• ISCRIVITI ALLA NEWSLETTER

The first impression is that of a deja vu or – worse – of a parody of Benetton old campaigns by Oliviero Toscani (there were many of them in the 90s). What irritates me is how characters are matched: the result is sloppy, naive, and even deceptive.

It’s just a little pain, as it happens when you meet your ex-girlfriend with a man you dislike, and something in that encounter annoys you, but you don’t want to drag up a finished love story. After a few minutes I’m already thinking about something else. But then people starts commenting those ads on social networks: a series of trite sentences and opinions we already heard, and yet what strikes me is that those remarks are written by young people who probably have never seen the original photos. And then I receive a call from the editors of “Bill” – I enjoyed the first issue of the magazine and its idea that advertising can be different from what we usually see. They ask me to write something about that campaign – of course, I’m talking about UnHate. And then I stop for a second and I think that maybe I was wrong and mine was a hasty judgment, perhaps due to too much love. Maybe. Anyway, it’s a good excuse to go through a page of advertising history – and not just that. So, let’s start from the beginning.

Benetton has built his reputation (and in part also his fortune, which was mainly due to an industrial and distribution system extremely innovative for the time) thanks to a series of campaigns that have significantly changed the world of advertising and communication during the ’80s and ’90s.

The great insight of Oliviero Toscani, shared by Luciano Benetton (yes, it was all about insight, not marketing strategy) was understanding that our way of life was changing fast, and those colorful sweaters could be the metaphor of a global and multi-ethnic reality. Benetton apparel was worn by people every day, it was practical and affordable: it was real, as opposed to the unattainable dream of luxury brands. What’s more, Oliviero Toscani understood that the company had to take into account its social role (what is now known as corporate responsibility). Nowadays it sounds obvious, but it wasn’t in those days, when advertising – and market – lived in a parallel universe, very far from real life. Advertising in Italy was made of happy families that had breakfast in a mill (the Mulino Bianco – “white mill” – company used to stage its commercials in an enchanting and almost fairy mill), and icy models looking into Infinity (I wonder what they saw). There were the products and there were the “consumers”. Two worlds apart. And the consumers were all the same – replicants, not individuals with individual qualities. And then what happens? Toscani put children in his pictures: children standing together, holding their hands, children with flaws and personality, everyone different from each other. And by doing this he turns a metaphor into a brand: United Colors of Benetton. That idea of difference and unity, along with simple but stunning photography, was an anticipation of what would happen later, even though no one could imagine it at that time…

One picture was enough to take a step farther: an innocent image, portraying a conflict – that reminds us of the UnHate campaign, except that it was taken 25 years earlier –, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In the original picture, which had been then modified, a Palestinian boy and a Israeli guy hug each other and hold a small globe (which is actually a piggy bank) popping with dollars. The director of JWT Paris, a Benetton’s partner in those days, finds the picture dangerous and gives the alarm – advertisers are sometimes more realistic then the king, especially when they are afraid of losing their budget. To him, who is of Jewish origin, the money popping from the globe is a reference to the stereotypes about Jews and money. That globe was present in all the ads of the campaign, staging several couples of little boys from different geographical and social origins: the Palestinian and the Israely boys, along with an Eskimo boy and an Australian aborigine, a young African girl and an American dandy boy – all of them holding that symbol of the Earth.

To Toscani the pictures had a precise meaning: in a globalized world our lives are inescapably linked, no matter who we are and where we live. Was he making reference to Edward Lorenz’s butterfly effect (Lorenz entitled a lecture given in 1972 “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”)? JTW director concern was justified. Ads (especially those ads), when tackling sensitive issues, are a mirror of society, they cause different reactions on different people and can be read in several ways, depending on our culture and our prejudices. This was a relevant point to take into account for a global company that had chosen to communicate in the same way all over the world (a brave and new choice at that time).

What happened next confirms this view. The same image – a black woman breastfeeding a white baby – was censored for racism in the United States, where it reminded the stereotype of the black nanny who nursed the children of the whites, and was rebuked for opposite reasons in South Africa (according to the Apartheid laws). A picture of three children who make funny faces is rejected in the Muslim countries because the Koran forbids to show internal organs, and the tongue is considered as such. In Chile the innocent wooden Pinocchio puppies are removed because the dictator Pinochet finds them a teasing for his name…. The list, of course, could go on.

Meanwhile, the jumpers had disappeared from the ads. A ground-breaking strategy, aimed at dragging the attention from commercial communication to institutional communication, from the product to the brand. It’s just an anticipation. Soon the barrier between advertising and life will fall.

All the previous ads depicted reality – just think of the holy family with two women and a child, all of different ethnic groups, or the cloud of condoms symbolizing the threat of HIV – and their meaning was always mediated through language, while the use of the white background helped to omit the context. Yet these ads weren’t less powerful than real photos such as, for example, Robert Capa’s falling soldier or the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. But they weren’t reality, and reality was claiming to play its part.

On 17 January 1991, the first day of Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War, Oliviero Toscani suggests Benetton to take a stand. In his personal archive he finds a photo of a military cemetery in America: he adds the Benetton green box and submits it to Luciano Benetton as the only possible message: There isn’t such a thing as a right war or a wrong war, because any war leads to death.

Only the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore chooses to publish that ad: one release on a single newspaper, but the echo is huge, and heard worldwide. “Benetton is exploiting death to sell sweaters” is the most common remark, a refrain that will be heard again and again in the upcoming years. What this reaction implies is that advertising does not have the dignity and the right to tackle serious issues, since it is a profitable activity, linked to business. But the same newspapers that complained about the Benetton ad – newspapers that everyday published pictures of the war – were for sale, thus making profit too. And, by the way, isn’t art a profitable business?

