If the point of advertising is to draw attention to your business then fashion label Eckhaus Latta has well and truly managed it. Before Friday we’d never heard of the New York-based label run by Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Lotta. But, now, three days on, the company’s X-rated campaign has been seared into our minds.
They say ‘sex sells’ and Eckhaus Latta are really putting this adage to the test with their spring 17 campaign. The adverts feature Craigslist-cast models copulating, with their aubergines and fingers and spread legs on display. It’s a no-holds-barred full-frontal NSFW series. While key elements have been - kindly - pixelated by photographer Haji Shin, it’s pretty explicit, and certainly not something you want your mum or boss to catch you staring at.
credit: Instagram @eckhaus_lata
Advertisements, especially for fashion and beauty brands, sell a lifestyle that’s bigger than the product and the designer. The image itself is usually manipulated - be it the clothes clipped and tailored to fit the specific model or the final photograph being altered in post-production. However, Eckhaus Latta wanted to create something authentic, so even though the end picture would be pixelated, they wanted the action to be real.
‘We were thinking of how we were using sexuality, the relationship between fashion advertising and sexuality—and in very direct terms saying sex sells,’ the photographer Shin told W Magazine, adding that the message is, ‘sex-positive, body-positive, sexuality-positive’.
‘For us, it was really important to think of sex as something really natural and not something fabricated, hyper-sexualized, or taboo,’ Eckhaus told the magazine.
As authentic and emotionally charged as the images are, it is hard to argue that this is anything more than a cynical way of capturing the media and public's attention. Though the casting is successfully varied and diverse, there's be hardly a whisper about this as the images make a single point about sex. Though they aren’t lewd or even little bit offensive, it is still gratuitous to use copulation as a marketing tool. As the clothes get lost, crumpled and strewn in this image you'll have a difficult job convincing me this anything more than an opportunity to be attention-seeking.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.