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Journal of Consumer Culture

DOI: 10.1177/1469540507073510 2007; 7; 105 Journal of Consumer Culture

Jacqueline Botterill contemporary jeans and sneaker advertisements

Cowboys, Outlaws and Artists: The rhetoric of authenticity and

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ARTICLE

Cowboys, Outlaws and ArtistsThe rhetoric of authenticity and contemporary jeans and sneaker advertisementsJACQUELINE BOTTERILLBrock University, Canada

Abstract. Advertising’s contribution to the deterioration of meaning in consumerculture has been well established, yet advertising also offers a therapeutic resource toaudiences. Early advertisers humanized the modern marketplace with nostalgic appealsto home, hearth and village, yet, against the rising tide of 1960s identity politics,designers made increasing appeals to authenticity. By the 21st century, the modernheroes of authentic individuality – the cowboy, the genius artist, the outlaw – hadbeen fully parodied and debunked, yet an interpretive study of two totemic youthcommodities, jeans and sneakers, suggests that the underlying values of freedom,autonomy and individuality are not. Contemporary jeans advertisers rewrite the questfor authenticity within contemporary promotional culture, yet this appeal is notuniversal.Athletic shoe brands achieved popularity by reflecting the ideology ofathleticism rooted in the modernist ethos celebrating achievement, deferral ofgratification, discipline and teamwork. The research suggests autonomy and self-authentication are taken most seriously by those most immersed in the quest for anti-modern identity. Even if the marketplace is not a site of absolute personal freedom, tothe degree it quells anxieties that the quest for freedom is disappearing in a hyper-commercialized market culture, it may prove therapeutic.

Key wordsadvertising ● consumer culture ● cultural anxiety ● therapeutic ● youth identity

SOME DEPICTIONS OF late 20th-century consumer culture characterized itas drained of authentic meaning, replete with hyper-reality and simulation,

Journal of Consumer Culture

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Vol 7(1): 105–125 1469-5405 [DOI: 10.1177/1469540507073510]




and saturated with promotion (Baudrillard, 1994; Eco, 2001; Jameson,1992). Advertisers were understood to create a chaos of meaning, delink-ing referents from signifiers, using vivid images to bypass audience ration-ality and reach out to them visually ( Jhally, 1998). This line of criticismsaw cultural meaning debased as it was pulled into the expanding cycloneof profane promotion (Goldman and Papson, 1996). Marketers piratedyouth culture’s creative expressions and put them into the service of sellingcommodities. The cacophony of market symbolism, its penetration into allareas of culture, was overwhelming and failed to provide the ‘horizon ofsignificance’ (Taylor, 1991) necessary to nourish robust identities, leavingsubjects demented and transfixed by the warm glow of the promotionallight (Baudrillard, 1988).

From this perspective, advertising is understood to diminish meaningand contribute to a consumer culture in which image, surface, and stylesubsume depth, substance, and history (Ewen, 1988). Against this view,which continues to resurface in contemporary accounts of advertising(Cross, 1996), this article argues that advertising does not simply decon-struct or debase meanings, and to assume it overwhelms audiences is todeny their interpretive powers. As promotion has become the centraldiscursive dynamic (Wernick, 1991), it is incorporated into the scaffoldingof identity projects, yet not when it is nonsense, rather when it makes senseand serves some therapeutic or social value (social uses of advertising).Basedupon an examination of contemporary jean and sneaker advertisements, Iargue that consumer culture is not bereft of the rhetorics of authenticity,but saturated with it. The article argues that advertisers’ use of authentic-ity is directed towards a renewed cultural mission. While authenticity onceserved as an antidote to mass society, today advertisers use it to soothe theiryoung audiences’ anxiety that authenticity is no longer possible. They doso by suggesting to audiences that genuine moments of humanity can stillbe contemplated, even in contrived and commercialized texts.

THE THERAPEUTIC ROLE OF ADVERTISINGThere is no better source from which to develop an appreciation for adver-tising’s cultural role than the work of historian Roland Marchand. Hisexamination of 1920s and 1930s American advertising messages wassituated within the broader historical, social and institutional context ofmodernity. Marchand noted how the expansion of modern institutions andnew ways of living were coupled with a widespread sense of malaise.Amidnew freedoms, modernity instilled feelings of loss, confusion, anxiety andalienation. Advertisers took their audiences’ anxieties seriously, because it

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aided the execution of their selling mission. The practice of advertising wasinfused with a democratic impulse. Copy was not judged on creativecriteria alone, but also how well it spoke to the ‘person on the street’(Marchand, 1986: 13).

Advertisers were among the first to develop a research feedback loopto their audiences, now common in today’s reflexive organizations. Recentdiscussions of advertising have criticized historical accounts like Marchand’sfor fetishizing and over-empowering advertising’s research (Cronin, 2004;McFall, 2004). Yet Marchand simply asserts that in comparison to otherpublic communicators, advertisers devoted considerable resources and effortto understanding and addressing their audiences. He clearly sees research asfallible and crude, and hardly suggests that advertiser’s diagnoses were alwaysaccurate, but unlike contemporary critics, he does not go so far as tocommit an equivalent fallacy, which is to suggest research is alwaysinaccurate:

Deficient as their early methods were, advertisers still tested theeffects of their communications more often and more rigorouslythan novelists, writers of magazine fiction, newspaper editors,movie directors, cartoonists, or even politicians.And they hadreasons for taking these ‘reality checks’ seriously. (Marchand,1986: xix)

In the sample of 18,000 magazine advertising messages drawn between1920 and 1930, Marchand saw advertisers accurately diagnosing a wide-spread cultural anxiety that understood the institutional scale and speed ofmodern life as corrosive to the traditional social bonds, ways of knowingand sense of social place. They responded by fusing modern graphicdesign techniques with culturally legitimate folk wisdom and religioustemplates to make messages both new and exciting as well as familiar andcomfortable. Advertisers harkened back to the village and the intimacy ofthe family circle to make new products agreeable to consumers, whilevisual clichés presented new fantasies and icons through which audiencescould contemplate change, wonder at possibilities, and daydream. Adver-tising also articulated new roles for mentorship (e.g. the managerial house-wife).

