Category: Advertisements

Postmortem on a dead woman dancing: That Gap ad with Audrey Hepburn cannot dim the star’s appeal.

In death, she keeps helping others. Her purpose enriches her legacy. It is the greatest lesson a celebrity could leave.

From: Orlando Sentinel, Article by Hal Boedeker, October 28, 2006

Audrey Hepburn in Tokyo Originally uploaded by sanchome.

DSCN7531 Originally uploaded by Oggie Photography.

Oggie Photography spotted an Audrey Hepburn advertisement for The Gap in Toronto.

We think these dancing Audrey’s filling the windows are adorable. Please comment and let us know what you think! Yay or nay?

You just can’t keep a good woman down. Audrey Hepburn has returned from the Other Side this month and is starring in an ad campaign for Gap, the struggling retailer that is pinning its hopes on the actress, who died of colon cancer in 1993.

She joins many dead colleagues — Fred Astaire (Dirt Devil), John Wayne (Coors) and Humphrey Bogart (Diet Coke) — in her posthumous marketing career.

The Gap spot is based on a clip from the 1957 romantic comedy “Funny Face.” Hepburn plays a clerk in New York who is discovered by a fashion photographer (Astaire) and whisked off to Paris to take the fashion world by storm. (No stretch, really, given her real-life role as muse to the French designer Hubert de Givenchy.)

In the ad, Hepburn, in a black turtleneck and black pants, is shown leaping from her chair in a Paris nightclub, exclaiming, “I rather feel like expressing myself now. And I could certainly use the release.” She starts a goofy Bohemian dance, then springs from the frame onto a white background as the AC/DC song “Back in Black” blares.

Some love the spot; some are appalled that a dead Hollywood icon is being used to sell skinny black pants. “The Gap should be ashamed of themselves,” wrote one commenter on ThirdWay Advertising Blog. “It’s a desperate attempt by a desperate company to align itself with someone classy.”

“I wanted to like it,” posted another, “but at the end was just too offended by the reincarnation of Audrey Hepburn as a pants salesman.”

Gap, for its part, is happy just to be back on people’s minds. For the last two years, the company has failed to excite customers who have fled elsewhere for inexpensive basics. Reviving a staple like the slim black pants, part of its new “Keep It Simple” campaign, could help revive Gap’s sliding fortunes. “The worst thing a marketer can do is spend a lot of money and people are like, ‘Oh well, another ad for Gap,’ ” said Kyle Andrew, Gap’s vice president of marketing. “This is polarizing. Any time we can do anything that elicits passion is great.”

Steven Levitt, who created Q scores, which measure name recognition and the likability of celebrities, said he thinks the choice of Hepburn is “excellent.”

“If it’s executed in good taste, her appeal will carry the advertising very well,” said Levitt, president of Marketing Evaluations, Inc. Every two years, his firm conducts a survey to determine the Q ratings of 168 dead celebrities. In the most recent one, Hepburn ranked in popularity behind only two other women — Lucille Ball and Katharine Hepburn. “If you started searching for a likable female with strong recognition to a current female audience,” said Levitt, “Audrey Hepburn would be the first one you’d come to. Lucille Ball would represent comedy, and Katharine Hepburn would probably have a much older skew.”

Audrey Hepburn’s son, Sean Ferrer, approved the ad and worked with the company on the spot. “We ran everything by him, and he had lots of things to say,” said Andrew.

With her wide eyes, graceful neck and boyish figure, Audrey Hepburn has been a fashion icon nearly since she was plucked from a crowd in 1951 by the novelist Colette to star in the Broadway adaptation of “Gigi.”

As a teen, she suffered malnutrition while living in Nazi-occupied Holland, and was always reed slender. At 5 feet, 7 inches tall and 110 pounds, she could easily get away with skinny black pants.

But is anyone buying?

“We’ve seen a lot of positive signs,” said Andrew. “We’re very happy.”

From: Los Angeles Times, Article by Robin Abcarian, September 23, 2006

An Icon Originally uploaded by mikiebaik.

Michael Baik spotted an Audrey Hepburn advertisement for Pasonet in Tokyo, Japan.

When a struggling clothing chain co-opts the image of a classy but deceased actress, somebody must pay. Tribune staff reporter Steve Johnson has some ideas about exactly who that should be.

Dear Gap:

Because this is a reverse ransom note, I don’t feel compelled to make it up out of letters cut from different magazine headlines. I can just come out and say what I want to say, I can use a normal typeface and I can even sign it with my own name.

What I want to say is this: Give her back. Give her back, or else.

