Journal of Consumer Culture

http://joc.sagepub.com Cowboys, Outlaws and Artists: The rhetoric of authenticity and contemporary jeans and sneaker advertisements
Jacqueline Botterill Journal of Consumer Culture 2007; 7; 105 DOI: 10.1177/1469540507073510 The online version of this article can be found at: http://joc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/1/105

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Journal of Consumer Culture

ARTICLE

Cowboys, Outlaws and Artists

The rhetoric of authenticity and contemporary jeans and sneaker advertisements
JACQUELINE BOTTERILL Brock University, Canada
Abstract. Advertisings contribution to the deterioration of meaning in consumer culture has been well established, yet advertising also offers a therapeutic resource to audiences. Early advertisers humanized the modern marketplace with nostalgic appeals to home, hearth and village, yet, against the rising tide of 1960s identity politics, designers made increasing appeals to authenticity. By the 21st century, the modern heroes of authentic individuality the cowboy, the genius artist, the outlaw had been fully parodied and debunked, yet an interpretive study of two totemic youth commodities, jeans and sneakers, suggests that the underlying values of freedom, autonomy and individuality are not. Contemporary jeans advertisers rewrite the quest for authenticity within contemporary promotional culture, yet this appeal is not universal. Athletic shoe brands achieved popularity by reecting the ideology of athleticism rooted in the modernist ethos celebrating achievement, deferral of gratication, discipline and teamwork. The research suggests autonomy and selfauthentication are taken most seriously by those most immersed in the quest for antimodern identity. Even if the marketplace is not a site of absolute personal freedom, to the degree it quells anxieties that the quest for freedom is disappearing in a hypercommercialized market culture, it may prove therapeutic. Key words advertising consumer culture cultural anxiety therapeutic youth identity

SOME DEPICTIONS OF late 20th-century consumer culture characterized it as drained of authentic meaning, replete with hyper-reality and simulation,
Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 7(1): 105125 1469-5405 [DOI: 10.1177/1469540507073510] http://joc.sagepub.com

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and saturated with promotion (Baudrillard, 1994; Eco, 2001; Jameson, 1992). Advertisers were understood to create a chaos of meaning, delinking referents from signiers, using vivid images to bypass audience rationality and reach out to them visually ( Jhally, 1998). This line of criticism saw cultural meaning debased as it was pulled into the expanding cyclone of profane promotion (Goldman and Papson, 1996). Marketers pirated youth cultures creative expressions and put them into the service of selling commodities. The cacophony of market symbolism, its penetration into all areas of culture, was overwhelming and failed to provide the horizon of signicance (Taylor, 1991) necessary to nourish robust identities, leaving subjects demented and transxed by the warm glow of the promotional light (Baudrillard, 1988). From this perspective, advertising is understood to diminish meaning and contribute to a consumer culture in which image, surface, and style subsume depth, substance, and history (Ewen, 1988). Against this view, which continues to resurface in contemporary accounts of advertising (Cross, 1996), this article argues that advertising does not simply deconstruct or debase meanings, and to assume it overwhelms audiences is to deny their interpretive powers. As promotion has become the central discursive dynamic (Wernick, 1991), it is incorporated into the scaffolding of identity projects, yet not when it is nonsense, rather when it makes sense and serves some therapeutic or social value (social uses of advertising). Based upon an examination of contemporary jean and sneaker advertisements, I argue that consumer culture is not bereft of the rhetorics of authenticity, but saturated with it. The article argues that advertisers use of authenticity is directed towards a renewed cultural mission. While authenticity once served as an antidote to mass society, today advertisers use it to soothe their young audiences anxiety that authenticity is no longer possible. They do so by suggesting to audiences that genuine moments of humanity can still be contemplated, even in contrived and commercialized texts. THE THERAPEUTIC ROLE OF ADVERTISING There is no better source from which to develop an appreciation for advertisings cultural role than the work of historian Roland Marchand. His examination of 1920s and 1930s American advertising messages was situated within the broader historical, social and institutional context of modernity. Marchand noted how the expansion of modern institutions and new ways of living were coupled with a widespread sense of malaise. Amid new freedoms, modernity instilled feelings of loss, confusion, anxiety and alienation. Advertisers took their audiences anxieties seriously, because it
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aided the execution of their selling mission. The practice of advertising was infused with a democratic impulse. Copy was not judged on creative criteria alone, but also how well it spoke to the person on the street (Marchand, 1986: 13). Advertisers were among the rst to develop a research feedback loop to their audiences, now common in todays reexive organizations. Recent discussions of advertising have criticized historical accounts like Marchands for fetishizing and over-empowering advertisings research (Cronin, 2004; McFall, 2004). Yet Marchand simply asserts that in comparison to other public communicators, advertisers devoted considerable resources and effort to understanding and addressing their audiences. He clearly sees research as fallible and crude, and hardly suggests that advertisers diagnoses were always accurate, but unlike contemporary critics, he does not go so far as to commit an equivalent fallacy, which is to suggest research is always inaccurate: Decient as their early methods were, advertisers still tested the effects of their communications more often and more rigorously than novelists, writers of magazine ction, newspaper editors, movie directors, cartoonists, or even politicians. And they had reasons for taking these reality checks seriously. (Marchand, 1986: xix) In the sample