Marchand argues advertising took on a broader, although hardlypremeditated, therapeutic function in culture, offering symbolic solutionsto harsh contradictions, articulating new role models, providing advice, andtranslating unfathomable, abstract and alienating components of modernityinto humanistic metaphors. The promotional ‘therapeutic’ offered an

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analgesic to modern malaise and aided the accommodation to modernityand consumer culture:

Advertising adopted a therapeutic role. It assured readers that allthe apparent psychological costs of scale could be finessed.Individual Americans never need feel themselves diminished oralienated, whatever the scale of life. They could enjoy everymodern artefact and style without losing the reassuringemotional bonds of the village community. . . . No longerpatent medicine ‘hawkers,’ advertising men had now becomebroader social therapists who offered, within the advertisingtableaux themselves, balms for the discontents of modernity.(Marchand, 1986: 360)

This perspective asserts that advertising’s influence in consumer culture isnot found simply in how it veiled or destroyed cultural meaning. Whileaudiences clearly understood that the commodity cures advertisers offeredfor their woes were part of a sales job, promotional symbolics were freelyavailable, widely circulated and offered resources that could be used tocontemplate the malaise of modernity. In this sense, advertising does notalways, nor necessarily, destroy the ‘horizon of significance’ required toformulate an identity. On the contrary, advertisers try exceptionally hard toconstruct meaning for their audiences. To use Don Slater’s (1997) termi-nology, they work within the cracks of the modern identity crisis.

ADVERTISING AND AUTHENTICITYWhile malaise is a general feature of modernity, historical circumstancescontoured the shape of discontent and the triumph of the mass market inthe decades following the Second World War.This period brought a distinc-tive malaise, as attention shifted from simply mourning the loss oftraditional social bonds, to a fear that the processes of modern massifica-tion were obliterating individuality. Applying Marchand’s theory of theadvertising therapeutic to his study of 1960s advertising, Thomas Frank(1997) drew attention to how the countercultural revolt against mass societyforced advertisers to reposition themselves. Frank argues that whileMarchand showed how the ‘early advertisements counselled ways of navi-gating the complex hazards of modernity’, ads after the 1960s becamecentrally concerned with counselling ‘consumers on how to maintainidentity (individuality) and purpose in a time of conformity’ (Frank, 1997:133). He suggested that ‘authenticity became more important than status’within advertising (p. 136).


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Synonymous with growing corporate expansion, big government,cookie-cutter suburbs and the conformist ‘organizational man’,mass societywas the object of counter-cultural resentment. American youth ralliedagainst their parents’ lifestyles, arguing that the prized ‘nuclear family’ andvalues of ‘hard work’, ‘duty’, ‘emotional restraint and manners’ demandedtoo much conformity and stifled individuals’ creative powers and authen-tic lifestyles (Frank, 1997: 51).

A unifying element of the counter-culture movement was a drive forexistential freedom and ‘emotional openness’. Hazel Warlamont (2000)documents the influence of European existentialist philosophers, such asMartin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Jean Paul Sartre (1905–80), uponcounter-cultural ideals. These thinkers asserted that the sheer business andpointless absurdity of everyday modern life induced forgetfulness and aneasy slide into conformity and inauthenticity, and prescribed that peopleresist complacency through active self-awareness and engagement in intenselife experience. Authentic people were self-aware, self-responsible and hada life’s project to bring focus and coherence to their existence.

The Beats, an American artist collective (some members includedLucien Carr,Allen Ginsberg,William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac), popu-larized and transformed European existentialism for American audiences,providing new templates for how to maintain authenticity in troubledtimes. Examples include the ‘hipster’ who reveled in the excitement ofurban street culture and the mores of the black American ghetto, and thehobo who voluntarily dropped out into self-imposed exile, riding the railsacross the country and living under the stars.

Building upon a diverse number of influences (The Beats, Europeanintellectuals, eastern spirituality, feminism), the highly diverse counter-culture of the late 1960s went on to experiment with ‘any and all societalmores, including the theater, film, art, pornography, sexual preference, livingsituations, occupations, dress, and hygiene’ (Dickstein, 1997[1977] in Holt,2002: 82). The counter-culture rejected mass society’s prescription foridentity, and struggled to assert its right to sovereign self-construction. Thiscan be understood as a quest for authenticity.

AUTHENTICITY AND ADVERTISINGOnce a key subject of humanities and social science debates, authenticityis now more likely to appear in popular business writing.A growing numberof marketing and popular books have taken authenticity as their subject.Business analysts David Lewis and Darren Bridger see the Soul of the NewConsumer (2000) rooted in a quest for authenticity. The new economy, they


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argue, has made time, trust and attention scarce and consumers assess theirnumerous commodity choices by dividing brands into two categories: thosethat are authentic and those that are not. Rejecting the latter, the newconsumers pay premium prices and remain more loyal than old consumersto brands they deem authentic. The key to creating authentic brands,according to Lewis and Bridger, is to provide opportunities for consumersto experience self-fulfillment.