For a few weeks now, you’ve been holding Audrey Hepburn hostage to your perceived marketing needs. Pushing something called “the skinny black pant,” you’ve used Hepburn’s “bohemian” Parisian nightclub dance from the movie “Funny Face” in a television ad. It’s backed, with what is supposed to be charming dissonance, by AC/DC’s pop-heavy-metal hit “Back in Black,” and it wouldn’t surprise me if you were to get irate letters, too, from the AC/DC fans who happen to be literate.

The ad’s suggestion is that Hepburn, who died in 1993, did that dance not to express her creativity and free spirit, as the movie’s plot would have it, but to sell Americans on cluttering their closet with yet another iteration of casual slacks.

This makes one of the classiest actresses Hollywood has seen into the apparel industry equivalent of Ron Popeil.

Give her back.

Like United Airlines grabbing “Rhapsody in Blue,” you have no right to purloin something so valuable from the popular culture, even if your lawyers tell you that, in some technical fashion, you do have the right. While it matters, legally, that her son OKd the ad campaign, it doesn’t matter, morally.

Rather than cleverly trading off of a celebrity’s image, you are ham-handedly tarnishing it and, in the process, staining your own. “Come visit the Gap,” your new slogan might read, “the store that managed to make Audrey Hepburn look crass.”

You metaphorically stuffed Hepburn into your car trunk, I understand, because your stores have lost their cachet among the youth and you needed something to jolt people into paying attention again. What’s wrong with the grand old clothier tradition of an absurdly oversexed catalog, a la Abercrombie & Fitch?

Even if it weren’t so unsettling, the campaign is still off the mark. Audrey Hepburn, a high-fashion icon, has nothing in common with the Gap, whose stores these days look-at least in the men’s department-as if somebody raided the drawers of my college dorm. Miss Hepburn was no schlump.

Also, there’s this: Skinny black pants really only look great on the few women who have the scant proportions of a Hepburn, and even there, only for a few wearings, until they start to fade.

Now, I am not unreasonable. I recognize you probably have a substantial investment in this advertising campaign. To ameliorate your losses, I am prepared to offer you a fair trade.

You give back Audrey Hepburn, removing the “Pants for Sale” sign from around her elegant neck.

We, the American people, will give you back every pair of stonewashed jeans, male capri pants, pre-wrinkled shirts, sherbet-colored khakis and other fashion mistakes you somehow persuaded us to buy.

We’ll even throw in, as a special bonus, all those garments that say “G-A-P” in giant letters because, you know, we turned 25 and realized that only a sucker pays money to advertise someone else’s products for them.

If you’re still not persuaded, Gap, you’ll remember that this letter began with an “or else.”

What, you may be wondering, is the “or else”?

It’s this: Give Audrey Hepburn back, or else we’ll all take an honest assessment of our clothing situations, count up all the pairs of chinos and jeans, and realize we don’t ever need to set foot in a Gap again. And if we do, by some terrible coincidence of undone laundry and spontaneous picnicking, suddenly need new chinos, we’ll go to J.Crew instead, even though we strongly suspect there is no actual person named “J.Crew.”

To show you agree with these demands, simply put all your Hepburn tapes and images in a big, unmarked box. Leave the box on the north side of the Buckingham Fountain at midnight Tuesday. Restore Audrey Hepburn to her pedestal.

From: Chicago Tribune, Article by Steve Johnson, October 12, 2006

Would this woman shop at The Gap?
THANKS TO AN UNRELENTING AD CAMPAIGN, THE CLOTHING RETAILER HAS MADE AUDREY HEPBURN UBIQUITOUS AGAIN. BUT COULDN’T THEY HIRE ANY LIVE CELEBRITIES?

The Gap could hire just about anybody to sell its clothes, but this season it searched far beyond all of contemporary Hollywood. They retreated nearly half a century … to Audrey Hepburn.

The clothing retailer is using the deceased Hepburn and her look from the 1957 movie “Funny Face,” specifically, to plug its new line of skinny, black pants, and it’s possible that in Hepburn they have found the single best person in human history to convey the extraordinary cool of skinny, black pants.

She wears skinny, black pants with such effortless perfection that any sentient being, anywhere, who bears witness to Hepburn’s sanctification of the look, would surely covet it.

We’ll get to the ad itself, but first the obvious question: Couldn’t the ad people find somebody alive to shill for their pants? Some trendy Sarah Jessica Parker type, or an ultra-cool Lenny Kravitz knockoff, to name two of the famous faces that appeared in previous ads?