of 18,000 magazine advertising messages drawn between 1920 and 1930, Marchand saw advertisers accurately diagnosing a widespread cultural anxiety that understood the institutional scale and speed of modern life as corrosive to the traditional social bonds, ways of knowing and sense of social place. They responded by fusing modern graphic design techniques with culturally legitimate folk wisdom and religious templates to make messages both new and exciting as well as familiar and comfortable. Advertisers harkened back to the village and the intimacy of the family circle to make new products agreeable to consumers, while visual clichs presented new fantasies and icons through which audiences could contemplate change, wonder at possibilities, and daydream. Advertising also articulated new roles for mentorship (e.g. the managerial housewife). Marchand argues advertising took on a broader, although hardly premeditated, therapeutic function in culture, offering symbolic solutions to harsh contradictions, articulating new role models, providing advice, and translating unfathomable, abstract and alienating components of modernity into humanistic metaphors. The promotional therapeutic offered an
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analgesic to modern malaise and aided the accommodation to modernity and consumer culture: Advertising adopted a therapeutic role. It assured readers that all the apparent psychological costs of scale could be nessed. Individual Americans never need feel themselves diminished or alienated, whatever the scale of life. They could enjoy every modern artefact and style without losing the reassuring emotional bonds of the village community. . . . No longer patent medicine hawkers, advertising men had now become broader social therapists who offered, within the advertising tableaux themselves, balms for the discontents of modernity. (Marchand, 1986: 360) This perspective asserts that advertisings inuence in consumer culture is not found simply in how it veiled or destroyed cultural meaning. While audiences clearly understood that the commodity cures advertisers offered for their woes were part of a sales job, promotional symbolics were freely available, widely circulated and offered resources that could be used to contemplate the malaise of modernity. In this sense, advertising does not always, nor necessarily, destroy the horizon of signicance required to formulate an identity. On the contrary, advertisers try exceptionally hard to construct meaning for their audiences. To use Don Slaters (1997) terminology, they work within the cracks of the modern identity crisis. ADVERTISING AND AUTHENTICITY While malaise is a general feature of modernity, historical circumstances contoured the shape of discontent and the triumph of the mass market in the decades following the Second World War. This period brought a distinctive malaise, as attention shifted from simply mourning the loss of traditional social bonds, to a fear that the processes of modern massication were obliterating individuality. Applying Marchands theory of the advertising therapeutic to his study of 1960s advertising, Thomas Frank (1997) drew attention to how the countercultural revolt against mass society forced advertisers to reposition themselves. Frank argues that while Marchand showed how the early advertisements counselled ways of navigating the complex hazards of modernity, ads after the 1960s became centrally concerned with counselling consumers on how to maintain identity (individuality) and purpose in a time of conformity (Frank, 1997: 133). He suggested that authenticity became more important than status within advertising (p. 136).
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Synonymous with growing corporate expansion, big government, cookie-cutter suburbs and the conformist organizational man, mass society was the object of counter-cultural resentment. American youth rallied against their parents lifestyles, arguing that the prized nuclear family and values of hard work, duty, emotional restraint and manners demanded too much conformity and stied individuals creative powers and authentic lifestyles (Frank, 1997: 51). A unifying element of the counter-culture movement was a drive for existential freedom and emotional openness. Hazel Warlamont (2000) documents the inuence of European existentialist philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger (18891976) and Jean Paul Sartre (190580), upon counter-cultural ideals. These thinkers asserted that the sheer business and pointless absurdity of everyday modern life induced forgetfulness and an easy slide into conformity and inauthenticity, and prescribed that people resist complacency through active self-awareness and engagement in intense life experience. Authentic people were self-aware, self-responsible and had a lifes project to bring focus and coherence to their existence. The Beats, an American artist collective (some members included Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac), popularized and transformed European existentialism for American audiences, providing new templates for how to maintain authenticity in troubled times. Examples include the hipster who reveled in the excitement of urban street culture and the mores of the black American ghetto, and the hobo who voluntarily dropped out into self-imposed exile, riding the rails across the country and living under the stars. Building upon a diverse number of inuences (The Beats, European intellectuals, eastern spirituality, feminism), the highly diverse counterculture of the late 1960s went on to experiment with any and all societal mores, including the theater, lm, art, pornography, sexual preference, living situations, occupations, dress, and hygiene (Dickstein, 1997[1977] in Holt, 2002: 82). The counter-culture rejected mass societys prescription for identity, and struggled to assert its right to sovereign self-construction. This can be understood as a quest for authenticity. AUTHENTICITY AND ADVERTISING Once a key subject of humanities and social science debates, authenticity is now more likely to appear in popular business writing.A growing number of marketing and popular books have taken authenticity as their subject. Business analysts David Lewis and Darren Bridger see the Soul of the New Consumer (2000) rooted in a quest for authenticity. The new economy, they
