Object to “Suit Supply” which offers pornography along with its suits
Look away now if a) consumerism offends you b) rampant sexism winds you up and/or c) you object to the pornofication of women in rampant sexist, consumerist style.
I signpost this blog with the warning because Suit Supply, a chain selling suits (would you believe) has thought it appropriate to use images of models in pornographic poses in order to sell its wares.
The blog writer on Beyond Retrograde (also a WVoN co-editor) was walking through Westfield (a shopping centre in West London) when her attention was drawn to the shop window where she saw an image of a woman on display, groping her own naked breast.
Between her fingers, her nipple was on show.
Inside Suit Supply she saw a photo of a seated woman, legs apart, looking up while a man lifted her skirt and inspected her vagina as though he were sizing up a bag of potatoes.
Other images included a man groping a woman’s naked breast and another of a man driving, reaching over to his female passengers crotch, presumably to perform a sexual act.
The pictures are all available on the shop’s website and are truly shocking.
Apparently the company has already been told to remove the photos from its Facebook page because they are offensive to users.
The company’s enthusiasm for these “artistic” photos is undimmed, however, and it dismisses the Facebook reaction as “really American“, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Perhaps someone should start a Facebook page objecting to them.
All letters of objection should be sent to:
Suit Supply
CEO Fokke De. Jong
Hoofdkantoor
Joop Geesinkweg 209
1096 Amsterdam
Or e-mail them at: info@suitsupply.com
And/or complain to the Advertising Standards Authority in your country.
I have submitted a complaint to the ASA in the UK – I cannot believe that these ads are on public view.
Oh, great. We did as well but got a reply from the ASA saying that they couldn’t deal with it as it’s outside their remit! Will be interestting to hear what they tell you. This is what they said:
“I’m sorry to tell you that we can’t deal with your complaint because our Code doesn’t cover point-of-sale and shop display material.
On 1 September 2010 the Committee of Advertising Practice announced that the ASA’s remit will be extended to cover the content of marketing communications online. However, that extended remit will not come into force until 1 March 2011, to allow the ASA and CAP to conduct training work to raise awareness and educate business on the requirements of the CAP Code, particularly amongst those who may not previously have been subject to ASA regulation. More information about the change of remit can be found on our website, http://www.asa.org.uk.
Until 1 March 2011, the ASA is able to apply the Code to certain kinds of material on websites. They are:
· online ads in space that’s been sold by the website owner to a third party; e.g. banner and pop-up ads
· sponsored search results (i.e. the links advertisers pay search engines to offer when you enter particular search terms) and
sales promotions. We regulate these wherever they appear, including in advertisers’ websites or e-mails. (Examples of sales promotions are free gifts and prize competitions; simple price cuts and savings claims aren’t sales promotions and we can’t investigate them.)
Because your complaint doesn’t fall within one of those categories I’m afraid that we’re unable to pursue it further.”
Complain directly to Westfield – as a company they are decidedly conservative and tend towards draconian leases. They take customer complaints very seriously and are very likely to bring pressure to bear if they think a shop display is offensive. The site for the specific mall will have a customer relations and marketing manager that you can email – in my experience (as a retail manager in a Westfield owned mall) they’re very responsive and hyper-averse to bad publicity.
Thanks for that. Yes, a number of us have been in touch with Westfield directly and are waiting to hear what they’re going to do. They seemed quite shocked at the images and didn’t seem to have been aware of them although one was on their own website! We’ll be following this up and will write a blog post to let readers know what we’ve managed to achieve.
Hello FD
Unfortunately Westfield hasn’t been that co-operative: in response to an email I sent them. They firstly replied with this:
_________________
Dear Jane
I have been in touch with the CEO of Suits Supply and have been given a statement to pass on to customers who find their promotional campaign offensive in any way.
‘Our campaign is called ‘Shameless’ and is shot by the renowned photographer Carli Hermès. In our opinion the photographs of the campaign are a well-balanced mix of style, humour and sex, the essence of fashion! We fully disagree that our campaign would be obscene and denigrating towards women. On the contrary, the women depicted in the photographs are obviously in the lead.’
I hope this helps resolve any issues that you have raised.
If you have any further questions or queries please feel free to get in touch.
——————————————————-
Obviously this didn’t address my concern, so I sent this:
________________________________
Hello
Thank you for your response.
However I would like a personal response from the management of the shopping centre itself please, not PR speak from the company that is committing the offence.
I look forward to receiving this reply.
Kind regards
——————————————————-
and got this:
______________________________
Good Morning Jane,
I do work for the Westfield Management Team. I am currently investigating this with my Centre Manager to see how we can escalate the posters being removed.
This is our current feedback in response to all queries regarding this issue.
If you have any further questions please feel free to get in touch.
Regards,
______________________________
So I am not sure that they really know what they are doing. We will wait and see.