Toscani’s response was not long in coming. Since death had caused so a outraged reaction, let’s try with life. So he delivered the image of a newborn baby with the umbilical cord still attached to her mother. It was extraordinarily realistic: you could to hear the baby crying and see life – a new, raw and imperfect life – breaking into the glossy world of advertising. That baby’s name was Giusy: her Grandma even tried to pay Toscani for the picture, as she thought it was a photoshot arranged by the Hospital for the newborns.

It was not just a beautiful photo, it was an ad. That picture was then featured on the cover of the first issue of Benetton magazine Colors, and included in an exhibition on Motherhood in the Netherlands, where it was put next to classical maternity portraits, overturning all the prejudices, boundaries and categories: it was advertising, but it was also a documentary, a piece of family photo album, and yes, it was art. Criticism was not long in coming too. That raw and dirty picture caused discomfort, just like art should do. That naked baby, posted on street corners, unsolicited and unwanted, was an offense to common sense. The best response to this was given by Italian humourist and cartoonist Vauro who drew a naked woman with big breasts with the caption: “The Benetton baby: 20 years later no one find her disgusting”.

Strangely enough, that was the last shot by Oliviero Toscani for Benetton (or at least the last shot at that time) Toscani takes a step back as a photographer, and takes a step forward in brand communication. On the one hand, he uses press photos, already published and took by other photographers, and adds the Benetton logo. On the other hand, along with Tibor Kalman he designs and gives birth to the magazine Colors. He seems to say that one advertising page is no longer enough to express a point of view on the world. It takes a lot of pages to celebrate diversity: it takes an entire magazine, it takes Colors. Even words seem inadequate to describe the new deal: does it make sense to call Colors a “house organ”? And above all, does it make sense to call “ad” a picture of a terminally ill AIDS patient? Or the first ship overloaded with refugees that arrived to Italy during the Yugoslav Wars? a Mafia killing? a cormorant trapped in an ooze of oil? And many others.

“What does AIDS have to do with sweaters?” is the title of a book published in Italy in 1993 (Mondadori), which collects 100 letters of the thousands that arrived to Benetton press office. The answer can be found in a later image of the Kosovo War by Toscani: a pair of trousers and a t-shirt stained with blood, belonging to the Bosnian soldier Marinko Gagro. A tragic still life. I wonder what would have happened today, on blogs, online forums, and social networks.

Once again, the latent accusation to Benetton (his original sin, his fault) is that he is exploiting tragic images to cause scandal and sell sweaters. Of course, nobody can be so naive as to thinks this assumption wasn’t correct – the proof is Benetton break-up with Toscani after the campaign against the Death Penalty threatened his business partnerships with US sellers. But then again “to sell” is the mission of any company that aims to create growth and jobs, as Benetton did in those years. And yet it takes courage, creativity, spirit of innovation and challenge, as well as a little dose of crazy to make profits the way Benetton did: by taking a stand and helping to draw attention on social issues.

The father of David Kirby – the terminally ill AIDS patient portrayed by Therese Frare and used by Toscani for the Benetton campaign (a moving image that reminds us of a Renaissance Deposition) – answered to reporters who asked him if he felt “exploited” by Benetton: “we do not feel of being exploited by Benetton but of exploiting Benetton: David speaks louder now that he’s dead than when he was alive”. “It was David’s will” said his mother Kay. In fact, David was not only an AIDS patient, but also a political activist and founder of a Foundation for people with AIDS who had finally managed to find a way to make his voice heard. Advertising can do that too – Toscani and Benetton did it: They did not run fundraising events nor made donations – good deeds, yes, but politically correct and almost “easy” to do – they used the powerful value of advertising to increase our social awareness.

Even after so many years, we cannot but recognize the great value of Benetton in media history. That’s because of this value and its significance, that’s because of the awareness that it was a unique moment in history, an alignment of stars, the great encounter of two genes, Oliviero Toscani and Luciano Benetton, that I can’t look at UnHate campaign without judging it. I cannot change my mind: I see the flaws, the naive approach, even in the way the predictable reactions were handled. Above all, it remains the feeling that it was guided by intention, while it was insight and instinct that gave birth to the early campaigns. When something has been done, and it has been done so greatly, it is very difficult to do it again.

One can argue at length about the photo technique that makes kisses look cold and ridiculous, about how different how they look in the pictures and in the video accompanying the campaign, about the choice of the characters and their almost casual matching, about its predictable turning into a guerrilla action (just think of the large condom put on the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde in Paris in 1993, during the first World AIDS Day, an action as crazy as to make police think it was authorized). One can argue about the need of adding the “UnHate” heading which certainly reassures the viewer but also removes ambiguity and freedom of interpretation (do you remember the “God save us from this love” writing on the Berlin Wall referring to Brezhnev and Honecker kissing?). One can also argue whether hatred is a bad feeling – hatred and love are complementary, just think of the poem Odi et Amo (“I hate and I love”) by Roman lyric poet Catullus – and hatred can be a great driving force for change and innovation. As Empedocles argued, the primary moving factors are Love and Strife. Maybe the world would not have existed without hatred.

But we are getting too philosophical, and we don’t want our opinion to prevail the author of the campaign (“Uh, I like that Van Gogh, but I think it would look better with less sunflowers”). What we should do is just expressing our agreement or disagreement with the campaign and acknowledging Benetton’s effort and courage to be confronted with such an important part of its history, to face a dormant social issue and to do it in a delicate historical and economic circumstance, and nevertheless trying to stand out of the crowd. Maybe he did it in a bad way, but he did stand out of the crowd.