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argue, has made time, trust and attention scarce and consumers assess their numerous commodity choices by dividing brands into two categories: those that are authentic and those that are not. Rejecting the latter, the new consumers pay premium prices and remain more loyal than old consumers to brands they deem authentic. The key to creating authentic brands, according to Lewis and Bridger, is to provide opportunities for consumers to experience self-fulllment. David Brookss (2001) Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There rose rapidly to the top of the bestseller lists and entered the vocabulary of advertisers and marketers on Madison Avenue. With education and cultural knowledge central currencies for success and class maintenance, Bobos seek to secure social standing by engaging in a conspicuous display of cultural knowledge that drives them to try to master as many modes of expression as possible. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school (Brooks, 2001: 18). Brooks sees the expanded meritocratic workplace as key to understanding why Bobos strong bourgeois competitive instincts are matched by equally strong yearnings for authentic bohemian experiences (hence the moniker Bobo). David Boyle (2003), analysing the British context, recognized a sector of the population that he labelled new realists. Their consumption was guided by the ideals of authenticity. In Boyles analysis, it is less the meritocratic workplace than the pressure of living in a world dominated by technology, bureaucracy and marketing that feeds the desire for real authentic experiences. Instead of utopia, the information age delivered a plastic, throwaway world and identical chain store experiences. Responding to this situation, new realists are attracted to the Slow Food movement, ock to natural bres, engage in caf culture, community building, and buying vintage clothing. Unlike Brooks who seeks to expose the Bobo as an emperor without clothes, a devious materialist masquerading in the drag of authenticity, Boyle admires the new realists and urges businesses to address their tastes, because, he believes, they promise to shape a more democratic, environmentally sound and humanistic marketplace. These works represent just a small sample of the growing interest in the idea of authenticity within advertising and marketing over the past 20 years, as humanities and social science researchers interest in the term has waned. An American Business Index keyword search, undertaken in January 2006, on authenticity produced 1091 articles, while a search of the Humanities and Social Science Index produced 312 articles. While authenticity is actively promoted within advertising and marketing literature, the use of the term is, not surprisingly, often celebratory and
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it is rarely dened. Book-length treatments of the term demonstrate its slipperiness, constant reformulation, and difculty to dene, despite its widespread use. Yet, to illuminate the later exploration of advertisers application of the term, it is necessary to mention some of its broad contours, based upon the work of four authors who have, at least in my mind, produced the most thoughtful examinations of authenticity (Berman, 1970; Trilling, 1971; Taylor, 1991; Golomb, 1995). First emerging in the 17th century in the early throes of the modernization of production and consumption, authenticity dened the certication of the true substance of objects (coinage, beer), and the actual, reality and genuine authorship of works of art. By the 18th century, philosophers began to explore the problem of human authentication. As the self was no longer as tightly tethered to traditional legitimating processes of feudal and religious orders, the congruence between peoples outer social role and their inner true self became subject to more intensive scrutiny. Authenticity, according to Charles Taylor (1991), was part of a massive subjectivist turn in philosophy. Lionel Trilling (1971) notes how early philosophers distinguished sincerity from authenticity. Sincerity, and matters of conscience, emerged as ways of describing the idea that being true to thine own self before others expectations was the measure of our human character. Authenticity, emerging later, was the measure of delity of the self to the self. Centrally concerned with the project of self-authorship, the rhetorics of authenticity frequently revolve around three interrelated ideals. The rst, and most fundamental, idea is reected in the assertion of German philosopher, Johann Gottfried von Herder (17441803) that each of us has an original way of being human, an authentic self (Taylor, 1991: 28). Authenticity shifted the touchstone of sacredness from God, scripture, even the social group, to the self and the everyday. Second, most philosophers agreed, the authentic self was not transparent, but required self work, creative work (Trilling, 1971: 93). Civilization and society were distractions to this authentic self-formation. For example, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (171278), suggested turning inward to nd truth, shutting out the cacophony of the voices of society and listening to the voice of nature within. The only path to freedom, Rousseau argued, was being ones self (see Berman, 1970). Individuals who were marginalized from prevailing social norms, or rebellious toward them, became exemplars of authenticity, because they appeared to resist or somehow escape the social process that thwarted quests for authenticity (see Hegel and Miller, 1979[1807]). Authenticity is also often deeply nostalgic, as the pre-modern past becomes