They just wrote back to me –
Full View
Westfield Statement : Suit Supply
…
From:
Westfield London Concierge
…
Add to Contacts
To:
Thank you for your email regarding Suit Supply.
Westfield takes seriously customer concerns and the need for customers to have an enjoyable experience when they visit our centres.
Retailers in our centre are responsible for their advertising and in-store campaigns which in most cases, they will roll out nationally in all their stores. With regards to the current advertising campaign being run by Suits Supply, Westfield London has approached the retailer to request the immediate removal of the images which have caused offence to our customers.
We assure you that we are continuing to pursue the matter to a satisfactory conclusion.
Regards,
Westfield London Concierge Team
Westfield Shoppingtowns Ltd| Westfield London Centre Management | Centre Management Suite | Westfield London Shopping Centre | Ariel Way | London | United Kingdom W12 7GF
T + 44 (0) 20 3371 2368 | W Westfield.com
**********************************************************************
This E-mail is from Westfield Shoppingtowns Limited. Westfield
Shoppingtowns Limited is a private limited company registered in England,
Company No. 03912122 whose registered office is at Level 6, MidCity Place,
71 High Holborn, London WC1V 6EA. VAT registration number is 815 0326 63.
Westfield Shoppingtowns Limited is a subsidiary of the Westfield Group and
further details about the Westfield Group can be found at http://www.westfield.com.
This E-mail and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended
solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed.
Any unauthorised dissemination or copying of this E-mail or its attachments,
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Thanks, Cliff, yes I just received that as well. So we have a result as far as Westfield is concerned. Now we need to ensure that Suit Supply get rid of these awful images from the rest of their stores and their website. We’re hoping to have a petition ready to go up next week advocating a boycott of their stores. Thanks for your support.
I would just like to say all you ladies are being pathetic. What do you think people see when our sex write like this: are we really making the point we want to make? Sure the adverts are a little risque but when you consider the volume of adverts on television directed at women and the fact that the advert is only available on the interent, a resource which already hosts mediums of far worse “entertainment”. I feel that this kind of reaction is what gives “feminist’s” a bad name. Needless to say the pictures are still on the website and we are still in the same situation however many letters sent afterwards.
I disagree on several counts. The adverts are much more than “a little risque” – they are downright pornographic and portray women as sex objects to be inspected and then presumably f****d. The adverts are in all Suit Supply stores, not just the internet. This was the whole point of our campaign – to get Westfield to tell Suit Supply to remove them from that shop. Which it did. That seems pretty successful to me. I would add that all the research ever done shows that portraying women in the way that these images did encourages violence against women. On that count alone we need to show stores like Suit Supply that these campaigns are not artistic and clever, but put women at risk.
I think it offensive to call us pathetic to objecting to being portrayed as animals to be stripped, inspected and the ****ed. If you showed black people being treated like this it would rightly remind people of the days of slavery …. but it’s alright to treat women and girls like this. Feminists will always have a bad name – most authorities do not like women to stand up for themselves as it stops them being maliable and submissive – and so the best way to keep women down is to deride their physical appearance, sexuality or views in the way that racists very often taunt people about the size of their lips, genitals or skin shade. It’s known as bullying – maybe you should examine why you berate us for views in one of the few non censored arenas of the media …?
I kind of sensed the ‘you’re all just over reacting’ post would appear sooner or later. If you really want to see the pictures in their ‘full glory’ Google search the Shameless images. Tell me then that they belong in a shopping centre? I and most women who complained about these images did, not from a place of ‘being a feminist’, but a knowing within that this advertising campaign has gone too far. Most men I know who have seen these images also said it is not appropriate to sell suits in this way.
I tend to go on my feelings about things like this, and I can tell you I didn’t ‘feel good’ seeing those pictures. You will notice the images portray the woman freely available, the man/men are wrinkled (which is unheard of in a female model) and the story basically says ‘I can have this woman, take or leave it’ (if he can be at all bothered since he’s wearing a suit). I don’t need to be descriptive about the models’ poses as I think it’s very clear what the pictures are trying to tell us.
Most mothers and fathers I know do not want to bring their sons up on this kind of advertising, or give their daughters the impression the only value they have in life is to wait for Mr Suit to turn up and all they are good for is sex. Men too are becoming more ‘aware’ and getting so bored of being advertised to through sex. There is surely more substance to men and their brains than the fantasy of naked available women?
If we don’t complain about this level of advertising it just becomes the ‘norm’. As for giving feminists a bad name, that won’t ever happen. Without the history of the amazing women before us (who I am sure were also labelled ‘pathetic’), we would not have a vote, career, nor the freedom to express ourselves to stop advertising like this. It’s not like we complain because we’ve got nothing better to do. We complain because somewhere within us, (feminist or not) we have a knowing this is not beneficial for male and female relationships, nor the messages Suit Supply seem to be sending out to the younger generation about male/females roles. We complain because we have an understanding that the meaning made from this level of advertising goes a lot deeper than people realise.