And now, the obvious answer: They just don’t make them like Audrey Hepburn anymore.

Thanks to the celebrity gossip mill, which everyone seems to disdain – and everyone seems captivated by – today’s Hollywood giants are inevitably downsized, with every detail of their lives, from minor weight gain to ugly divorce, exposed to public scrutiny. Those who don’t come off as vulgar end up appearing failingly human.

So, going for polish? You’ve got to tap historical figures.

Good answer, but too simple. Let’s discuss.

There is something to the claim that they don’t make them like Audrey Hepburn anymore.

She was born in Belgium to an aristocratic family, attended boarding school in England, and then after her parents divorced, lived in The Netherlands under Nazi occupation, where she danced ballet to raise money for the anti-Nazi underground movement and suffered from malnutrition.

After the war she continued dancing, tried acting, excelled, landed movie roles and got her first starring gig opposite Gregory Peck in “Roman Holiday.”

She rocketed from there to international fame, a bright star that never fell, capping her long career with a deep dedication to helping suffering children around the world. Her ability to speak English, French, Italian, Dutch/Flemish and Spanish aided this international humanitarian effort and her image.

Do they make ‘em like that today? Well yes, they do, all over the world talented women endure hardships and triumph in grand form, but they generally aren’t elbowing their way up the Hollywood ladder and establishing themselves as enviable starlets.

And even if they did, would they land at the top of the heap as clean and classy as Audrey Hepburn? Would Hepburn herself arrive at the pinnacle unscathed today?

Gossip machine

With Us Weekly and Entertainment Tonight and Jossip.com tracking her every visit to a deli for a pack of cigarettes, theorizing about her various hair styles, dissecting her two divorces?

It’s not a stretch to conclude that no, nobody can enter Hollwood today, rise, succeed, and stand flawless. Even Audrey Hepburn, for goodness sake, would emerge from the gauntlet tattered and tawdry, just another Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Lopez, or Angelina Jolie, all tainted – right or wrong – by the relentless interpretation of their everyday lives as scandal.

The good news is that Hepburn wasn’t forced to trudge through that tunnel of humiliation, and so we have Audrey Hepburn the immaculate icon, a jeweled vessel of mischevious grace, of spunk and smarts and a style exhilarant with confidence and dash.

She’s like a pure form, like a primary color of class – perfect, it turns out, for corporate image crafting.

In the brilliant Gap ad, she dances to AC/DC’s rock’n'roll anthem “Back in Black,” first in a smoky bar – a mash-up of a clip from “Funny Face” with the song – then alone on the screen, all the while in skinny black pants and a black turtleneck and black loafers, her dark hair pulled up in a perky ponytail.

“I rather feel like expressing myself now,” she says in the ad, pronouncing rather as “rahther.”

“If a girl wants to dance, a girl wants to dance. It’s nothing more than a form of expression, a release.”

Fans mixed on ad

And so she expresses herself in service to The Gap, only the woman herself has nothing to do with the sales pitch.

For old hands at the Hepburn phenomenon, she’s long been a sun around which they orbit, a goal to which they aspire. Her website-maintaining, YouTube-posting fanatics are split about The Gap ad. Some find it crass, antithetical to Hepburn’s spirit. Others, like former Boulderite Carrie Spritzer, who has an ambitious Hepburn website, say it’s OK.

“If it takes a little bit of advertising to raise awareness about her (even if it makes us cringe), then I’m all for that because she deserves our attention,” she wrote in an e-mail.

She’s getting it. Let’s hope the attention doesn’t pluck Hepburn from the firmament and cast her down to earth – a confusion of The Gap and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” a cute slogan, a fallen star.

From: Denver Post, Article by Douglas Brown, October 4, 2006

In An Age Of Indulgence, Audrey Hepburn Looks Even Better

On “CSI: NY” this week, a bunch of identically dressed women pull a jewel heist, all dressed like Audrey Hepburn from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” The women may have been crooks, but they looked fabulous.

Just shows you how the aura of Audrey continues to resonate.

It’s happened a lot, lately. The iconic Givenchy dress that Hepburn wore in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” will be auctioned by Christie’s in December. Gap’s new ad for its skinny black pants uses old footage from “Funny Face” of Hepburn cavorting in signature black pants and flats. A new biography, “Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn” by Donald Spoto, is out this month. And Ikea is selling a print of Hepburn as Holly Golightly, while CB2 has a wall clock imprinted with another Golightly pose. Hepburn has, it seems, expanded from fashion to home design.