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a vessel for holding the ideal of a purer state of self-actualization where character was forged in harmony with nature. Intimate groups, tribes, collectives, even the family have also been woven into the rhetoric of authenticity as they appear to provide a context for self-discovery, yet these social groups can also as easily become oppressive to the formation of an authentic self. Third, those who engaged in expressive lifestyle alternatives came to be seen as exemplars of authenticity.According to Trilling, in the 19th century, the character type of the artist came to epitomize the ideas of authenticity. Artists became the paradigm case of the human being, the central agent of original self-denition (Trilling, 1971: 62). Artists, such as the bohemians, rebelled against prevailing puritan norms, rejecting emotional restraint, selfdenial, and an industrial work ethic, honouring the emotions and hedonism (Campbell, 1987). Art and creativity emerged as domains of moral renewal in a secular society. While science claimed truth was found by examining the external world via hypotheses, artists legitimated the imagination as a faculty for apprehending truth and beauty. Artists helped to give shape to a new structure of feeling in western cultures. The counter-culture movements of the 1960s popularized the sentiments of mid-19th-century bohemian artists, throughout culture, by moving art outside ofcial galleries, deeming everyday objects art, and everyone an artist. As Elizabeth Wilson notes: We are all bohemians now (see Wilson, 1999). In sum, all cultures must develop means of mediating the relationship between the individual and the wider social group, and modern culture inherited the ideals of authenticity as one ideology about the nature of this relationship. According to Trilling (1971), authenticity provided a secular alternative to the symbolic and social weightiness once offered by religion, serving as a guide to enchantment and trust in a rationalized world.Authenticity not only points to the contradiction between the individual and society, it offers enticements, characters and advice for how to resolve this tension. The neo-liberal marketplace is predicated upon the consumers freedom to choose, yet, as John Kenneth Galbraith astutely argued long ago, there is a fundamental contradiction associated with consumer freedom given that it unfolds in a marketplace teaming with marketers, consumer researchers and advertisers who devote massive resources in their effort to author our consumer lives through their branding (Holt, 2002: 82). This contradiction became culturally palpable in the 1960s, as the counterculture attacked American advertisers as part of the establishment, handmaidens of mass society, propagators of lifestyles that served corporate
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expansion, not existential freedom. Frank documents how unorthodox creatives, like William Bernbach of BBD, helped to shift this focus, creating advertising with a less dictatorial tone. Bernbach, a man with an afnity for counter-cultural sentiments, reected the quest for existential freedom in his promotional designs. His now frequently mentioned anti-ad Volkswagen campaign transformed Hitlers archetypical mass commodity for a mass society into a counter-cultural status symbol, by giving it publicfriendly names like the bug and the bus. The campaign was funny, creative, emotionally open, diverse, and stressed that the Volkswagen was an individualized mode of transportation. Frank notes that the antiadvertising campaign harnessed public mistrust of consumerism perhaps the most powerful cultural tendency of the age to consumerism itself (1997: 55). The 1980s embrace of neo-liberalism saw consumer culture reborn (Lee, 1993). A consolidated global economy and global media, deregulation and privatization heightened competition within mature western markets. Post-Fordist production processes, computer technology and the cultural embrace of novelty are just some of the factors that supported a slightly different marketplace with a wider diversity of goods, and more rapid turnover of fashion. Style cultures fragmented into ever more rened niche groups, as mass marketing techniques no longer dominated. Within this postmodern marketplace, Douglas Holt argues, the socially valued and culturally signicant increasingly circulated through media and branded goods (Holt, 2002).With ideals of messianic capitalist overthrow in decline, an uneasy alliance between advertisers and their 21st-century audiences was forged. Taking up the hard-won lessons of the 1960s, successful brands at the close of the century stopped directly proscribing a mass or modern lifestyle, particularly to sensitive youth markets. Instead, they reafrmed the market as a domain of autonomy, freedom and choice. The authority of the consumer was acknowledged (Keats and Abercombie, 1994). Particularly in advertising directed to youth, the marketplace was presented as an area to pursue identities unencumbered by tradition, social circumstances, or societal institutions (Holt, 2002). While mothers nagged, teachers disciplined, and politicians droned on, marketers asked nothing of youth other than their willingness to use branded goods (whichever they chose) to fashion their lifestyles. Yet, to be useful to consumers identity projects, Holt notes, branded cultural resources must be perceived as authentic. Disinterested . . . invented and disseminated by parties without an instrumental economic agenda, by people who are intrinsically motivated by their inherent value (Holt, 2002: 83). The trope of authenticity
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becomes ideally suited for this context for in principle it is antithetical to any attempt to provide a rationalized blueprint for life. Like capitalism itself, authenticity is amoral, pertaining less to what kinds of things you should do and more to how a life is styled. For Golomb (1995), authenticity is an enticement in the text that acts as a lure for the contemplation of creative self-discovery. AUTHENTICITY IN ADVERTISING To explore advertisers use of authenticity in more depth, I undertook an interpretive analysis of contemporary jeans and sneaker advertisements directed to youth (1825 years). The scope of this article ruled out a fullscale analysis of all advertising sectors. I narrowed my perspective to youth identity products, because youth has been singled out as a particular champion of authenticity (Campbell, 1987; Frank, 1997). Jeans and sneakers were chosen because, unlike toothpaste and razors, these are clearly identity products, public statements about what one is (Holt, 2004). Jeans also have a historical connection to the counter-culture that donned them in opposition to the grey annel suit. The multi-million dollar athletic shoe sector was similarly built upon the patronage of youth. A pilot study indicated that the values in jeans advertisements differed from those in sneakers, thus sneaker advertisements offered a useful point of comparison. Using Creative Club, a British advertising database (manufacturer: Thomson Intermedia, London), and Adcritic (manufacturer: Advertising Age, New York), which holds primarily American, but also European, advertisements, I isolated all print and television advertisements produced for these sectors between 1999 and 2005. The nal sample contained 1000 unique impressions. The settings or tableaux presented and the character types promoted in the 700 jeans ads and 300 sneaker ads were considered. The study asked, rst, whether the encoded meanings available in the ads could be logically linked to the rhetorics of authenticity. Second, the research considered whether there was any evidence to suggest that the anxieties reected in the ads today were similar to, or different from, those of the 1960s. Decoding denim During the period in which these sample advertisements appeared, jeans sector prots had taken a downturn. Although women continued to purchase the variety of new styles offered to them, winning the patronage of men proved more of an obstacle (Mintel Research, 2005). Now a staple for their parents, and even their grandparents, wardrobes, jeans no longer