David Brooks’s (2001) Bobos in Paradise:The New Upper Class and HowThey Got There rose rapidly to the top of the bestseller lists and entered thevocabulary of advertisers and marketers on Madison Avenue. Witheducation and cultural knowledge central currencies for success and classmaintenance,Bobos seek to secure social standing by engaging in a conspic-uous display of cultural knowledge that drives them to try to master asmany modes of expression as possible. For ‘members of the educated class,life is one long graduate school’ (Brooks, 2001: 18). Brooks sees theexpanded meritocratic workplace as key to understanding why Bobos’strong bourgeois competitive instincts are matched by equally strong yearn-ings for authentic bohemian experiences (hence the moniker Bobo).

David Boyle (2003), analysing the British context, recognized a sectorof the population that he labelled ‘new realists’. Their consumption wasguided by the ideals of authenticity. In Boyle’s analysis, it is less the meri-tocratic workplace than the pressure of living in a world dominated bytechnology, bureaucracy and marketing that feeds the desire for ‘real’authentic experiences. Instead of utopia, the information age delivered aplastic, throwaway world and identical chain store experiences. Respond-ing to this situation, new realists are attracted to the Slow Food movement,flock to natural fibres, engage in café culture, community building, andbuying vintage clothing. Unlike Brooks who seeks to expose the Bobo asan emperor without clothes, a devious materialist masquerading in the dragof authenticity, Boyle admires the new realists and urges businesses toaddress their tastes, because, he believes, they promise to shape a moredemocratic, environmentally sound and humanistic marketplace. Theseworks represent just a small sample of the growing interest in the idea ofauthenticity within advertising and marketing over the past 20 years, ashumanities and social science researchers’ interest in the term has waned.An American Business Index keyword search, undertaken in January 2006,on authenticity produced 1091 articles, while a search of the Humanitiesand Social Science Index produced 312 articles.

While authenticity is actively promoted within advertising and market-ing literature, the use of the term is, not surprisingly, often celebratory and


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it is rarely defined.Book-length treatments of the term demonstrate its slip-periness, constant reformulation, and difficulty to define, despite its wide-spread use.Yet, to illuminate the later exploration of advertisers’ applicationof the term, it is necessary to mention some of its broad contours, basedupon the work of four authors who have, at least in my mind, producedthe most thoughtful examinations of authenticity (Berman, 1970; Trilling,1971; Taylor, 1991; Golomb, 1995).

First emerging in the 17th century in the early throes of the modern-ization of production and consumption, authenticity defined the certifica-tion of the ‘true substance’ of objects (coinage, beer), and the ‘actual, reality’and genuine ‘authorship’ of works of art. By the 18th century, philosophersbegan to explore the problem of human authentication.As the self was nolonger as tightly tethered to traditional legitimating processes of feudal andreligious orders, the congruence between people’s outer ‘social role’ andtheir inner ‘true self ’ became subject to more intensive scrutiny. Authen-ticity, according to Charles Taylor (1991), was part of a massive subjectivistturn in philosophy. Lionel Trilling (1971) notes how early philosophersdistinguished sincerity from authenticity. Sincerity, and matters ofconscience, emerged as ways of describing the idea that being true to thineown self before others’ expectations was the measure of our human char-acter. Authenticity, emerging later, was the measure of fidelity of the selfto the self.

Centrally concerned with the project of self-authorship, the rhetoricsof authenticity frequently revolve around three interrelated ideals.The first,and most fundamental, idea is reflected in the assertion of German philos-opher, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) that ‘each of us has anoriginal way of being human’, an authentic self (Taylor, 1991: 28).Authen-ticity shifted the touchstone of sacredness from God, scripture, even thesocial group, to the self and the everyday.Second,most philosophers agreed,the authentic self was not transparent, but required self work, creative work(Trilling,1971: 93).Civilization and society were distractions to this authen-tic self-formation. For example, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau(1712–78), suggested turning inward to find truth, shutting out the cacoph-ony of the voices of society and listening to the ‘voice of nature within’.The only path to freedom, Rousseau argued, was being one’s self (seeBerman, 1970). Individuals who were marginalized from prevailing socialnorms, or rebellious toward them, became exemplars of authenticity,because they appeared to resist or somehow escape the social process thatthwarted quests for authenticity (see Hegel and Miller, 1979[1807]).Authenticity is also often deeply nostalgic, as the pre-modern past becomes


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a vessel for holding the ideal of a purer state of self-actualization wherecharacter was forged in harmony with nature. Intimate groups, tribes,collectives, even the family have also been woven into the rhetoric ofauthenticity as they appear to provide a context for self-discovery, yet thesesocial groups can also as easily become oppressive to the formation of anauthentic self.

Third, those who engaged in expressive lifestyle alternatives came to beseen as exemplars of authenticity.According to Trilling, in the 19th century,the character type of the artist came to epitomize the ideas of authenticity.Artists became ‘the paradigm case of the human being’, the central ‘agent oforiginal self-definition’ (Trilling, 1971: 62). Artists, such as the bohemians,rebelled against prevailing puritan norms, rejecting emotional restraint, self-denial, and an industrial work ethic, honouring the emotions and hedonism(Campbell, 1987). Art and creativity emerged as domains of moral renewalin a secular society. While science claimed truth was found by examiningthe external world via hypotheses, artists legitimated the imagination as afaculty for apprehending truth and beauty. Artists helped to give shape toa new structure of feeling in western cultures. The counter-culture move-ments of the 1960s popularized the sentiments of mid-19th-centurybohemian artists, throughout culture, by moving art outside officialgalleries, deeming everyday objects art, and everyone an artist.As ElizabethWilson notes: ‘We are all bohemians now’ (see Wilson, 1999).

