"Many people have criticized Barbie dolls for their unrealistic proportions, claiming that they give young girls a warped idea of what beauty should be. To tackle this problem, Nikolay Lamm created digital visualizations of a regular-sized “Barbie” doll, hoping to promote realistic beauty standards.
Jes Baker, 26, created a campaign called Abercrombie and Fat in response to the CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch. In 2006, the CEO released a statement that his target consumer is the cool, All American kid who has a lot of friends. He continues to say that his business is exclusive and a lot of people do not belong in his clothes.
Brandalism, an organization out of the UK that aims to reclaim public spaces from advertisers, used Black Friday to protest "partner" brands to the COP21 Climate Conference.
Anonymous artists contributed subvertisements that criticized these brand for their hypocrisy in saying they are advocates for the environment when more often than not they are the worst contributors to the problem.
The enforcement of city and state law pertaining to graffiti, advertising, and other signage has enormous power to visually shape public space. In New York City, enforcement is heavily skewed to ignore illegal commercial advertising, while simultaneously aggressively targeting graffiti and, in some cases, symbols of dissent.
“How different. Exotic,” commented one women as she watched a group of almost 50 people — mostly young and black, many wearing bright fabrics with African designs — stroll through the Shopping Leblon mall.
At a gallery within a shopping complex in the South Korean capital, a couple saw paint cans and brushes at their reach and use next to what was actually a finished portrait worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thinking the available paint and brushes was a signal to be a part of the art, they ended up technically vandalizing the artists' work.
Is it better for the environment if you buy a brand-new cotton T-shirt or a recycled one?
Well, it depends.
Recycling has apparent benefits, but the process shortens cotton fibres and so usually has to be mixed with some oil-based material to keep it from falling apart.
Such trade-offs make it tricky to figure out the real sustainability rating of clothes — but brands in Europe will soon have no choice.
Jes Baker is cutting retailer Abercrombie & Fitch down to size. Baker, who blogs under the name "The Militant Baker" and wears a size 22, changed the brand's A&F logo to "Attractive & Fat" in a mock, black-and-white Abercrombie ad to challenge the line's branding efforts.
Shmoogle is a Google randomiser. When you type your query into Shmoogle, you get Google's results but in random order. In one click Shmoogle instantly neutralizes the PageRank hierarchy and the whole SEO industry induced by it. Missdata, questions the implications and significance of the digital paradigm in which we live. She proposes different alternatives to daily digital tools.
In a massive act of ‘brand vandalism’ just two days before the launch of the UN COP21 Climate Conference, 600 anti-advertisement posters have been installed in outdoor media spaces throughout the streets of Paris. The posters display artwork from over 80 artists from 19 different countries, including big names such as Banksy-collaborator Paul Insect, Alex One, Know Hope, Escif, Cleon Peterson, Hyuro, Jimmy Cauty, Ron English and many others.
UNLESS by Stephanie Cardon is a vibrant floor-to-ceiling installation that fills the main entryway of Boston’s landmark Prudential Center. Commissioned by Boston Properties and curated and produced by Now + There, UNLESS explores sustainability, climate justice, and how taking action together can create positive change.
Internet spreads word as networks shun adverts for Buy Nothing Day
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
The Guardian, Friday 24 November 2000
Today is America's Buy Nothing Day. An event that was started to poke pointed fun at consumerism is now being celebrated in more than 40 countries, embarrassing television networks and demonstrating the power of the internet as a political organising tool.
When Disney and Barneys partnered together to create a runway-ready Minnie Mouse, outrage ensued from size and body acceptance activists claiming that the new Minnie Mouse was too skinny. Ragen Chastain, a leader in the Health at Every Size movement, and founder of popular blog "Dances With Fat," jumped on the controversy, and started a change.org petition that garnered over 145,000 signatures.
If fashion is a reflection of the times it is little wonder that the current round of shows have often felt discombobulating.
Gucci’s show on Sunday night was particularly surreal, opening with a series of models being propelled along a conveyor belt catwalk, staring bleakly ahead, wearing a high fashion take on straitjackets.
The Whitney Museum of American Art’s pay-what-you-wish Fridays are typically busy. For two-and-a-half hours out of the 53 the museum is open each week, visitors can enter without paying the usual $25 admission fee, a brief and temporary, but recurrent, leveling of the playing field for art lovers.
"Whirl-Mart Ritual Resistance is a participatory experiment. It is art and action. It came into being in 2001 as a response to Adbusters magazine’s call for foolish action on the first of April. What began as a single happening in Troy, NY has over the course of a year evolved into a ritual activity that is performed across the U.S., and known around the world.
Whether or not they follow politics, it’s fair to assume most people don’t actually read electoral programs. Podemos, Spain’s growing leftwing party, which got nearly 21% of the votes in last year’s elections, doesn’t think that’s good, so it adopted an unusual marketing approach to tackle that problem: it printed the program as an Ikea catalogue (pdf, link in Spanish).
Artist Daniel Soares pasted Photoshop toolbar stickers on these H&M posters as a nice little reminder that not all is as it seems. Y'all know how Photoshop messes with our perception of beauty, and I think this is a smart little stunt to snap us back into reality when we start to wonder why we never look like the girls on the posters we walk past every day.
For more than 30 years, the Guerrilla Girls have travelled the world exposing sexism and inequality in the art industry, and this week they proved Hong Kong was no exception.
Three members of the anonymous feminist collective—calling themselves Frida Kahlo, Käthe Kollwitz and Zubeida Agha—spoke at the University of Hong Kong on Monday, dressed in their signature black outfits and gorilla masks.
For 35 years, the Billboard Liberation Front have been altering public advertisements in San Francisco under the cover of night, strategically changing words or phrases to invert the intended message of corporate sponsors. Considering their guerrilla reclamation of public space an "improvement of outdoor advertising," the BLF regards the advertisers whose billboards they improve as clients, for whom they are performing a vital service.
"FTSE" is Birmingham-born producer and rapper Sam Manville. As an anti-captialist, he though it would be funny to take the name of the British stock market index (Financial Times and Stock Exchange), but he also jokes the acronym stands for "Fuck The System, Ennit.”
HIV is still among the top 10 leading causes of death in the world, ranking sixth with around 1.5 million deaths each year. Around 35 million people are currently infected with HIV, and cases are worryingly on the rise—it is far from old news. Determined to change this, a magazine has embarked on a bold new campaign in which 3,000 copies will be printed using ink mixed with HIV-infected blood.
Vetements' trademark is for subverting the fashion industry’s ways of doing things. Following its recent return to the runway after a short one season break, designer Demna Gvasalia has unveiled his latest project.
The Story of Stuff Project launches a new video. What is instructional, educational, and inspirational is a call for all the people in America to exercise their citizenship rather than their right to consume.
Here is what Annie Leonard (co-founder and spokes person for the project) has to say about this new film:
At ‘Arcadia Earth,’ Dazzle Illuminates Danger
Using augmented reality, virtual reality and installations of light and art, the creators of this pop-up exhibition hope to inspire action on climate change.
By Laurel Graeber
Oct. 23, 2019
The creators of “Arcadia Earth” want to awaken your conscience. But they also plan to make that guilt trip extraordinarily fun.