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offered young men easy access to the citadel of cool. Cool was now refracted across other domains (athletic wear and combat trousers). Thus, following the industry truism that women will tolerate ads targeted to men, but not the reverse, jeans advertisers placed the promotional weight behind seducing the male audience. The inuence this had on messages is suggested in the recurrent masculine identity myths, particularly independence and rebellion. Approximately 15 percent of the ads appeared to offer no link to authenticity. These messages primarily contained unreexive appeals to glamour, and were the few advertisement in the sample that targeted women. I would argue these earnest appeals to glamour are too selfconscious, and overtly linked to achievement within existing social processes, to be associated with authenticity. There are clearly gender dynamics at play here, and although I do not have the space to elaborate these ideas further, the question of how authenticity contributes to gender narratives may pose an intriguing avenue for further research. Because authenticity is an invitation, enticement, ambiance and setting are all important. What was striking about the jeans sample was the recurring mise-en-scne, which variously emphasized escape, challenge, and/or relaxation from formal rules: the desert, the rooftop, the edge of town, the street, the everyday. Each of these settings, as I will discuss, can be understood to encode enticements to authenticity. Regardless of season, jeans appeared in the hot, dry dust of the desert. This tough, rugged mystical terrain that forged the authentic cowboy character is now a common backdrop for models in jeans. Characters also frequently appeared on rooftops, peering down on the city. Marchand found this same motif in early 20th-century advertisements, but characters gazed out on the modern city with wonder and pride. In 21st-century jeans advertising, characters turned their backs on urbanity, focusing on themselves and their peers, not the urban landscape. Other ads depicted models on the edge of postindustrial cities, with burnt-out factories, and crumbling smoke stacks in the background. These images of social decay suggested not only the death of progress, but a point of rebirth, a clean slate and an invitation to be part of a new, more authentic civilization that leaves the stultifying social norms of the past behind. The open road was endlessly offered up in the advertisements as a path to authentic self-discovery. Characters were depicted travelling across the plains on motorcycles. They appeared in vintage cars, but not polished, museum pieces; rather patina laden, nostalgia machines, worn and dusty. Burnt-out stock cars and at, black old Fords, like those used in American
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outlaw road movies, were also in abundance no Ford Focuses, SUVs or mini vans, which lie too close to mainstream reality. In one ad, the character hops into an empty freight train car, clearly a promotional tribute to the existential hobo. While rays of light and halos were once used in early advertising to signify the products transcendence from the profane, todays jeans advertisers accomplish this by associating commodities with the street. Models were endlessly displayed on the street, interacting with others, posing against grafti-covered walls, and literally sitting and lying on the street. One campaign depicted models sleeping rough. Designer jeans were modelled on the street, not the fashion runway. The street, like the desert, is a setting for authentication. In the poetry and novels of bohemians and Beats, and essays of European intellectuals, the urban street was a site of intensity, surprise and challenge. The street sharpened ones wit and skill, thrusting a person into novel authenticating experiences. While the corporate boardroom required the fake performance of power games, the street was real. Advertising designers also focused on private everyday interiors, displaying characters engaged in mundane acts (eating yogurt while standing up in a kitchen, drinking a coffee in a diner, tea in the cafe) in tributes to the ordinary. According to Charles Taylor, common and everyday human acts are frequently understood as authentic: The gravity of the good life does not lie in some higher sphere, but in what I call ordinary life that is, the life of production and the family, of work and love (Taylor, 1991: 45). The interior locations chosen were frequently down market: disheveled, littered with dirty plates, paint drippings, and crumpled cloth. Squalor was offered up as a cultural resource for an unmade, relaxed, less stylized lifestyle a bohemian rhapsody, an adolescent dream of escaping the dictates of middle-class parental fastidiousness and hygiene and its gestures of puritanism. These are unpretentious interiors, designed for authentic individuals, more concerned with their self-development than social display. Models frequently appear in artist studios engaged in the creative arts, both classical (painting or sculpting) and new media (behind the movie camera or in front of the microphone). In the 1970s, John Berger (1972) demonstrated how advertisers used high art to confer status upon commodities. In the 21st century, after the aestheticization of art in everyday life, commodities are connected directly to artistic lifestyles, for nished artistic projects too easily suggest a dictation of taste. Instead, advertisers simply celebrate the general act of creativity which, as we have seen, is a core process of self-authorship.