In sum, all cultures must develop means of mediating the relationshipbetween the individual and the wider social group, and modern cultureinherited the ideals of authenticity as one ideology about the nature of thisrelationship. According to Trilling (1971), authenticity provided a secularalternative to the symbolic and social ‘weightiness’ once offered by religion,serving as a guide to enchantment and trust in a rationalized world.Authen-ticity not only points to the contradiction between the individual andsociety, it offers enticements, characters and advice for how to resolve thistension.

The neo-liberal marketplace is predicated upon the consumers’freedom to choose, yet, as John Kenneth Galbraith astutely argued long ago,there is a fundamental contradiction associated with consumer freedomgiven that it unfolds in a marketplace teaming with marketers, consumerresearchers and advertisers who devote massive resources in their effort to‘author our consumer lives through their branding’ (Holt, 2002: 82). Thiscontradiction became culturally palpable in the 1960s, as the counter-culture attacked American advertisers as part of ‘the establishment’, hand-maidens of mass society, propagators of lifestyles that served corporate


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expansion, not existential freedom. Frank documents how unorthodoxcreatives, like William Bernbach of BBD, helped to shift this focus, creatingadvertising with a less dictatorial tone. Bernbach, a man with an affinityfor counter-cultural sentiments, reflected the quest for existential freedomin his promotional designs. His now frequently mentioned anti-adVolkswagen campaign transformed Hitler’s archetypical mass commodityfor a mass society into a counter-cultural status symbol, by giving it public-friendly names like the ‘bug’ and the ‘bus’. The campaign was funny,creative, ‘emotionally open’, diverse, and stressed that the Volkswagen wasan ‘individualized’ mode of transportation. Frank notes that the ‘anti-advertising’ campaign ‘harnessed public mistrust of consumerism – perhapsthe most powerful cultural tendency of the age – to consumerism itself ’(1997: 55).

The 1980s embrace of neo-liberalism saw ‘consumer culture reborn’(Lee, 1993).A consolidated global economy and global media, deregulationand privatization heightened competition within mature western markets.Post-Fordist production processes, computer technology and the culturalembrace of novelty are just some of the factors that supported a slightlydifferent marketplace with a wider diversity of goods, and more rapidturnover of fashion. Style cultures fragmented into ever more refined nichegroups, as mass marketing techniques no longer dominated. Within thispostmodern marketplace, Douglas Holt argues, the socially valued andculturally significant increasingly circulated through media and brandedgoods (Holt, 2002).With ideals of messianic capitalist overthrow in decline,an uneasy alliance between advertisers and their 21st-century audiences wasforged. Taking up the hard-won lessons of the 1960s, successful brands atthe close of the century stopped directly ‘proscribing’ a mass or modernlifestyle, particularly to sensitive youth markets. Instead, they reaffirmed themarket as a domain of autonomy, freedom and choice. The authority ofthe consumer was acknowledged (Keats and Abercombie, 1994).

Particularly in advertising directed to youth, the marketplace waspresented as an area to ‘pursue identities unencumbered by tradition, socialcircumstances, or societal institutions’ (Holt, 2002). While mothers nagged,teachers disciplined, and politicians droned on, marketers asked nothing ofyouth other than their willingness to use branded goods (whichever theychose) to fashion their lifestyles. Yet, to be useful to consumers’ identityprojects, Holt notes, ‘branded cultural resources must be perceived asauthentic. Disinterested . . . invented and disseminated by parties withoutan instrumental economic agenda, by people who are intrinsically moti-vated by their inherent value’ (Holt, 2002: 83). The trope of authenticity


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becomes ideally suited for this context for in principle it is antithetical toany attempt to provide a rationalized blueprint for life. Like capitalism itself,authenticity is amoral, pertaining less to what kinds of things you shoulddo and more to how a life is styled. For Golomb (1995), authenticity is anenticement in the text that acts as a lure for the contemplation of creativeself-discovery.

AUTHENTICITY IN ADVERTISINGTo explore advertisers’ use of authenticity in more depth, I undertook aninterpretive analysis of contemporary jeans and sneaker advertisementsdirected to youth (18–25 years). The scope of this article ruled out a full-scale analysis of all advertising sectors. I narrowed my perspective to youthidentity products, because youth has been singled out as a particularchampion of authenticity (Campbell, 1987; Frank, 1997). Jeans and sneakerswere chosen because, unlike toothpaste and razors, these are clearly identityproducts, public statements about what one is (Holt, 2004). Jeans also havea historical connection to the counter-culture that donned them in oppo-sition to the grey flannel suit. The multi-million dollar athletic shoe sectorwas similarly built upon the patronage of youth. A pilot study indicatedthat the values in jeans advertisements differed from those in sneakers, thussneaker advertisements offered a useful point of comparison.

Using Creative Club, a British advertising database (manufacturer:Thomson Intermedia, London), and Adcritic (manufacturer: AdvertisingAge, New York), which holds primarily American, but also European,advertisements, I isolated all print and television advertisements producedfor these sectors between 1999 and 2005. The final sample contained 1000unique impressions. The settings or tableaux presented and the charactertypes promoted in the 700 jeans ads and 300 sneaker ads were considered.The study asked, first, whether the encoded meanings available in the adscould be logically linked to the rhetorics of authenticity. Second, theresearch considered whether there was any evidence to suggest that theanxieties reflected in the ads today were similar to, or different from, thoseof the 1960s.

