Hmmm . . . Do I Know That Face? : ‘Real People’ Advertising Puts a New Spin on Celebrity
What’s the difference between a fashion model and a real person?
“When you photograph real people, the character and personality are already there,” says Steven Meisel, the popular fashion photographer. “So are the interest and realness. You don’t have to create it. There’s more. Real people don’t have to be perfectly beautiful.”
Meisel should know. He has photographed some of the best of the lot. He also has been a “real person” model himself, wearing his own black T-shirt and black trench coat in one of the new ads for the Gap.
It’s easier for a photographer to use a real person than a fashion model, he says. “And it is a lot easier being the model than the photographer,” he adds with a laugh.
How Real Is ‘Real’?
Using “real” people in fashion advertising is the current vogue. Some are more “real” than others, who may be celebrities readily recognizable in their own locale or in group.
Barneys uses men from the financial world to tout its menswear, but it also has model-actress Lauren Hutton for its women’s campaign.
Arnold Scaasi is pictured with the women who wear his clothes.
And the Gap uses people successful in their own worlds, if not generally known.
It is hardly a new idea.
“Testimonial advertising is cyclical and it has been around since advertising began,” says Alan Hampel, creative director at Benton and Bowles for years and now a partner at Canter and Achenbaum, marketing and management consultants. “There is a certain veracity built into the real-people approach, a certain believability that counters that certain skepticism about advertising in general these days.”
Old Ad Dogs, New Tricks
But if the idea is old there are new approaches. The American Express ads succeeded by putting faces to already well-known names. In a fairly recent series of Esprit ads, the company boosted its youthful image by picturing and identifying its younger employees as models.
Few people, real or not, turn down a chance to appear in such an ad.
When creative advertising executive Jane Trahey cooked up the idea of the Blackglama ads, with “legends” photographed in black mink coats, Jacqueline Onassis turned it down--and not because she didn’t wear fur. Her secretary offered to take her place, but she herself was turned down. Since then, others, including Phyllis Diller, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme and Evangeline Carey have asked to be included in the popular series, says Peter Rogers, whose agency now handles the account.
The Great Lakes Mink Growers arrived from Utah to get Trahey’s help promoting black mink at a time when mink sales were on the wane.
Who Wears Mink Nowadays?
“We kept concentrating on the fact that people had stopped wearing mink except for old ladies and Jackie Kennedy,” Trahey said. She thought of the former First Lady as a role model, but assumed, accurately, “I’ll never get her.”
But she did reach David Begelman at the William Morris Agency, which handled Lauren Bacall, Barbra Streisand and Melina Mercouri.
She offered a Richard Avedon photo and a coat of their choice by the furrier of their choice in return for appearing in an ad. “I was like an Indian, trading pelts for people,” she laughed.
Streisand was the first to agree. Her name was never used and the coat was not really seen in the ad, just the sense of the black fur.
“It wasn’t necessary,” says Trahey, who soon started getting calls from celebrities’ agents. The campaign gave credibility, that was its secret, Trahey says. Women were recognized without using their names. “You didn’t have to. . . . Here were marvelously recognizable faces looking out at you,” she says.
Character Behind the Company
Dress designer Adele Simpson and shoe creator Joe Famolare were predecessors of the Lee Iacocca ads of today.
It was the Blackglama campaign that gave Maggie Gross, senior vice president for advertising for the Gap, the international chain of inexpensive quality sportswear items and jeans, the inspiration to attempt a campaign using real people. “It was my vote of confidence,” Gross says.
Here was her situation. Millard Drexler, the company president, wanted to run ads for the most basic items in the store--T-shirts, turtlenecks and chambray shirts, the stuff that everyone buys but hardly makes a grabby photograph. The problem was making the clothes look different from everyone else’s T-shirts.
The Gap was opening stores in Los Angeles and wanted to devote special advertising to the city.
Gross fantasized about real Los Angeles types from the movie and music industries wearing Gap clothes in the ads. In a brainstorming session she focused on Tina Turner to wear a Gap T-shirt. “We laughed and said she would probably show up in an original hairdo and high heels and pocket T and we’d have somebody incredible shoot her.” It never happened.
Semi-Celebrities
But it all rolled out from there, Gross says. They decided to pick people on the edge rather than very famous celebrities. “We knew we could get those kind of people, while we didn’t have the confidence to go up to Tina Turner and say ‘please wear this pocket T-shirt.’ ”
They started the first week of November last year, using photographer Matthew Rolston and as models actress Claire Hall, architect Bryan Murphy, “people recognized for what they do, and appropriate to L.A.”
The response was all positive. Not only did the campaign bring customers into the store, but--no surprise--people called up wanting to be in the ads. And someone offered Vanity Fair columnist Angela Janklow, one of the models, a trip around the world. To shoot the New York series that followed, Gross picked the “most New York photographer,” Annie Leibovitz.
Gap ad photographers have a strong say in choosing the individuals to be photographed, and the amateur models style their attire with elements from their wardrobes.
“When photographer Steven Meisel walked in the door he was photographed just the way he appeared. In his own black T-shirt and trench coat,” says Gross.
Names But Not Models
Gap digressed and used “names” in one New York-based series that included fashion folk such as editor Marina Schiano (who was wearing a $9.50 Gap T-shirt with her YSL tuxedo), designers Rifat Ozbek and Geoffrey Beene. Beene couldn’t resist Meisel’s offer, he says, to be photographed with his dachshund pups, Maximilian and Sir Lancelot.
Real people are paid an “honorarium” by the Gap, pay roughly comparable to that usually offered a rising model. Even so, some, like arts maven Peggy Cooper Cafritz, have turned down the Gap, not wanting to appear in something so commercial; others, like New York jewelry designer Tina Chow, found it simply didn’t work into their schedules. (Chow has since been photographed in a hooded sweat shirt and her own jewelry.) Producer David Mamet promised his wife he would never appear in an ad.
Barneys New York used identifiable men in the spring of 1988, including Joseph Papp, Thomas Hoving and John Malkovich. “We felt that the men who shop in our stores would not particularly identify with models,” said Neil Kraft, vice president of advertising and marketing for Barneys. The campaign then expanded to men in the financial circle in New York. “People who do interesting things are more unusual, more interesting than young kid models.”
When Gene Pressman, the brains behind Barneys’ women’s division, started talking through an upcoming advertising campaign on the women’s clothes, he wanted to reach the women who might think Barneys was too young for them. Pressman suggested focusing on Lauren Hutton, but was advised that there was no way she would do it. Kraft figured the store couldn’t pay enough money and that a personality like Hutton wouldn’t give up that kind of time.
But she had the time and Barneys had enough money. But is Hutton, who made her name as a model and has one of the most photographed faces in the world, a model these days or a “real person”? The answer may lie in the famous space between her two front teeth, which Hutton assiduously disguised with tooth caps in her model days, but bares with mischievous gusto now. Check the ads. She can only be considered real when she’s wearing the gap.