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The characters in these ads literally slouch, both as a testament to the comfort of the jeans and in deance of puritan standards of posture. They frequently appear lazy, drained of the work ethic. Touching the bohemian, models endlessly appear dishevelled and ungroomed an inordinate number had long hair. Men wore beards and stubble, women had tousled hair, and everyone was seemingly styled by a roll in the grass. Advertisers did their best to depict models as authentic individuals with strong personalities. Models spelt out their names in sugar spilt on tables, with crayon on walls, or in lights, in a desperate effort to relay their individuality and selfexpressiveness, and encode them as real, authentic people, not merely advertising models. The expressiveness of the models faces were accented to convey their uniqueness and inner emotions. The models frequently look down or appear caught in a dream. These displays conform to Goffmans (1970) licensed withdrawal, a common pose that he believed indicated psychological removal and disorientation from the social situation, thus from dependence on the protectiveness and goodwill of others (Goffman, 1970: 57). In his study of 1970s advertisements, Goffman found females most commonly displaying licensed withdrawal. In this study, males were equally likely to be depicted in poses that reected retreat from the material world, perhaps because the trope of authenticity celebrates the revelry of inner experience. Along with a setting that invites audiences to consider self-authentication, the sample of jeans advertisements made frequent links to black culture, as Norman Mailers 1956 White Negro hipster appears to live on in the promotional imagination (see Frank, 1997: 12, 13). Indeed, within todays popular culture, black culture and the street have become the hallmarks of the real and authentic (Hall, 1996; hooks, 2003).Although studies continue to stress the under-representation of black people in advertising, over 16 percent of the sample contained black models. Blacks were also frequently cast as the main character, instead of their more typical supporting role in the diversity shot. Particularly in the British ads, there was an emphasis on the cosmopolitan. Designers favoured mixed-race individuals to represent diversity. The models selected had no clearly identiable (thus potentially threatening or exclusive) ethnic traits, and could have been read as African, Latin American, Spanish, Asian, Middle Eastern, or African Caribbean anything but mainstream inauthentic Anglo white (Crouch, 2004). An example is found in BBHs Levis European campaign, laden with the mythos of black culture and the street.A young black, but not too black, man walks down a city street dressed in baggy jeans, tee shirt, leather jacket
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and baseball cap. He walks by a black bouncer dressed in a suit, protecting the entrance to a club. The young man stops to engage in street banter. The bouncer provides the perfect, silent, authoritarian foil against which the young mans authenticity is expressed. Street wise, the young man begins his patter by pointing out he is aware he cannot enter the club because of his inappropriate dress, but goes on to defend his style, thereby challenging the social convention that prevents his entry. The young man notes How do I explain this to you? Your look is so . . . My style is like bad and yours is a little crispy. I am like aahhh! and you all are like uhh?. The banter itself suggests authenticity by mocking the conventions of formal English. Authenticity is encoded by depicting a tension between work, formality and rules, and play, rejection, creativity. The nal advertisement worthy of attention is a 2005 Levis jeans viral lm campaign by McCann Tag (May 2005), which provides a useful example of advertisers diagnosis of contemporary youth anxiety. The ad depicts a scruffy little terrier dog frantically running around a beautifully appointed modernist at, chewing and clawing through pillows, sofa legs, and electrical wires; pulling modernist lamps and yuppie blenders to the oor. The dogs frenetic movements are supported by a driving electric guitar, drumming and screaming punk-inspired anti-authoritarian lyrics. Shot in grainy black and white, the actions of the dog are overlain with aggressive capital block letters, which spell out the following: MOVIES BECAME FILMS. . . . MEDIUMS BECAME GRANDEES; MEAT BECAME SOY; SWEATS BECAME HIGH-PERFORMANCE, ULTRA-DRY OUTER LAYER PANTS; ITS ENOUGH TO DRIVE A GOOD DOG MAD. In the nal scene the little dog urinates on a magazine image of a buff male body, and the ad closes with: Levis 501: Uncomplicate. If the mass market of the 1950s caused anxiety because it threatened authentic identity formation, the postmodern market is threatening because of its expansive choice and promotional density. The anti-hero canine burrows beneath his gilded cages faade of beauty to escape the discipline of glamour and complexity of lifestyle maintenance. The advertisement mocks an over-stylized, hypercommericalized world gone pretty, in which nothing is any longer real, simple or authentic, except Levis. Athletic authenticity Distinctive from the jeans sector, the dominant visual clichs found in the sample of 300 sneakers advertisements make little reference to the rhetoric
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of authenticity. The $40 billion US athletic shoe empire built over the last 30 years does not symbolically rest on romanticism, but rather the prowess of the elite athlete. The domain of sport demands discipline, deferred gratication, adherence to rules, subordination to coaches and trainers and teamwork, all of which are non-authentic values. Nike, the most skilled of all brands in its use of puritan values, has been rewarded with a whopping 40 percent of the market, the lions share of prot, and is able to ensure a constant stock of sponsorship deals with the most famous athletes in the world. Still, the athletic shoe sector was not bereft of values of authenticity, and indeed, it became clear within the sample that Reebok, Converse and Adidas were using appeal to authenticity as a competitive promotional strategy to position themselves against Nikes dominance over puritan values. For example, in 2002, Reebok, a brand that made its name in the 1980s riding the wave of aerobic tness popularity, but unable to compete with Nikes expanding dominance, began to align the brand with rebellion. In a successful black and white advert hyper-fast edits were used to create a sense of intensity, motion, and self-transformation. Individuals