French Connection Advert Campaign 'You are...'

For my DVC presentation I had to research about identity in today's postmodern society. The topic sounded slightly dull, especially as I had briefly covered it when doing A-level sociology, and yes, like usual, I left it to the last minute to research but once I started looking into it, I actually found it very interesting. One thing that did particularly interest me, which I hadn't seen before was French Connection's advertising campaign entitled 'You are...'. The campaign questions what it means to be a man or woman in today's society. By doing this, the campaign enables the consumer to explore how gender and society dictate behaviour with powerful, thought-provoking imagery. This moves forward from the idealized image of man and woman, French Connection have created scenarios confronting the viewer by asking, 'You are man?' and 'You are woman?'.

What was even more interesting was the story behind how the adverts came about. For two weeks, French Connection set up 'The Man Camp' on the Isle of Malta and 'The Woman Camp' on the Isle of Gozo and dared their ambassadors to discover what it meant to be man and what it meant to be woman. Some of the things they had to do actually sounded quite funny, they made the ambassadors sit upon an inflatable animal in the sea whilst looking good?! Apparently that helped to find out whether you were man or woman! But I suppose French Connection is known for the humour it brings about, especially with its most famous iconography of 'FCUK' which is why the intelligent wit and humour of the new ad campaign makes it so successful with its existing customers.

So they decided that 'The Man' was 'a rugged, bearded and outspoken character who tells our customer how to dress. He has the physique of a bare-knuckle boxer, the brain of Voltaire and a discerning eye. Other men can learn much from him'.

And 'The Woman' was described as 'understated, yet sexy, her description is brief, as we know little of her. She is beautiful, enchanting, capricious and mystifying. We don't even catch her name'.