiful women from the streetview is not the right way to make women feel satisfied with their own bodies. You can’t blame beautiful women for making you feel ugly. There will always be people that are more beautiful than you and you should just get over that.

Victoria’s Secret sometimes is accused of exploiting their angels. These angels are usually already high-earning models. They don’t need to do a Victoria’s Secret runway show. They can easily say no. Compared to runway shows of other brands, Victoria’s Secret probably is one of the best employees. Other fashion brands use underaged models. Other fashion brands prefer models with a certain ‘aesthetic’ that you can only achieve by not eating. If a model doesn’t speak English it’s not a problem, because than she won’t be able to say she doesn’t want to do something or to complain she hasn’t been paid. That is what I call exploiting.

The Victoria’s Secret angels also are criticized for objectifying themselves, but I think if women want to walk around in their underwear it’s not wrong as long as it is their own decision. Some women want to wear a veil and some women want to wear mini-skirts and if you would ever have talked to either of them, you would know that both these women usually are blessed with an incredibly big mouth. What women wear says nothing about how much they submit themselves to men. It says something about where they draw the line on how much of their body they want to show to the world.

If you want to read the blogpost I had written earlier on fashion and sexuality, you can read it here.

Madonna and aging

As a woman gets older she is expected to keep her beauty and physical youth, but the pressure to do anything with her life experience is much lower if not non-existent. When Madonna turned 50 she received a big applause for having preserved her beauty, but I didn’t feel like applauding. I didn’t understand why a music artist that has never written a song on her own and that hardly ever sings live should deserve any applause. 

A lot of people found it sexist how the media was focused on her age and her looks. I was more disturbed that nobody seemed to notice that after all these years she didn’t ever try to be more than just the packaging of her songs. I can’t imagine a man would be taken serious as a music artist for over 25 years if he would be more focused on his looks than on his music.

Madonna is the prototype of the female music artist and when they look for a new female music artist, they look for a new Madonna. They will first search for someone with the right looks, good dancing skills and maybe good vocals too. Whether or not she writes her own songs is not even considered. Women are just packaging for songs men wrote and Madonna has perfected the art of being packaging.

But do people that listen to music from a female artist really care more about the packaging than the content? I think you find the answer in MySpace. If you discovered a song you would like on MySpace, it was easy to send it to your friends and they could easily send it to theirs. Nobody would consider how many other people might like it. The people would only consider how much they liked it themselves. It was a democracy far away from business decisions. And who did MySpace discover? Lilly Allen, the type of pretty girl you pass by, but a pretty girl that would just make good music. A pretty girl that gave up, because as soon as she left her space on MySpace it would turn out that the world cared more about her pregnancies and her weight than about the music she put her hart and soul in. And that’s what I thought was truly sexist. 

War and fashion

“…the charming full skirts falling to just below the knee did suggest a decorous army wife in olden times…” I think the person at style.com that commented on the Burberry Spring Summer 2012 doesn’t have a clue idea of what it’s like to be an army wife. If someone you love is at the battlefield, you couldn’t possibly care less about being ‘decorous’.

I don’t understand why the fashion world keeps on referring to the military and occasionally even glorifying it. War is something awful and if you would actually understand what it is, you couldn’t possibly feel ‘inspired’ by it. War only leads to the suffering of innocent people, while those that started the war hardly ever go to the battlefield. They rather enjoy their newly acquired status by surrounding themselves with bodyguards and women that are drawn to their power or women that know they don’t have a choice other than pretending they care about that.

Another example: the Michael Kors spring/summer 2012 fashion show seemed to be inspired by Africa and the military. Knowing how much the people in Africa suffer from armed conflicts, I find it two things you can’t put together. A few of the outfits of Michael Kors even looked very much like the uniform of Congolese soldiers: not really the greatest defendants of human rights. On top of that, the handles of his handbags reminded me of bullet belts for automatic guns. Even though I suspect he’s oblivious enough not to know whose look he’s copying. I still don’t understand how you can be inspired by the look of Congolese soldiers, even if it’s not consciously. The people from Congo that you should be inspired by are the ones that don’t carry guns.

