Levis "Wives" from joe zizzo on Vimeo.
Here's another example from Levi's baffling "expect the unexpected" phase, before their Sta-Prest campaign with punk puppet Flat Eric put them back in favour with the young and hip crowd they were targeting a lot more tentatively here.
When they weren't traumatising children with morbid tales of terminally bored pets, Levi's were celebrating originality in more benign forms, in this case by examining the ostensibly dull life of a nondescript 1950s office worker as he gives us a tour of his ostensibly dull house and all its contents. The obvious "What The Fuck?" moment comes when he casually reveals, in the midst of all this mid-century modern blandness, that he's married to a total of six different women, but even prior to this there's a definite sense of things being off-kilter in his bromidic, flatly materialistic world. For a start, none of the the doors we see are actually connected to walls, the trees look distinctively out of space, and his food supply consists of an uninspiring collection of identical bottles and cans. It's a lifestyle which radiates a curious mixture of artificiality, monotony and unreality. Except for his six wives, of course. They're clearly all real, and each of them very distinctive.
As Levi's "originality" campaign went, "Wives" is considerably less mean-spirited than "Kevin", although its particular method of oddness, while quizzical enough, does seem a lot more nondescript. The potentially unsettling qualities of black and white aesthetics had already been well-mined by numerous Guinness ads at this stage in the decade, and Irn-Bru had a somewhat similar campaign a little later on down the road which likewise centred upon the casual subversion of more conservative family values (and not without attracting its share of controversy, as at least one of those ads was perceived as being at the expense of transsexuals - we'll touch more upon that one, along with Irn-Bru's infamous cow billboard ad, at a later date). As noted in my reflections on "Kevin", for a number of years I'd falsely remembered this ad as being part of said Irn-Bru campaign, which does highlight one of the key issues with Levi's entire "originality" campaign - it was so all over the place, and only connected to the product itself in the vaguest, most abstract of senses, that there's a definite air of interchangeability throughout.
The closing images of "Wives" also betray a lack confidence in its own weirdness, by showing a question mark followed by a close-up of an eye blinking in apparent astonishment, as if the ad is at pains to point out to the viewer that this has all been a deliberate exercise in confoundment. Still, I'm almost embarrassed to admit that, as a young teenager, I took that question mark to indicate that there was a riddle here to be solved, meaning that I probably thought longer and harder about this ad than most other people at the time (the fact that I forgot the specific product being advertised notwithstanding). In trying to think of someone famed for having six wives and a ship, Henry VIII was honestly all that came to mind - however, unless something particularly cryptic was happening with the more modern amenities like the car and the refrigerator, it was blatantly never going to be a reference to him. If nothing else, then Bartle Bogle Hegarty at least succeeded in trolling my impressionable, logic-seeking teenage brain for a day or two.
"Wives" was directed by Doug Nichol, who also helmed the Kevin ad.
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