Yes, it’s noticeable that African-American women like Leontyne Price and Lena Horne appear in Avedon’s mass-market ads in an era when they were rarely featured outside Ebony or Jet. Yes, the Versace woman commands the shirtless Versace man. The compilers of the book make a case for female empowerment in these images, which only halfway holds up. (The photos, tellingly, focus on the models and barely show the shoes.) And they are his ads: Over the years, he increasingly inserted himself into agency conversations in order to knit together strategy and image. When in the 1990s Hush Puppies carried off a miracle, repositioning itself from “strictly for dorky sociology professors” to “so clunky it’s hip,” it was Avedon who helped that happen. Before the campaign he shot for Clairol, one in seven American women dyed their hair afterward, it was one in two. According to the first survey of his ads, Avedon Advertising (by Rebecca Arnold, James Martin, and Avedon’s daughter-in-law Laura Avedon), these photographs really worked as marketing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |