This last week, the “natural” series of American Apparel advertisements finally went too far.  The starkly-lit photo spots, ubiquitous in Philadelphia since the arrival of our very own AA outpost on Walnut Street, use non-professional models to sell a line of retro, functional clothes.  The store is what you would expect to see if a Fruit of the Loom truck plowed through a Sherwin Williams store.  The ads are what you would see if you went to www.amateurteens.com. 

This week’s ad certainly qualifies as borderline pornographic, with a chubby girl-next-door lying back in nothing but a pair of black tights, her hands and forearms covering her exposed and badly tanned breasts.  The basic, “natural” feel of the ad contrasts sharply with the usual fashion aesthetic of anorexic perfection and presents an interesting and provocative challenge to business as usual.  But how successful are they in promoting the “everyday” image of “real” people? 

The ads do present, in graphic detail, some “normal” people; this is an ostensible attack on the modeling establishment and its superficial ethos of perfection.  Indeed, the clothing company states simply on their website: “American Apparel values a natural aesthetic when it comes to our clothes as well as our models.”  The results are photos which are simple, straightforward and leave as little as possible to the imagination. 

You can actually see the pimples on Sheily’s ass.  The stubble under Natasha’s armpits stands proudly, untouched by razor or overbearing men. Natasha’s thong unitard brashly reveals cheeky dimples and the fine, purple veins crisscrossing the not-quite-ass, not-quite-thigh flesh.  The style of photography uses close-ups with unidirectional, harsh lighting to create an exaggerated snapshot effect.  The photos – shot in banal settings such as bedrooms, cars, on couches, in the shower, in the kitchen – have an ephemeral air which belies their minute detail: rich textures of teeth, lips, hair, tartar, coffee stains, pimples, razor burn, fripples.  Nothing is hidden, so it seems.

Or rather, everything is brought out.  Despite the appearance of naturalness, there is something deeply unsettling about these ads.  While it is true that the fashion industry and its destructive tradition of one dimensional representation and exploitative, objectifying gaze over women deserves, even begs, for a challenge, the American Apparel “natural” models fall very short of redefining any visual role, much less introducing a “natural” perspective that eliminates the impossible ideals set forth by previous generations of fashion ads.  In spite of everything, it still feels a whole lot like looking at porn.

The reasons for this failure are threefold.  First, their attempt at “naturalness” merely exchanges one imagistic stereotype for another.  The plastic bodies and static smiles of Hollywood are traded in for the wan grin and pudgy stomach of the “average” girl, an image which is just as constructed as any other.  When you look at the pictures, the focus is still the physical presence of the model, and she still interacts with the camera to create an ideal space in which the viewer can imagine him or herself.  The images, like any other advertisement, invite you to project yourself next to them and see how you stack up.  Through their authority as “accurate” images, photographs assert themselves as points of reference from which people will then extrapolate their “needs” as consumers.  For the AA ads this is doubly so, since they try so hard to establish themselves as “real.”  For porn this is triply true, since people still insist on injecting a plot.

Overall, the only things that qualify the AA models as “real” are the photos’ over-attentiveness to detail and their “snapshot” qualities of blurred motion, odd angles and superfluous flash.  When one looks past this thin stylistic veneer, the same forms are lurking that haunt the SI Swimsuit Edition.  Even if the people in these photo shoots were not models before the shoot, they certainly become models during it, and seem to take special relish in overplaying the role.  The recurring “seductive” gazes are so seductive they almost reduce the girls eyes to slits, the Japanese-French-Canadian sales clerk bites her pinky as if she were lying on some tropical beach, and the erogenous zones are displayed disproportionately compared to other body parts – all the worse since they’re wrapped in a cacophony of cheap-looking colored spandex.  And, as always, there are still no grossly obese models, despite the fact that America is overbearingly fat.  How “real” can that be?

The second reason why these ads fail to present any authentic alternative to the visual lies perpetuated by fashion advertising is that the whole approach is simply part of a clever branding strategy! Instead, these images carefully calibrated to a newly-defined demographic which is categorically opposed to the popular view of “perfect” supermodels.  What we are given, rather than the promised authenticity, then, is a constructed “anti-fake” which is negatively defined by the world of Cindy Crawford and Vogue.  While the people who model for AA are more diverse and don't conform to the same rigid aesthetic guidelines as, say, Cosmopolitan, the ads still display a specific kind of person for a specific reason.  The kind of person is simply the synthetic antithesis of the supermodel— at the opposite end of the spectrum, to be sure, but a creation with similar anatomy. 

As stated on their website, the AA brand is based on clothes and people which are “natural.” The girls pose in suggestive, unnaturally languid ways that underline the products effect on lifestyle.  People who wear these clothes are natural, relaxed, free-spirited; the kind of people who would take close-up pictures of themselves in their underwear and not give a shit if millions of people saw.  People who don't wear these clothes, or who value color coordination or use professional models, are “fake” people who push impossible, uncomfortable and discriminatory designs on poor, unsuspecting regular girls.  Their alternative is to package the image of the skin blemish and make clothes for the self designated “imperfect.”  If body image is so unimportant, then why not eliminate images of the body altogether?  Why pursue the hypocrisy of an anti-body-image image of bodies?  Why not just make porn?  AA is just trying to sell clothes, and their reality is the same as any other retailer’s: shaped by sales.

Lastly, the ads in AA are just as sexist and objectifying as any others.  “Natural” or not, the most common images are T and A, and female models outnumber males 29 to 3.  In any case, Glen’s photo shoot is not nearly as extensive as Lauren’s, and I’ll wager that it gets fewer hits.  Even in the ads themselves, sex is a central selling point. I need only cite the series of road trip photos where the girl alternatively takes off her top, sticks her fingers down the front of her pants and then, at the very end, is shown unloading a blanket from the trunk of the car.  The numerous girls who do photo spreads on couches or beds are very literally having kinky, contorted sex with invisible people.  Honestly, how many shots of somebody’s ass do you need to sell a pair of pants?

The way towards a media revolution is not through the creation of an Abercrombie Catalog doppelganger with unattractive people who don't shave.  At least with professional models, we know that they’re fake; the cues are obvious.  Here, the marketing strategy is so well designed that the “realness” of the models and the laid back, everyday nature of the products are virtually unquestioned, leaving in place the assumption that other brands are “fake,” uptight and closed minded products of superficial corporations.  The girls are accessible in a very naughty way that Claudia Schiffer isn’t.  One gets the impression that you might just run into one doing her laundry in a pair of powder blue panties, sitting on top of washing machine with a mischievous grin.  Oh, wait.  That was a porno movie I saw.  Never mind.

AA is a wolf in hot pink boy shorts.  The images, cunningly made to seem “real” give a new, devious standard of normalcy which is every bit as limiting and sexist as the old one.  Girls are made to seem accessible in photos that so resemble the stolen views of errant thongs and inadvertently exposed flesh in public places that it’s scary.  These ads are living voyeurism.  “Reality” has become just another marketing strategy, and like everybody else who prides themselves in their ability to distinguish “reality” from “advertising” as a discriminating consumer, I am afraid.  I am very, very afraid.

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