Decoding denimDuring the period in which these sample advertisements appeared, jeanssector profits had taken a downturn. Although women continued topurchase the variety of new styles offered to them, winning the patronageof men proved more of an obstacle (Mintel Research, 2005). Now a staplefor their parents’, and even their grandparents’, wardrobes, jeans no longer


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offered young men easy access to the citadel of cool. Cool was nowrefracted across other domains (athletic wear and combat trousers). Thus,following the industry truism that women will tolerate ads targeted to men,but not the reverse, jeans advertisers placed the promotional weight behindseducing the male audience.The influence this had on messages is suggestedin the recurrent masculine identity myths, particularly independence andrebellion.

Approximately 15 percent of the ads appeared to offer no link toauthenticity. These messages primarily contained unreflexive appeals toglamour, and were the few advertisement in the sample that targetedwomen. I would argue these earnest appeals to glamour are too self-conscious, and overtly linked to achievement within existing socialprocesses, to be associated with authenticity. There are clearly genderdynamics at play here, and although I do not have the space to elaboratethese ideas further, the question of how authenticity contributes to gendernarratives may pose an intriguing avenue for further research.

Because authenticity is an invitation, enticement, ambiance and settingare all important. What was striking about the jeans sample was the recur-ring mise-en-scène, which variously emphasized escape, challenge, and/orrelaxation from formal rules: the desert, the rooftop, the edge of town, thestreet, the everyday. Each of these settings, as I will discuss, can be under-stood to encode enticements to authenticity. Regardless of season, jeansappeared in the hot, dry dust of the desert. This tough, rugged mysticalterrain that forged the authentic cowboy character is now a commonbackdrop for models in jeans. Characters also frequently appeared onrooftops, peering down on the city. Marchand found this same motif inearly 20th-century advertisements, but characters gazed out on the moderncity with wonder and pride. In 21st-century jeans advertising, charactersturned their backs on urbanity, focusing on themselves and their peers, notthe urban landscape. Other ads depicted models on the edge of post-industrial cities, with burnt-out factories, and crumbling smoke stacks inthe background. These images of social decay suggested not only the deathof progress, but a point of rebirth, a clean slate and an invitation to be partof a new, more authentic civilization that leaves the stultifying social normsof the past behind.

The open road was endlessly offered up in the advertisements as a pathto authentic self-discovery. Characters were depicted travelling across theplains on motorcycles. They appeared in vintage cars, but not polished,museum pieces; rather patina laden, nostalgia machines, worn and dusty.Burnt-out stock cars and flat, black old Fords, like those used in American


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outlaw road movies, were also in abundance – no Ford Focuses, SUVs ormini vans, which lie too close to mainstream reality. In one ad, the charac-ter hops into an empty freight train car, clearly a promotional tribute to theexistential hobo.

While rays of light and halos were once used in early advertising tosignify the product’s transcendence from the profane, today’s jeans adver-tisers accomplish this by associating commodities with the street. Modelswere endlessly displayed on the street, interacting with others, posing againstgraffiti-covered walls, and literally sitting and lying on the street. Onecampaign depicted models sleeping rough. Designer jeans were modelledon the street, not the fashion runway. The street, like the desert, is a settingfor authentication. In the poetry and novels of bohemians and Beats, andessays of European intellectuals, the urban street was a site of intensity,surprise and challenge. The street sharpened one’s wit and skill, thrusting aperson into novel authenticating experiences. While the corporate board-room required the fake performance of power games, the street was ‘real’.

Advertising designers also focused on private everyday interiors,displaying characters engaged in mundane acts (eating yogurt whilestanding up in a kitchen, drinking a coffee in a diner, tea in the cafe) intributes to the ordinary. According to Charles Taylor, common andeveryday human acts are frequently understood as authentic: ‘The gravityof the good life does not lie in some higher sphere, but in what I call“ordinary life” that is, the life of production and the family, of work andlove’ (Taylor, 1991: 45).The interior locations chosen were frequently downmarket: disheveled, littered with dirty plates, paint drippings, and crumpledcloth. Squalor was offered up as a cultural resource for an unmade, relaxed,less stylized lifestyle – a bohemian rhapsody, an adolescent dream ofescaping the dictates of middle-class parental fastidiousness and hygiene andits gestures of puritanism. These are unpretentious interiors, designed forauthentic individuals, more concerned with their self-development thansocial display.

Models frequently appear in artist studios engaged in the creative arts,both classical (painting or sculpting) and new media (behind the moviecamera or in front of the microphone). In the 1970s, John Berger (1972)demonstrated how advertisers used high art to confer status uponcommodities. In the 21st century, after the aestheticization of art ineveryday life, commodities are connected directly to artistic lifestyles, forfinished artistic projects too easily suggest a dictation of taste. Instead, adver-tisers simply celebrate the general act of creativity which, as we have seen,is a core process of self-authorship.


