The german H&M newsletter just arrived in my mailbox. With the “thrilling” message : don´t miss the autumn-highlights. Beef up your wardrobe with the absolutely essential garments. AAAARGH…..are you serious H&M??? Flower-blouse, knit-cardigan, jeans and waistbelt are acceptable highlights when you´re a small town mum,  escorting your third kid to school enrolment. But for an international fashion empire- the message is just a ridiculous boredom. Time to unsubscribe the H&M newsletter.

Photo via H&M Shop

Created by TBWA Paris and photographed by Vincent Fournier this campaign is for sure one of the most inventive ad series, we´ve seen for a long time from the detergent branch. It was Pieter from today and tomorrow who has seen the campaign at first.

Photos via Vincent Fournier

Radical Advertising - An Exhibition that has to be seen. Online or Live.
It´s shown until august, 17th in Düsseldorf, Germany and online under radicaladvertising. The show includes works by
Cindy Sherman, Zevs, Maison Martin Margiela, and Jeff Koons as well as the famous Adbusters Foundation. The list can be breythless continued with names like Oliviero Toscani, David LaChapelle, Terry Richardson, Banksy andsoonandsoon.
Watch! It´s worth it! Here the official press text:”Both the exhibition and its provocative title show that the transition from the 20th to the 21st century marked a radical paradigm shift in advertising.
Against the backdrop of globalization, the 1990s became the decade of the no-logo movement and ‘ad-busting’, an attack on the cluttering of the semiotic environment with advertising messages.

The fashion industry was instrumental in this regard: not only did it make it fashionable to wear hijacked logos, it also successfully employed anti-advertising techniques in its marketing campaigns. In doing so, it spearheaded a radically changed concept of advertising that successfully incorporated political and artistic attacks on global advertising into its campaigns. The RADICAL ADVERTISING exhibition features ad-buster campaigns, the critical artistic reflections of artists such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, and Daniele Buetti, and the opinion-forming campaigns of Benetton, Sisley, Diesel, Helmut Lang, Calvin Klein, and Comme des Garçons.

Many of the advertisements that appeared on billboards or in magazines in the 1980s and 1990s were designed to shock. They not only revolutionised the advertising industry, but also generated heated debates among members of the public. The controversy generated by Benetton, for example, was so intense that some magazines refused to print Benetton advertisements featuring images of death row in American prisons and some retailers stopped stocking Benetton products.

The nineties: radical shock - advertising as a means of attack
The noughties: radical life - advertising as a means of making contact
2010 onwards: radical moral - advertising as a means of co-operation
… these are the central themes of the exhibition.

Since the 1990s, globalization has also produced a fundamental change in the way consumers consume the media. In the 21st century, advertising has reacted to the media overkill caused by the complete fragmentation of television and the advent of the Internet, mobile telephony, and instant messaging with a second, equally radical u-turn: it is withdrawing from mass communication and addressing individuals wherever it encounters them. The relationship with the consumer has changed from being a passive one to being an active one. Buzz marketing, guerrilla advertising, ambient advertising, and Web2.0 have created the participating consumer.

The RADICAL ADVERTISING exhibition will recreate spectacular ambient advertising campaigns in 3-D and introduce the visitor to the advertising world of Web2.0 and Youtube. Exhibits include a MINI that was converted into a hotel room (and parked outside Germany’s World Cup stadiums); a manhole cover that startles the visitor because of the two hands that reach out from beneath it (for Amnesty International); an interactive urinal advertising Frankfurt’s taxi guild; and a dedicated blog written by the popular German comic figure, Horst Schlämmer, advertising Volkswagen products.

Here too, artists launch a subversive and aggressive attack on the world of advertising: Zevs ‘kidnaps’ advertising figures from posters and Tom Sachs ‘crafts’ a model of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant…
… the final campaign highlighted in this series is the one run by American Apparel, a company that chooses not to brand its products with a logo and uses its customers as models in its advertisements. In the spirit of Andy Warhol, everyone in this campaign gets their 15 minutes of fame and it is the consumers who shape the advertisements that seek to encourage them to buy products.

The heart of the exhibition is a Comme des Garçons guerrilla store containing both retro products and the label’s most recent designs. The store will appear at the launch of the exhibition and disappear again when it ends. Although Comme des Garçons has already applied the guerilla store concept in a variety of cities (including Berlin, Singapore, Krakow, and Glasgow), this is the very first time it has used it in a museum. The store rebelliously carries to extremes the notion of the increasingly mercantile nature of museums. It will be surrounded by a wire fence: on one side of the fence, visitors to the store will look out through the wire mesh into the museum, while on the other side, visitors to the museum will catch glimpses of the glittering world of consumerism through the wire barrier.
The term ‘radical’ covers both meanings of the word: ‘radical’ in the sense of revolutionary and ‘radical’ in the opposing sense of fundamental or absolute. This is exactly what the RADICAL ADVERTISING exhibition is about: advertising’s fundamentally different approach, an approach that is revolutionary because it turns the fundamental principles of the system upside down.