were depicted engaged in high-adrenalin pursuits such as bob sledding, crashing bicycles, jumping gates, slamming into one another. Along with fast callto-arms music, the advertisement ashed a series of words across the screen: Defy suburbia, physics, Defy red tape, expectations, cages, description, Defy tradition, the man, the media, whatever, comparison, defy convention. The ad promotes an existentially and emotionally intensive lifestyle, linking Reebok to the ideology of authenticity Pleased with the success of this campaign, Reebok went on in 2003 to link the brand to hip-hop. Hip-hop resonated with authenticity, not only because its roots lay in black musical cultures, but because it calls forth the creative expression of audience members. The advertisement featured young black men breakdancing, while an announcer explained why participation in hip-hop is real: Hip-hop is the culture of breakdancing, grafti, DJ and m-cing. My style of breaking is not inuenced by other people but I create it on my own. The crew . . . have to keep it real and know whats the truth and whats fake out there. In 2004, Reebok signed sponsorship contracts with rap recording artists Jay Z and 50 Cents, who wore Reebok clothing in their concerts, and appeared
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in promotional messages. Tapping into their youthful targets interest in computer games, Reebok created an interactive advertisement that invited viewers to navigate through an animated city, and earn street cred by clicking on esteemed city areas such as the basketball court, the recording studio and the art gallery. In each site, different Reebok running shoes were promoted. In 2005, Reebock launched a campaign entitled I am what I am, which included a highly stylized confessional advertisement designed for rap artist 50 Cents. Constructed out of random documentary style shots of Guy R. Brewer Street, Jamaica Queens, New York (where the artist grew up), a cavernous warehouse where 50 Cents sits on a metal block, and closeups of his face, the advertisement is narrated by layers of sound, including radio announcers, celebrity interviewers, sirens and the rapper counting to nine (the number of times he has been shot). In the nal scene, when asked what he will do next, 50 Cents laughs and I am appears on the screen, but his expression quickly changes, his eyes narrow and lips purse.What I am, appears just as his smile turns to a grimace. The baseball cap rim disappears, leaving only a hood. The legacy of blacksploitation lives on in this campaign. Harper (1998) has demonstrated how the popular music industry uses the street and music to authorize and represent authentic blackness. Promoters build a media version of the street through repetition of quick edits, intertextual references, irony and parody. Most importantly, the street convention has been linked to a variety of romantic associations, particularly masculinity, and a construction of real blackness. The street is an emblem of the blackest and the baddest (Harper, 1998: 402). Indeed, the black gangsta has come to represent a potent character of authenticity, an amalgam of the downtrodden, artist, outlaw. One in a long line of popular cultural anti-heros including the bandit, pirate, highwayman, desperado, rebel, hoodlum, gangster. These gures serve as authentic enticements when recast from criminals who threaten the community into heroes struggling against a wider social system that threatened the true community or authenticating powers of the self . Adopting postmodern styling, the Reebok advertisement forges an associative link between the brand, mean streets and a tale of a tough black man lifted by his musical talents from those streets to fame. What is unique about this narrative is that it adds a new twist to the dream of social advancement. Despite 50 Cents fantastical social transformation, the ad suggests he is able to remain authentically true to who he is a man of the street. Within popular culture, getting ahead, from Pygmalion to the American Dream, typically required some subordination
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to the values and customs of another class. Yet, research suggests the more potent dream of the disadvantaged is to increase their money and fame while retaining social networks, values and skills. In her thoughtful study of UK working-class lottery ticket buyers, for example, Casey (2003) revealed participants interest in winning the lottery was tempered by a fear that money would corrupt their lifestyle and values which they deemed authentic. For rappers like 50 Cents, the connection to the street is the source of authentication and central to his market appeal (Yousman, 2003). This identity myth is powerful because it appears to uncouple a contradiction: black men can escape the ghetto based on their talents, yet also retain their street credibility. This is a highly romantic position; it is clearly other worldly. American Department of Justice 2004 records show that blacks accounted for 44 percent of the 2 million plus prison inmates, yet represent only 12 percent of the population. Black men have a 30 percent chance of being imprisoned in their lifetime; their likelihood of becoming internationally famous recording artistes is obviously innitesimally lower. Adidass 2004 Impossible is nothing also draws upon characters from black culture, but this time the authenticating hero is not a gangster but a black athlete. One advertisement from the campaign draws upon historical black and white footage of the documentary Rumble in the Jungle, based on the 1974 ght in Zaire, when the older and weaker Muhammad Ali won back the heavyweight crown from George Foreman. In the ad, Ali is on his morning training run before the ght. Contemporary athletes (David Beckham, Ian Thorpe, Haile Gebrselassie, among others) are digitally spliced into the footage, running alongside, and looking up at Ali. The ad is set on the authenticating open road, and Alis daughter provides the voiceover, which is tracked with acoustic mandolin music and African chants: Some people listen to themselves rather than what others say. These people dont come along very often, but when they do they remind us that once you set out on a path, even though critics may doubt you, it is OK to believe that there is no cant, wont or impossible, they remind us that it is OK to believe impossible is nothing. This ad represents a potent myth that cleverly unites authenticity with the work ethic. Alis talent for self-expression (self-promotion), his stance against, and triumph over, black oppression have been endlessly mythologized rendering him Pan-like, half artist, half athlete. Ali is the artist who