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The characters in these ads literally slouch, both as a testament to thecomfort of the jeans and in defiance of puritan standards of posture. Theyfrequently appear lazy, drained of the work ethic. Touching the bohemian,models endlessly appear dishevelled and ungroomed – an inordinatenumber had long hair. Men wore beards and stubble, women had tousledhair, and everyone was seemingly styled by a roll in the grass. Advertisersdid their best to depict models as authentic individuals with strong person-alities. Models spelt out their names in sugar spilt on tables, with crayon onwalls, or in lights, in a desperate effort to relay their individuality and self-expressiveness, and encode them as real, authentic people, not merely adver-tising models. The expressiveness of the models’ faces were accented toconvey their uniqueness and inner emotions. The models frequently lookdown or appear caught in a dream. These displays conform to Goffman’s(1970) ‘licensed withdrawal’, a common pose that he believed indicatedpsychological removal and disorientation from the social situation, thusfrom dependence ‘on the protectiveness and goodwill of others’ (Goffman,1970: 57). In his study of 1970s advertisements, Goffman found femalesmost commonly displaying licensed withdrawal. In this study, males wereequally likely to be depicted in poses that reflected retreat from the materialworld, perhaps because the trope of authenticity celebrates the revelry ofinner experience.

Along with a setting that invites audiences to consider self-authentica-tion, the sample of jeans advertisements made frequent links to blackculture, as Norman Mailer’s 1956 ‘White Negro’ hipster appears to live onin the promotional imagination (see Frank, 1997: 12, 13). Indeed, withintoday’s popular culture, black culture and the street have become the hall-marks of the ‘real’ and authentic (Hall, 1996; hooks, 2003).Although studiescontinue to stress the under-representation of black people in advertising,over 16 percent of the sample contained black models. Blacks were alsofrequently cast as the main character, instead of their more typical support-ing role in the diversity shot. Particularly in the British ads, there was anemphasis on the cosmopolitan. Designers favoured mixed-race individualsto represent diversity. The models selected had no clearly identifiable (thuspotentially threatening or exclusive) ethnic traits, and could have been readas African, Latin American, Spanish, Asian, Middle Eastern, or AfricanCaribbean – anything but mainstream inauthentic Anglo white (Crouch,2004).

An example is found in BBH’s Levis European campaign, laden withthe mythos of black culture and the street.A young black,but not too black,man walks down a city street dressed in baggy jeans, tee shirt, leather jacket


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and baseball cap. He walks by a black bouncer dressed in a suit, protectingthe entrance to a club. The young man stops to engage in street banter.The bouncer provides the perfect, silent, authoritarian foil against whichthe young man’s authenticity is expressed. Street wise, the young manbegins his patter by pointing out he is aware he cannot enter the clubbecause of his inappropriate dress, but goes on to defend his style, therebychallenging the social convention that prevents his entry. The young mannotes ‘How do I explain this to you? Your look is so . . . My style is like“bad” and yours is a little “crispy”. I am like “aahhh!” and you all are like“uhh?”’. The banter itself suggests authenticity by mocking the conven-tions of formal English. Authenticity is encoded by depicting a tensionbetween work, formality and rules, and play, rejection, creativity.

The final advertisement worthy of attention is a 2005 Levis jeans viralfilm campaign by McCann Tag (May 2005), which provides a usefulexample of advertisers’ diagnosis of contemporary youth anxiety. The addepicts a scruffy little terrier dog frantically running around a beautifullyappointed modernist flat, chewing and clawing through pillows, sofa legs,and electrical wires; pulling modernist lamps and yuppie blenders to thefloor. The dog’s frenetic movements are supported by a driving electricguitar, drumming and screaming punk-inspired anti-authoritarian lyrics.Shot in grainy black and white, the actions of the dog are overlain withaggressive capital block letters, which spell out the following:

MOVIES BECAME FILMS. . . . MEDIUMS BECAMEGRANDEES; MEAT BECAME SOY; SWEATS BECAMEHIGH-PERFORMANCE, ULTRA-DRY OUTER LAYERPANTS; IT’S ENOUGH TO DRIVE A GOOD DOG MAD.

In the final scene the little dog urinates on a magazine image of a buff malebody, and the ad closes with: ‘Levis 501: Uncomplicate’. If the mass marketof the 1950s caused anxiety because it threatened authentic identity forma-tion, the postmodern market is threatening because of its expansive choiceand promotional density. The anti-hero canine burrows beneath his gildedcage’s façade of beauty to escape the discipline of glamour and complex-ity of lifestyle maintenance. The advertisement mocks an over-stylized,hypercommericalized world gone ‘pretty’, in which nothing is any longer‘real’, ‘simple’ or authentic, except Levis.

Athletic authenticityDistinctive from the jeans sector, the dominant visual clichés found in thesample of 300 sneakers advertisements make little reference to the rhetoric


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of authenticity. The $40 billion US athletic shoe empire built over the last30 years does not symbolically rest on romanticism, but rather the prowessof the elite athlete. The domain of sport demands discipline, deferred grat-ification, adherence to rules, subordination to coaches and trainers andteamwork, all of which are non-authentic values. Nike, the most skilled ofall brands in its use of puritan values, has been rewarded with a whopping40 percent of the market, the lion’s share of profit, and is able to ensure aconstant stock of sponsorship deals with the most famous athletes in theworld.

Still, the athletic shoe sector was not bereft of values of authenticity,and indeed, it became clear within the sample that Reebok, Converse andAdidas were using appeal to authenticity as a competitive promotionalstrategy to position themselves against Nike’s dominance over puritanvalues. For example, in 2002, Reebok, a brand that made its name in the1980s riding the wave of aerobic fitness popularity, but unable to competewith Nike’s expanding dominance, began to align the brand with rebellion.In a successful black and white advert hyper-fast edits were used to createa sense of intensity, motion, and self-transformation. Individuals weredepicted engaged in high-adrenalin pursuits such as bob sledding, crashingbicycles, jumping gates, slamming into one another. Along with fast call-to-arms music, the advertisement flashed a series of words across the screen:

Defy suburbia, physics, Defy red tape, expectations, cages,description, Defy tradition, the man, the media, whatever,comparison, defy convention.

