American Apparel Advertisement

In this image a young woman is leaned over a bowl of cereal, supposedly relaxing “the morning after”. One cannot help but notice the angle of the camera is conveniently placed to look up at her legs and bottom. For American Apparel (A.A.), a clothing company based in downtown Los Angeles, these types of provocative ads based on objectifying women’s bodies are not unusual. A.A. has been critiqued and scolded by numerous feminist based websites and organizations, mainly Jezebel.com, for printing overly sexual based advertisements. This ad in particular is overtly sexist in displaying a half naked female, in the kitchen, with the only part of her on display that will apparently grab the attention of the audience. It is clear this model has been selected based on the modern American beauty ideal: she has blonde, shoulder length hair, she is fairly skinny (probably a size 0/2) with a little extra (seemingly) on the hips and in the buttocks, not to mention she’s half naked and in the kitchen-where a misogynist might say she “belongs”. The most overtly sexist part of this advertisement is that her face is not shown because clearly her face is not what is going to sell A.A. clothing.

The text on the bottom says “Los Angeles. The morning after. Trying to put it back together.” The explicit meaning of this text is describing the context of the image: location – Los Angeles; date/time- the morning after (sex, most likely); action – trying to put “it” back together. Although it is not overtly clear what “it” entails, one could assume a number of things. Personally I would take that phrase as a reference to the date that this woman had last night was such an extravagant lover that he completely turned her world upside down and the only way she can “put it back together” would be to revert to comfortable routines like standing up half naked in the kitchen making herself the same bowl of cereal she has probably enjoyed since she was a child. However, the ad is clearly not trying to sell the cereal but instead how “hot” their underwear will make you look even at a time when your world is in shambles.

This advertisement places an extraordinary value on the female body as a tool, or object, used to sell clothing, considering she is the main and only prominent figure in the photograph. Our society values the half naked female form incredibly and scrutinizes it regularly until the concept of perfection loses all aesthetic meaning because it can never be reached. Generally speaking, men want to have sex with women who look like this and women want to look like this because the beauty ideal is revered and is perpetuated in popular music, commercial advertisements, actresses on television and in movies, and models on the pages of most popular magazines. If we look at society as a whole and how these ads perpetuate the way some men see women –as objects- these ads in no way help bring violence rates down and by no means appeal to the reasoning that women are people, not commodities.