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transcends the pompous artist, for he is also an athletic achiever. Rousseau speaks through the advertisement in the notion of listening to yourself and shutting out the critics. According to Adidas, nding oneself is not simply about self-transformation, but self-fulllment and achievement. Converse fashions its promotion upon brand heritage, building authenticity through nostalgia. Seven decades before Nike turned basketball sponsorship into big business, the Converse Rubber Corporation fashioned the rst All Star basketball shoe, whose high top design came at the advice of Charles Taylor, a basketball player, and Converse fan. Like Ford cars, the highrise basketball sneaker came in one colour, black. After the Second World War, the shoes appeared in different colours and low-rise models, but the overall design remained the same, distinguishing it from Nike, whose styles continually changed. Cheaper than most running shoes, the consistency of its design has made it a favourite of alternative groups such as skateboarders, geeks and student radicals. AdBusters, an anti-commercial, anti-consumption magazine and movement, markets its own version of the shoe to raise funds for its campaigns. Converse has sought to circulate the loyalty stories of its consumers, who affectionately nicknamed the shoes Chucks. In 2005, brand managers launched Converse Gallery, a section on the brands website where people posted self-produced short lms (ads) about their relationship with the product. An instant success, the site hosts over 750 lms, submitted from over 20 countries. Three million have visited the site to watch and download the movies. Market spokespeople explained how benecial supporting the self-expression and authenticity work of core consumers could be. Heritage brands like Converse are some of the rare symbols and objects that appear to endure the rapid changes of modernity, thus take on the aura of authenticity providing a romantic escape, because in a postmodern marketplace glutted with choice, nostalgia for the good old, onesize-ts-all mass market can excite a certain appeal of simplicity. CONCLUSION Authenticity is a quintessentially modernist idea. Yet in the wake of Adornos 1964 critique, the liberatory force of this historical notion has been called into question. The artistic quest for self-expression and nosethumbing at symbols of bourgeois power proved only an illusion of liberation. This was politically regressive because it remained rooted in a false promise of freedom that abstracted individuals from their historical and social context (Adorno, 2003[1964]). The idea that it was possible to dream, think or creatively imagine our way to real freedom seemed preposterous
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to Adorno, because such quests diverted individuals from engaging in the material and social changes necessary to truly change their subjective conditions. Thanks to Adorno, it remains unfashionable to speak of authenticity today within much contemporary critical scholarship. (Golomb, 1995: 5) Yet, as we have seen above, the imagery that honours the individuals quest for autonomy from the social group continues to play an important role in postmodern discourses especially in jeans advertising targeted at youth. Clearly by the turn of the 20th century the modern heroes of authentic individuality the cowboy, the artist, the outlaw began to be parodied and debunked. Yet, as the Marlboro man showed, even the most contrived promotional adaptations of the mythology surrounding the struggle for authentic individuality did not necessarily diminish its underlying appeal to postmodern audiences (see also Hill, 2002). While the jeans ads are fancifully postmodern, the underlying values of freedom, autonomy and individuality are not: from grafti artists, to baggy-panted mixed-race young men hanging on the street, from young men in the box cars, to cowboy boots and mud-splattered motorcycles, they provide signposts for interpreting an evolving idea of authenticity albeit one that can be expressed within the framework of a consumer culture. Certainly from my students point of view, these fashion ads can be read as a codex for interpreting authentic youth sentiments and lifestyles (see also Thornton, 1995). By way of contrast with the fashion sector, the athletic shoe ads offer us few references to the myths of authenticity. The ideology of athleticism is deeply rooted in the modernist ethos celebrating achievement, deferral of gratication, discipline and teamwork, paths to personal identity. Yet even in these high modernist tableaux, the psychological force of authenticity is evidenced backstage: Reebok bows to the authenticating myth of the street musician, while Adidas invokes nostalgic footage of Muhammad Ali in a romanticized blending of artistry and athleticism. And when advertisers manage to create messages that their audiences deem authentic, they appear to be rewarded with sales. I am not claiming that the quest for authenticity is universally celebrated by advertising or psychologically signicant for a mass audience. Nor are the rhetorics of authenticity encoded in brand advertising today proffered as the antidote to the alienation of mass society. Yet rather than abandon the idea, I found more than a few indications that contemporary advertisers have continued to rewrite the quest for authenticity within contemporary promotional culture. Targeted at youth (and perhaps the educated middle classes in the form of adventure vacations and organic
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foods), the project of autonomy and self-authentication continues to be taken most seriously by those most immersed in the quest for anti-modern identity. Yet even if the marketplace is not a site of absolute personal freedom, to the degree it quells anxieties that the quest for freedom is disappearing in a hyper-commercialized market culture, it may prove therapeutic. References
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Jacqueline Botterill is an assistant professor at Brock University, Canada where she teaches courses related to advertising, media and consumer culture. She is co-author of The Dynamics of Advertising (Routledge, 2000) and Social Communication in Advertising (3rd edition, Routledge, 2005) and author of the forthcoming Consumer Culture and Personal Finance (Palgrave Macmillian). Address: Department of Communications, Popular Culture & Film, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, L2S 3A1, Canada. [email: J.S.Botterill@uel.ac.uk]

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