The ad promotes an existentially and emotionally intensive lifestyle, linkingReebok to the ideology of authenticity

Pleased with the success of this campaign, Reebok went on in 2003to link the brand to hip-hop. Hip-hop resonated with authenticity, not onlybecause its roots lay in black musical cultures, but because it calls forth thecreative expression of audience members. The advertisement featuredyoung black men breakdancing,while an announcer explained why partici-pation in hip-hop is ‘real’:

Hip-hop is the culture of breakdancing, graffiti, DJ and m-cing.My style of breaking is not influenced by other people but Icreate it on my own. The crew . . . have to keep it real andknow what’s the truth and what’s fake out there.

In 2004, Reebok signed sponsorship contracts with rap recording artists JayZ and 50 Cents,who wore Reebok clothing in their concerts, and appeared


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in promotional messages. Tapping into their youthful targets’ interest incomputer games, Reebok created an interactive advertisement that invitedviewers to navigate through an animated city, and earn ‘street cred’ byclicking on esteemed city areas such as the basketball court, the recordingstudio and the art gallery. In each site, different Reebok running shoes werepromoted.

In 2005, Reebock launched a campaign entitled ‘I am what I am’,which included a highly stylized confessional advertisement designed forrap artist 50 Cents. Constructed out of random documentary style shots ofGuy R. Brewer Street, Jamaica Queens, New York (where the artist grewup), a cavernous warehouse where 50 Cents sits on a metal block, and close-ups of his face, the advertisement is narrated by layers of sound, includingradio announcers, celebrity interviewers, sirens and the rapper counting tonine (the number of times he has been shot). In the final scene, when askedwhat he will do next, 50 Cents laughs and ‘I am’ appears on the screen, buthis expression quickly changes, his eyes narrow and lips purse.‘What I am’,appears just as his smile turns to a grimace. The baseball cap rim disappears,leaving only a hood.

The legacy of ‘blacksploitation’ lives on in this campaign.Harper (1998)has demonstrated how the popular music industry uses the street and musicto authorize and represent authentic blackness. Promoters build a mediaversion of the street through repetition of quick edits, intertextual refer-ences, irony and parody. Most importantly, the street convention has beenlinked to a variety of romantic associations, particularly masculinity, and aconstruction of real blackness. The street is an emblem of the blackest andthe baddest (Harper, 1998: 402). Indeed, the black gangsta has come torepresent a potent character of authenticity, an amalgam of the down-trodden, artist, outlaw. One in a long line of popular cultural anti-herosincluding the bandit, pirate, highwayman, desperado, rebel, hoodlum,gangster. These figures serve as authentic enticements when recast fromcriminals who threaten the community into heroes struggling against awider social system that threatened the ‘true community’ or ‘authenticatingpowers of the self ’. Adopting postmodern styling, the Reebok advertise-ment forges an associative link between the brand, mean streets and a taleof a tough black man lifted by his musical talents from those streets to fame.

What is unique about this narrative is that it adds a new twist to thedream of social advancement.Despite 50 Cent’s fantastical social transform-ation, the ad suggests he is able to remain authentically true to who he is– a man of the street. Within popular culture, getting ahead, fromPygmalion to the American Dream, typically required some subordination


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to the values and customs of another class. Yet, research suggests the morepotent dream of the disadvantaged is to increase their money and famewhile retaining social networks, values and skills. In her thoughtful studyof UK working-class lottery ticket buyers, for example, Casey (2003)revealed participants’ interest in winning the lottery was tempered by a fearthat money would corrupt their lifestyle and values which they deemedauthentic.

For rappers like 50 Cents, the connection to the ‘street’ is the sourceof authentication and central to his market appeal (Yousman, 2003). Thisidentity myth is powerful because it appears to uncouple a contradiction:black men can escape the ghetto based on their talents, yet also retain theirstreet credibility. This is a highly romantic position; it is clearly otherworldly. American Department of Justice 2004 records show that blacksaccounted for 44 percent of the 2 million plus prison inmates, yet repre-sent only 12 percent of the population.Black men have a 30 percent chanceof being imprisoned in their lifetime; their likelihood of becoming inter-nationally famous recording artistes is obviously infinitesimally lower.

Adidas’s 2004 ‘Impossible is nothing’ also draws upon characters fromblack culture, but this time the authenticating hero is not a gangster but ablack athlete. One advertisement from the campaign draws upon historicalblack and white footage of the documentary Rumble in the Jungle, based onthe 1974 fight in Zaire, when the older and weaker Muhammad Ali wonback the heavyweight crown from George Foreman. In the ad,Ali is on hismorning training run before the fight. Contemporary athletes (DavidBeckham, Ian Thorpe, Haile Gebrselassie, among others) are digitallyspliced into the footage, running alongside, and looking up at Ali. The adis set on the authenticating open road, and Ali’s daughter provides thevoiceover, which is tracked with acoustic mandolin music and Africanchants:

Some people listen to themselves rather than what others say.These people don’t come along very often, but when they dothey remind us that once you set out on a path, even thoughcritics may doubt you, it is OK to believe that there is no can’t,won’t or impossible, they remind us that it is OK to believeimpossible is nothing.

