"Born to Fit Together"
This advertisement for Gap depicts a man and a woman posing with their bodies intertwined wearing all denim clothing. Our intial observations were that these two people were distincly “masculine” and “feminine”. The man was built, had short hair, a beard, and was also in front of the woman. The woman had long hair, was very thin, and clearly had make up on. We interpreted various messages about gender from these observations. The slogan, “born to fit together” seems to imply that men and women are born to be together, rather than same sex couples. We also thought that both the positioning of the models, as well as the slogan had an obvious sexual connotation. We looked further into the message about men and women being meant for eachother. Some premises we came to were that biologically, men and women “fitting together” is the only way that reproduction can occur. The message of men and women fitting together could also imply that homosexual relationships don’t “fit” in society. This ad can also imply that Gap clothes are only for heterosexual people. This ad has all of these implications and connotations, yet we wonder what the ad itself has to do with the product at hand.
Another detail. The woman is actually lying on top of the man. He's not even wincing. What does that say? A man can support a woman's weight easily, but not the other way around? If they are "fitting together" does that mean equality?
ReplyDelete-Erik
Nice details. I definitely see where you drew your hypotheses.
ReplyDeleteAs I was thinking more about your hypotheses, an alternative hypothesis came to mind that I'm really curious to know your opinions on - if you put your finger over the faces of the two models, both bodies look and are dressed androgynously enough that you MIGHT not be able to tell the difference. Am I crazy?! Both have shirts unbuttoned pretty low, both are dressed in denim that is loosely fitting enough that you may or may not be able to discern whether or not each body is in possession of a set of breasts (although I can tell that the slight frills on the woman's denim jacket are meant by Gap designers to be worn by a female) - but their dress and body types look more similar to me than I would expect. Thoughts?!
-Steph
Wow. Both the article writer and the first comment are really, really reaching. Do you really think they thought that deep? No, they went: this is the slogan, let's think of a cool pose to go with it. Things like this make it difficult for real issues to be taken seriously.
ReplyDelete