The RADICAL ADVERTISING exhibition uses numerous examples to illustrate the history of shock advertising and employs the shortest-lived examples of the genre to bring visitors not only close to, but actually into pop-up stores and guerilla marketing campaigns.
The 400-page exhibition catalogue (on sale for only € 29.90!) contains essays by Werner Lippert, Peter Wippermann, and Diederich Diederichsen, hundreds of photos, and countless interviews by Hermann Vaske with radical advertising protagonists such as Renzo Rosso (Diesel), Oliviero Toscani (Benetton), Kalle Lasn (the founder of Adbusters), and other creative minds from around the world.

The pop band MIA and its sin

ger Mieze provide a completely different perspective on the exhibition. Visitors can listen to MIA’s exhibition guide using any Bluetooth-equipped mobile phone or watch it as a podcast on the NRW-Forum website (www.nrw-forum.de).”

All Photos by radicaladvertising

At first sight, Berlin and couture match like Paris and curry sausage. On closer examination, you, my dearest reader might notice that this thought is oafish one-dimensional - and unfair - and boring - and…whatever!
Like Paris isn´t only standing for the Grand Defilees and renowned fashion houses, Berlin doesn´t only stand for edgy fashion and electronic music culture.

It´s time to look closely and envisage those that doesn´t “fit” at first sight, those who set themselves apart from the common fashion language of the town, who dare to do something different and those, who tie in with the times, when Berlin wasn´t only standing for “poor but sexy” but for glamour, style and extravagance.

It´s time for Scherer Gonzales.
A young label that courageously does the high fashion in Berlin, a label that connects couture with prêt-a-porter and a label that is currently attracting more attention abroad than back home in Germany. Why seek far afield when the good could not be any closer by?

Constanze G. Gonzáles and Paul Scherer met while studying fashion design at Berlin´s Lette Verein. In 2004 the young designer duo founded their own fashion label and since them, Gonzales and Scherer recreate repeatedly award-winning feminine-vanguard creations that conjoin extremes in a gentle and harmonic way.
Cyberspace-aesthetics meets rococo-charme, fabulous robes strike bondage-elements, organic flowing fabrics meet cuts that master curves.

Besides the big robes it´s the complex corsages that emerge as collection highlights.
With a strong waistline, the shaping corsages punctuate a feminine way of moving and wearing. In being voluminous and feathery at the same time and in combination with frail fabrics and soft flowing panels the corsages create THE tension and strength that a great collection inheres.

But it´s not only the cuts and shapes, the collection pieces and their interplay that pushes Scherer Gonzales in the front row of young couturiers. It´s also the materials and their unconventional treatment that turns heads. Luxurious materials such as duchesse-silk, cashmere, ostrich feathers, kid and snake leather as well as lamb nappa achieve an unconventional look and extraordinary optics in being arranged individually with special coloring and washing. The high-class finishing is given through impressive and extraordinary details and it´s pretty obvious that Scherer Gonzales is more than ready to conquer the world´s catwalks.

Photos via Scherer Gonzales

Don´t worry folks, i won´t write a puff piece about James Jean and his hand drawn Trembled Blossoms wallpaper for Prada. There have been too many that did it before. It´s a masterpiece - we all know it.
I would like to draw attention to the multiple usability of the wallpaper that turns out of be the perfect tool to communicate a strong CI while showing a whole product palette. Clothing, accessories and glasses - no matter what is shown, you instantly know that you see a Prada campaign. And, it´s just a wallpaper background.
For me, it´s the PERFECT setting to communicate a brand identity, to create a strong visual language that fits the products and the brand…..don´t you think? Look at the tons of shots that have been taken so far. Each Photograph is unique but also without a logo identifiable as a Prada ad.
This is high class advertising conception!

Screenshots taken from Prada

Dave the Chimp on his blog about an art-marketing-guerilla action that was highly discussed by German media: “At 5am this morning myself and a group of others met the artist Brad Downey in the shopping district of West Berlin.
Downey had accepted a commission from the clothing label Lacoste to create a window display for them for the department store KaDeWe.
He had refused to tell his client what he had planned for the window, and they were growing increasingly nervous.
Downey’s idea was, if you’re going to employ a vandal, you’re going to get a vandal.
So, after the shutters went up on the store just before 6am, he took a fire extinguisher loaded with green paint (the corporate colour of Lacoste) and sprayed the front windows and sign of the store from one end to the other.
My job was simply to wait with a bag at the other end of the store with which to conceal the fire extinguisher while Downey headed off to the escape vehicle.
I then headed around the block, changing my shirt, and joined up with J….. who filmed the event, to advise him what the police were up to and be his look-out while he filmed them.
Downey plans to show the video of the action alongside the fire extinguisher as his window display (that is, if his client doesn’t kill him first!)

German news sites have reported the action, but seem to think it’s a political comment as the windows are currently showing the work of a Chinese designer!”

Photos via Just

While flipping through OZON magazine (new issue here to download), the Onitsuka Tiger caught my attention - the shoe in the ad was shown at Bright Tradeshow where i´ve been in the beginning of the year. And i was stunned to see that kind of threedimensional-laser-cut-lightened-up-sculptural piece. It doesn´t only look great from far - it´s also worth to get a closer view:

Ad by Onitsuka Tiger, seen at OZON Magazine.
Photos by Spanier.

Photo credits: Cleptomanicx, bpo