This ad represents a potent myth that cleverly unites authenticity with thework ethic. Ali’s talent for self-expression (self-promotion), his stanceagainst, and triumph over, black oppression have been endlessly mythol-ogized rendering him Pan-like, half artist, half athlete. Ali is the artist who


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transcends the pompous artist, for he is also an athletic achiever. Rousseauspeaks through the advertisement in the notion of ‘listening to yourself ’and ‘shutting out the critics’. According to Adidas, finding oneself is notsimply about self-transformation, but self-fulfillment and achievement.

Converse fashions its promotion upon brand heritage, building authen-ticity through nostalgia. Seven decades before Nike turned basketballsponsorship into big business, the Converse Rubber Corporation fashionedthe first All Star basketball shoe, whose high top design came at the adviceof Charles Taylor, a basketball player, and Converse fan. Like Ford cars, thehighrise basketball sneaker came in one colour, black. After the SecondWorld War, the shoes appeared in different colours and low-rise models,but the overall design remained the same, distinguishing it from Nike,whose styles continually changed. Cheaper than most running shoes, theconsistency of its design has made it a favourite of alternative groups suchas skateboarders, geeks and student radicals.AdBusters, an anti-commercial,anti-consumption magazine and movement, markets its own version of theshoe to raise funds for its campaigns.

Converse has sought to circulate the loyalty stories of its consumers,who affectionately nicknamed the shoes ‘Chucks’. In 2005, brand managerslaunched Converse Gallery, a section on the brand’s website where peopleposted self-produced short films (ads) about their relationship with theproduct. An instant success, the site hosts over 750 films, submitted fromover 20 countries. Three million have visited the site to watch anddownload the movies. Market spokespeople explained how beneficialsupporting the ‘self-expression and authenticity’ work of core consumerscould be. Heritage brands like Converse are some of the rare symbolsand objects that appear to endure the rapid changes of modernity, thus takeon the aura of authenticity providing a romantic escape, because in a post-modern marketplace glutted with choice, nostalgia for the ‘good old’, one-size-fits-all mass market can excite a certain appeal of simplicity.

CONCLUSIONAuthenticity is a quintessentially modernist idea. Yet in the wake ofAdorno’s 1964 critique, the liberatory force of this historical notion hasbeen called into question. The artistic quest for self-expression and nose-thumbing at symbols of bourgeois power proved only an illusion of liber-ation. This was politically regressive because it remained rooted in a falsepromise of freedom that abstracted individuals from their historical andsocial context (Adorno, 2003[1964]). The idea that it was possible to dream,think or creatively imagine our way to real freedom seemed preposterous


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to Adorno, because such quests diverted individuals from engaging in thematerial and social changes necessary to truly change their subjectiveconditions. Thanks to Adorno, it remains ‘unfashionable to speak ofauthenticity today’ within much contemporary critical scholarship.(Golomb, 1995: 5) Yet, as we have seen above, the imagery that honoursthe individual’s quest for autonomy from the social group continues to playan important role in postmodern discourses – especially in jeans advertis-ing targeted at youth.

Clearly by the turn of the 20th century the modern heroes of authen-tic individuality – the cowboy, the artist, the outlaw – began to be parodiedand debunked. Yet, as the Marlboro man showed, even the most contrivedpromotional adaptations of the mythology surrounding the struggle forauthentic individuality did not necessarily diminish its underlying appealto postmodern audiences (see also Hill, 2002). While the jeans ads arefancifully postmodern, the underlying values of freedom, autonomy andindividuality are not: from graffiti artists, to baggy-panted mixed-raceyoung men hanging on the street, from young men in the box cars, tocowboy boots and mud-splattered motorcycles, they provide signposts forinterpreting an evolving idea of authenticity – albeit one that can beexpressed within the framework of a consumer culture. Certainly from mystudents’ point of view, these fashion ads can be read as a codex for inter-preting authentic youth sentiments and lifestyles (see also Thornton, 1995).

By way of contrast with the fashion sector, the athletic shoe ads offerus few references to the myths of authenticity. The ideology of athleticismis deeply rooted in the modernist ethos celebrating achievement, deferralof gratification, discipline and teamwork, paths to personal identity. Yeteven in these high modernist tableaux, the psychological force of authen-ticity is evidenced backstage: Reebok bows to the authenticating myth ofthe street musician, while Adidas invokes nostalgic footage of MuhammadAli in a romanticized blending of artistry and athleticism.And when adver-tisers manage to create messages that their audiences deem authentic, theyappear to be rewarded with sales.

I am not claiming that the quest for authenticity is universally cele-brated by advertising or psychologically significant for a mass audience.Norare the rhetorics of authenticity encoded in brand advertising today prof-fered as the antidote to the alienation of mass society. Yet rather thanabandon the idea, I found more than a few indications that contemporaryadvertisers have continued to rewrite the quest for authenticity withincontemporary promotional culture. Targeted at youth (and perhaps theeducated middle classes in the form of adventure vacations and organic


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foods), the project of autonomy and self-authentication continues to betaken most seriously by those most immersed in the quest for anti-modernidentity. Yet even if the marketplace is not a site of absolute personalfreedom, to the degree it quells anxieties that the quest for freedom isdisappearing in a hyper-commercialized market culture, it may provetherapeutic.

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Jacqueline Botterill is an assistant professor at Brock University, Canada where she teachescourses related to advertising, media and consumer culture. She is co-author of The Dynamicsof Advertising (Routledge, 2000) and Social Communication in Advertising (3rd edition,Routledge, 2005) and author of the forthcoming Consumer Culture and Personal Finance(Palgrave Macmillian). Address: Department of Communications, Popular Culture & Film, BrockUniversity, St. Catharines, Ontario, L2S 3A1, Canada. [email: [email protected]]


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