Abercrombie & Fitch recently pulled off a clever PR victory by cheekily offering to pay The Situation, from Jersey Shore, to stop wearing its clothes. The French apparel company Lacoste, seemingly inspired, is now trying to get the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to stop wearing the green crocodile. Forgive the glibness of the comparison. There’s something strange at work here.
Breivik loves Lacoste. He lists it in his so-called manifesto among his favourite things, alongside Eurovision, “beef with noodles and fried rice – yummy!” and “high class escorts”. Even when he was willing to sell his beloved Breitling watch and Montblanc pen to raise cash to buy weaponry, he stayed true to his sartorial favourite. It was such a hit with the ladies, you see. On 25 June, weeks before he killed 77 people, he wrote:
“Refined individuals like myself are a rare commodity here so I notice I do get a lot of attention. It’s the way I dress … mostly very expensive brand clothing, Lacoste sweaters … people can see from a mile away that I’m not from around here.’”
Lacoste, whose slogan is “unconventional chic”, actively sells this “refined” side of itself—a kind of attainable elitism. In fact, the brand can boast that it pulled off one of the greatest marketing turnarounds in history. In the 1980s, Lacoste was ubiquitous in downmarket department stores. If you were snotty, missing several teeth and still peed the bed, you were guaranteed to own a selection of crocwear. Then Lacoste turned on its cute little tail. It bought back its licenses from retailers like Zellers and Bargain Harold’s (high fives? anyone?), and multiplied the price of everything by 10. Within a decade it had rebranded itself as the posh French fashion label for people who don’t know much about posh French fashion.
So the brand managers know what they’re doing. When they saw the widely published photo of Breivik in a police car wearing a red Lacoste jumper, they probably put their best minds on the problem of what to do next. This was a big decision, and I’m not saying there was a right way to handle it. By deciding to very publicly disassociate the brand from Breivik, Lacoste’s managers adopted the stance of taking the moral high ground, at great cost. Not only is Lacoste taking the risk of drawing attention to what many of us never noticed in the first place, namely that Breivik wore Lacoste. (Most of us were focused, in disgust, on his eyes and that faked smile.) But it’s also turning up its nose at the crazy rightwing Christian fundamentalist market, a market that, one imagines, is only growing in Europe. I’m only partly joking.
But how scrupulous is this decision, really? The lesson from Jersey Shore is not the one the Guardian drew—that “the show’s cocktail of sex, alcohol, bragging and bad behaviour is harming [Abercrombie & Fitch’s] ‘aspirational’ brand image”—but just the opposite. It was ENCOURAGING the connection, purposefully drawing attention to it. MTV and Abercrombie were both giddily self-congratulatory with their PR coup. It underlined Abercrombie’s aspirational brand image by showing a bunch of vulgar unsophisticates trying (and failing) to live up to it. It flattered the suburbanites who are Abercrombie’s real target market by saying to them, “Hey, sexy Abercrombie fans—look how all the trash wish they were you.” Call it reverse aspirationality.
Could this reverse aspirationality be at work with Lacoste and Breivik? Only somebody who feels hugely insecure about their social standing as one of the white Christian elite would kill a bunch of white elite Christian teenagers. Maybe Lacoste is actually emphasising the elitism of its brand by pointing up the connection to a guy who took such pathetic and sick measures to stress his own worthiness to join the club.
Lest you accuse me of rank cynicism (which of course I dispute; I’m not even necessarily accusing Lacoste of it), let’s take a quick poll:
Hands up who knew Anders Breivik loved Lacoste last week.
Hands up who knows it now.
If I’m wrong—if there wasn’t something actively to be gained from calling attention to the Lacoste-Breivik connection—wouldn’t the brand managers just have been better off letting the whole thing blow over?
No?
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Christopher Michael is a regular contributor to Toronto Standard and a writer for The Guardian newspaper.
Cross-posted from Hawkblocker.com: Ad reviews by the prey. For more unbiased advertising reviews from around the globe go to Hawkblocker.com.