Dutch on style.com

Hihi, style.com used a Dutch word on its website: 'echt' it means 'truly, real, geninuine'. Does this mean Dutch is the nouveau French?

London fashion week Spring 2012

London fashion week always if full of shows you either love or hate. And below are the 3 shows I loved the most.


Emilio de la Morena


Even though everybody is pressured to be pretty, wearing clothes that make you look prettier is often seen as unacceptable and superficial. In some subgroups eating disorders and plastic surgery are more tolerated than wearing clothes that make you look prettier. I think people that had plastic surgery or that have an eating disorder are ten times more vain and superficial than people that wear pretty clothes, because an eating disorder or plastic surgery is a much bigger sacrifice than wearing pretty clothes. For this reason I like it when a designer makes pretty wearable clothes, especially if their clothes say ‘I am a pretty girl’ instead of ‘I want to be a pretty girl’. Something I believe Emilio de la Morena has succeeded in.

Peter Jensen


When I looked at Peter Jensen's retro-inspired clothes, I felt like he had a real woman in his mind instead of just a girl that loves buying expensive quirky clothes. And he did have a real woman in his mind: Nina Simone, a black musician from the fifties with quite a reputation and a lot of soul. Fifties nostalgia always has more appeal, when the muse is a girl waiting to break free, than when the muse is the fifties housewife from the commercials waiting for her cupcakes to rise.

Roksanda Ilincic


Roksanda Ilinic warped women’s fashion of all decades since the forties in one collection: eighties pink, sixties blue, nineties grunge and silhouettes of the forties and fifties. A tribute to the women that learnt to take care of themselves, the women that were glad their men were back and the war was over, the women that wanted love, peace and understanding, the women that wanted more and the women that had enough.

New York fashion week Spring 2012

The centre point of NY fashion week was men. Either the clothes aimed to repel men, either the clothes were aimed at appealing to men, desperately. A total waste of time, if you ask me, straight men don’t really care about what clothes you put on. They picture you without clothes on anyway.

A few shows were aimed at appealing to little girls, which I did like. Because when I look at a fashion show I always wonder if I would have liked it just as much when I was a kid, if no, than I put it in the category ‘temporary fashion, eternally ugly’. Oscar de la Renta made a collection that would have made me swoon as a kid: big skirts, lace, feathers, everything. As an adult I still like those things and I still can’t afford them. Jenny Packham also made a collection I would have loved as a kid: flowy fabrics, fairy colors, flowers and sequins. As a grown-up I don’t love it as much as I would have as a kid, but I still like it. It makes me nostalgic about the times I would build camps with my friends, while we were dressed up like a princess.

The collections I liked the most were the ones from Vena Cava, Milly and Jason Wu, because I like them today just as much as I would have as a kid. Vena Cava was very much Classic Hollywood goes to Africa. The earthy colours made it grounded, the bright orange would light it up, the seventies glamour would add the chic and the big chunky jewelry would take the seriousness off. I find this one of the few collections that uses elements of traditional African wear without making it look like some kind of fetish.

Vena Cava Spring 2012

These pictures are property of Vena Cava. Do not republish without their permission.

I honestly never heard of Milly before, but I did like it. Because when I would try to find an outfit for a job interview, I would find it extremely hard to find one that would make me look like the interesting person I described in my resume, while I would still show that I would take the job seriously. Business like clothes would make me look like a little girl drowning in a suit that wasn’t meant for her and the more casual clothes would make me look as if my only 5 year plan was getting married and making babies. Catwalk outfits often are extremely inappropriate to wear in daily life, but the outfits of Milly were very wearable and a lot of them were even perfect for business.

When designers choose to revive the past, it often looks like nothing more than a ‘copy paste’ from the past. It often ends up looking even more old-fashioned than the original. Jason Wu is one of the few that knows how to translate it in a whole ‘new look’. Michelle Obama is a very smart woman with good taste in clothes and in men. I think Jason Wu deserves a position at Dior.