Consuming Representations of Childhood, Family and Community in Advertising

The following advertisements are all mere representations of our childhood, our potential families and beloved communities, but with a strange twist. They seek to assure consumers that the products these signs and signifiers represent will help them attain the state of being in the representation that is portrayed. In other words, the ads are actually selling us two things simultaneously -- a product and an ideology.

You will soon see some of the many ways that advertisements are framed against a historical and nostalgic backdrop, like Donna Reed for instance, in order to reassure us that the anxieties relating to our childhood, families and communities can be forgotten in the midst of the free market. Condensing our sense of collective memory into brief historical memories, these ads select random segments from some of society's most sacred realms. In an age where nothing is sacred, this shouldn't cause much reason for any alarm.

We believe that the longer our media-based culture continues to play with fire, it will inevitably get burned. Robbing these moments of their true historical and personal contexts and using them as puppets speaking for a product, advertisements have joined in the destruction of the sanctity of the past in order to build a hyper-real future. If this trend in advertising continues and our memories and nostalgia of the past are re-positioned to signify something new, we may soon find ourselves lost in a search to construct meaning out of the rubble of what once was.

This comical portrayal of childhood is infested with feelings of the gleefulness and bliss that every little girl can discover on a fine spring day. Rather appropriate for a corporation who claims to be "An 'attitude' company", this advertisement asks women to recall an attitude of discovery, but associates it with beauty. The blanket statement "I sure am beautiful" supported by a sequence of "la's" carries a carefree attitude about beauty that The Body Shop has always attempted to support. As a self-proclaimed progressive corporation that is so hip it even uses recycled materials, The Body Shop a new retro-chic model to represent their products and attitudes: Eudora. Poor Eudora merrily rides along on her previously and, thanks to our space-age retro fascination), currently fashionable bicycle, enjoying her youth while she still can. Similar to our culture's connection to 'kitschy' items, The Body Shop seeks to identify with the strong and imagined feelings of Eudora's springtime epiphany. In her discussion of kitsch, Megalopolis author Celeste Olaquiaga points out that a gap exists between the meaning of a real and simulated experience.

In this advertisement it is pretty clear that this gap separates Eudora from the original meaning of her bike ride, and fills her thoughts with language intended to support the sales of The Body Shop. This gap is further widened by what Olaquiaga refers to as

...the retro 1950s and 1960s fashion, in which the desire for intensity and the recirculation of a heavily iconographic imagery unite to resolve the spatial confusion of contemporary identity in its own terms. (Olaquiaga, 23)

Few moments can be more intense than an epiphany, yet this intensity is lost in the trite words strewn about the advertisement which continually draw us back to the product being sold.

Tommy Hilfiger's cologne, Tommy, positions its prospective owner as an American- a sign, symbol and ideology filled to the brim with inter-textuality and meaning. As do many of his other products, Tommy Hilfiger's new cologne is associated with the colors and patriotism of the American flag. A "Tommy family" is created around the historical significance and symbolic representation of a sign such as the American flag. Instead of a uniting, (or divisive) meaning attributed to the sign value of the flag, its meaning tries to demonstrate that others have acquired this same attitude, and even have the proper uniforms and perfumes to achieve their American dream. Hopefully, this community is not a real one, although with the recent advent of community togetherness in the advertising messages and shared summer vacations of Saturn car company, can we expect anything different? The American flag conjures up a variety of visions, playing on our collective memory of these patriotic, militarisitc and not-so-democratic moments which are supposed to bring us all together. Perhaps the proliferation of a strong sense of nationalism and collective identity means that our last bastions of community and nationhood will be dependent on what we consume, rather tan who we are. If Tommy Hilfiger keeps up their American campaign, it may not be long before their clothing is required in schools and America reeks of a red, white and blue scented cologne.