“Audrey Hepburn is an inspiration in that her classic and timeless style has continued to resonate throughout the years in everything from fashion to pop culture to home décor,” says Kim Ficaro, style editor for Domino magazine. “The most important thing about Audrey’s style is that she stayed true to herself, and that is what people respond to. Any woman can find the Audrey Hepburn within herself and express it.”

Certainly, fashion has long been inspired by Hepburn, who died in 1993. Designer Carmen Marc Valvo showed some of the most crisp little black dresses that oozed Audrey charm in his Spring 2007 runway show during the recent Fashion Week. And Target has tapped designer Behnaz Sarafpour to do Audrey-style fashions (at mass retailer prices) come November. Hepburn lives.

“Fashionistas will not allow her to rest in peace, nor should they. She is the very antithesis of sexy vulgarity of the Paris Hilton type, and therefore Audrey is the antidote to the trash and flash that has been driving fashion during the recent celebrity tsunami,” says David Wolfe, creative director for Doneger Group. “Fashion-sensitive folk [designers, stylists, editors] are just plain bored with vulgarity and so are pushing the pendulum to the opposite extreme.”

In a world of vulgarity, it’s nice to know, we can still cling to Audrey Hepburn.

From Hartford Courant, by Greg Morago, September 29, 2006

Hollywood legend Audrey Hepburn is back in vogue as a style icon more than 13 years after her death — but a biographer fears the revival will feed a misconceived image of the actress, who never cared much about fashion.

Hepburn, who is often named as one of the most beautiful women of all time, is inspiring the new season’s fashion line-up with her classic but simple style of skinny black pants, flat pumps and little, black dresses.

Retailer Gap is leading the drive, using pictures of the actress in skinny black pants on billboards and in a television and Web ad, dancing in the 1957 movie “Funny Face” set to rock band AC/DC’s song “Back in Black.”

Another U.S. retailer J. Crew has set up a Little Black Dress Shop in its stores.

Author Donald Spoto, who this week released a new biography on the Oscar-winning actress called “Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn,” said he is not surprised by the renewed focus on Hepburn.

“Audrey Hepburn represents a kind of elegance that may be especially appreciated in an era of torn jeans. Her combination of modesty and simplicity are a wonderful corrective in these times of vulgar and empty celebrity,” he told Reuters.

But he said he felt this emphasis on fashion and style minimized Hepburn’s significant achievements as an actress. Later in life Hepburn was very active in humanitarian work.

“(It) also directly contradicts her own sense of values, which did not place clothes very highly on a list of important things,” he said.

Hepburn, who died of colon cancer in 1993 aged 63, always played down her own beauty, saying her look was attainable.

“Women can look like Audrey Hepburn by flipping out their hair, buying the large sunglasses, and the little sleeveless dresses,” she once said.

But her classic style has endured and remained in demand. The black Givenchy dress she wore in the 1961 movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is expected to sell at an auction in December for around $100,000.

Spoto said he wrote about Hepburn because he was disappointed in previous works on her, with the actress treated as a “stained glass window figure” rather than a human being who struggled.

His book reveals Hepburn desperately wanted children but had bad luck with famous boyfriends who were sterile.

She did finally have a son, Sean, with American actor Mel Ferrer in 1960. Sean Ferrer allowed Gap to use his mother in their campaign with a significant donation to be made to the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund. She had another son in 1970 with second husband, Italian psychologist Andrea Doretti.

“The most surprising thing was the constant thread of heartache and disappointment in her life, which she bore with magnificent grace and courage,” said Spoto.

Learn more about Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn.

From: Reuters, Article by Belinda Goldsmith, Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Every woman knows that a perfect pair of black pants is a quintessential wardrobe staple. More than a decade ago Gap became known for a fabulous pair of black pants that flew off shelves and helped millions of women across the country dress with sophistication and style. This season Gap is back with “the Audrey Hepburnâ„¢ pant” — a perfect fitting pair of skinny black pants that will remind women of the perfect Gap black pants they owned years ago. Named after Audrey Hepburnâ„¢ — a timeless fashion icon known for her classic, feminine style — Gap’s “Audrey Hepburnâ„¢ pant” is sleek and simple with modern details that make them undeniably cool.

Gap has a long heritage of offering clean, classic and simple styles. This fall Gap has a wide range of great fitting sophisticated pants in all lengths and shapes, as well as classic shirts, turtlenecks, sweaters and outerwear. Worn day or night, these are the items Gap has always been known and loved for.

Visit the Image Library to download print-ready photos from the fall collection.

From: Gap News