I have seen some of the main press reporting the Shameless campaign as ‘erotic’ and ‘liberal’. Really? There is nothing erotic or liberal about wearing a suit…
Yes, you’re right, the response that we’re all “over-reacting” was bound to emerge. It amuses me that people are happy to benefit from all the advances that feminism has brought women (including, as you point out, the right to vote for which some women actually died) but love nothing better than to denigrate feminists. Twas ever thus.
oh yawwwn.
One last thing; they are not pornographic: The Oxford English Dictionary describes pornography as “… the depiction of sexual behavior that is intended to arouse sexual excitement in its audience”. No doubt the behaviour is sexual as is the case in much of the advertising industry however I think it is a tad too much to reason that this somewhat adolescent display was for the erotic pleasure of would be customers. I believe, though do not necessarily commend, that Suit Supply was merely trying to make a bold statement in a humorous if not vulgar manner.
I’m afraid that’s a bit of an own goal there. These pictures are clearly intended to arouse as you yourself accept when you say the behaviour is sexual. That’s the whole point. Sex sells. In this case, suits for men. What we are saying is that portraying women in this way is unacceptable and we will continue to campaign against it.
So many things are wrong with this ad campaign that I don’t know where to begin. I saw the discrepancy between the way the girls -gorgeous young girls- and men -old, wrinkled- looked as well. You can be old and wrinkled but you can have and f..k a young gorgeous girl because you have money -obviously successful business men wearing power suits- and girls can be bought and sold…Just remove the girls and replace it with young men, black people , animals or children then you will see how disgusting they are…or replace the genders…Old women doing the same things to young good looking boys, checking their genitals, sexually overpowering them, naked next to fully clothed women…I mean it is just disturbing and wrong…Women’s naked bodies are used as accessories…I am so fed up with oversexualization of women in media…This is teaching young men to look at women like sideshows, objects and additions…Sad actually…
Really good points there Emine. Yes, if we were to replace the men in the images with older women, they most certainly would not have been acceptable. So why is it okay to portray women in that way?
What really gets me down is that these images were deemed acceptable in the first place. Every time this kind of thing happens, it just reinforces that the world is still run by men. No woman would ever think that these images were acceptable – so the board of Suits Supply must be male, the advertising agency must be male, the management of the shopping centre must be male. Sigh.
And the female models? I imagine they are male too…
There have always been women who have been prepared to sell their bodies and there still are. Her point, as I understand it, is that it “reinforces that the world is still run by men”.
sorry to disappoint you Jane, I am a woman and I think these images are acceptable.
Hello Saskia you are entitled to your opinion, but you are right – I am extremely disappointed that as a woman you do not see that these images are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the pervasive pornography that portrays women as ONLY sexually available playthings.
I’m sorry I am disapointing you Jane, but I honestly don’t see what you’re describing in these pics. The women in these pics are enjoying themselves as much as the men. I don’t see anything wrong with two conscenting adults having fun. I have a lot more problems for example with women being forced to cover themselves up, are expected to be submissive to men, not being allowed to go out, have an opinion… all with the excuse that they could possibly sexually arouse men or that they are a lesser human being. That they don’t show in adverts of course, but that’s a much bigger issue than what’s being portrayed in these pics.
Saskia you make the point that you have a lot more of a problem with ‘women being forced to cover themselves up, are expected to be submissive to men, not being allowed to go out, have an opinion… all with the excuse that they could possibly sexually arouse men or that they are a lesser human being.’ Advertising campaigns such as these reinforce this problem – women in this advertising campaign are not being shown as equals – they are being portrayed as accessories to the fully clothed male, and therefore are being portrayed as submissive, just as they are in pornography – it is usually the woman bent over somewhere, or being penetrated by several men or – take your pick, the images and plot lines are always based on the male determined ‘money shot.’ These images are just the precursor to that. However, whatever the rights or wrongs of the images are, and the debate will rage on, I really do not want children being exposed to such images in shopping centre.
Saskia, I grew up in a country where women’s sexuality is constantly repressed in the name of “honor, dignity, religion” and at the age of 22, I moved to USA where I witnessed that in the name of “liberation” women became sexual objects. So I guess I am qualified to comment, and I think both are wrong. Look at the pictures again, women are on the background, sometimes eyes closed, mostly naked….One man examining her genitals…Just like beautiful dolls or statutes…or piece of furniture, not active -surely passive- inanimate, and dominated…And go to Afghanistan, women are on the background, entire body is covered, not active-surely passive- and dominated. Their genitals are examined too…Same concept, different methods…I guess they could have used wild animals or fruit =)))
Let’s just agree to disagree on this subject 🙂
In the mean time, I’m going to look at some of the David Beckham underwear pics for Armani and the Calvin Klein adverts with male models 😉
Oh Saskia – yawn.