I was poised over the play arrow on the video link in the email announcing craftsman Stuart Weitzman’s fall 2024 advertising strategy and hesitated, bracing myself for the common sense of letdown, of the attack in the back, of Et tu, Stuart?
The short film that serves as the anchor for Weitzman’s advertising campaign is called” How Sweet to be a Woman,” and anything that mentions “woman” could lead to heartache and trouble in the future. In recent years, so many of our favorite manufacturers have betrayed us, be Pod People immediately, or have fallen for the woke thinking disease, particularly in the sheep-like fashion sector.
With shiny images and hysteric articles about the terrible job of the West Bank, Vogue magazine, which I’ve been a subscriber since I was a young child, changed to The Nation. Teen Vogue became a dream, with how-to guidelines for anal intercourse and glowing policy of Columbia University’s pro-Hamas camp area. To avoid offense in its” Snow White” remake, Disney cast a Hispanic as” Snow White” and brought in seven normal-sized people to play the dwarves.
I believe fashion seems particularly vulnerable to any woke drivel that comes down the pike because their product is finally so unimportant that the designers must work even harder to defend their presence. It does n’t hurt that activist groups are trying to get big companies to put ads featuring transgender imagery to be marketed as “inclusive” and gain access to mega finance.
The trans action has jumped with both feet, and that is why. The online newspaper Bustle trilled about airports at last night’s New York Fashion Week because they were “awash in…]male-to-female ] trans versions”.
So, as my finger hesitated over the play arrow, the million-dollar question became how would Weitzman, one of my favorite purveyors of classic pumps and slingbacks, answer the question” What is a Woman”? He is, after all, old (83 and still very little helming his company ), light, and a very powerful Jew. I was surprised to learn that the old coot still holds onto his woman-loving and then conventional firearms with a great sense of gratitude. The” How Lovely to be a Woman” movie-ette features all real women.
I am aware of this because I have eyes and, like any other person, can see the likely XY lying in a jungle of XXs ( as we saw with hero Imane Khelif at the Summer Olympics ), as well as because the Weitzman brand ambassadors, Christy Turlington, Issa Rae, Lucy Liu, Ming Xi, and dancer Aly Raisman, are all quite well-known. They are filmed mainly in classic black-and-white, breezing through regular days, soothing babies, taking phone calls, studying laptops, applying beauty, taking a sleep on the floor of a brightly-lit part office, and, in Raisman’s case, sticking a horizontal bar landing.
Weitzman gave no third to another shocking social trend: What Peggy Noonan called the “uglification” of all earlier this year. ” Creative culture has taken a revolting move. It speaks of a nation that hates itself, and hates existence”, summarized the Wall Street Journal headline.
After watching the Broadway adaptation of” Cabaret,” Noonan was inspired to write the row because the Kit Kat Klub dancing were portrayed as “ugly, crazy, inartistic, ultimately stupid.” Even vulgar but in a aimless manner, without meaning”.
Many of the” Kabaret Girls” are now boys, with beards to make sure we get it, dressed often in humiliating garb, like short pink tutus. They also use a toilet plunger to conduct stunts, such as Eddie Redmayne’s sodomizing performance as the “emcee.” This is an threat, Noonan points out, for a number of causes but particularly because” Cabaret”, was choreographed by Bob Fosse, and Fosse “famously loved people”.
But,” no one loves people in this present. When we meet Sally Bowles, in the kind of dress a little girl might put on a doll, with heavy leather boots and harsh, garish makeup, the character does n’t flirt, does n’t seduce or charm. She growls and cries, violently”.
I even like the adverts music.
The copy song, which is titled” How Sweet to be a Woman,” also includes the early 1960s and the musical” Bye Bye Birdie.” The song is uncredited and nearly inaudible who croons these phrases ( set notice! ), no Ann Margaret as in the film version of the music. Unsophisticated lyrics from the beginning 1960s! ):
How wonderful to have a physique
That’s around instead of straight
Whenever you hear guys whistle
You’re what they’re whistling at!It’s great to think
The manner a person feels
It makes you shine so much.
Simply to hear
You’re wearing makeup and feet
So there you go: an advertising plan that without vitriol, without apology, without humor celebrates female women. Although this advertisement may sound a little bit like historical flotsam, it is not particularly minor.
Politics is inland from tradition, as the beatified Andrew Breitbart once said to us. We’re seeing a standard reversal of liberalism in many ways, both in small and large ways, generally as evidenced by small cultural trends like the rise of feminine podcasters and substackers like Gen X, Y and Zers Freya India, Peachy Keenan, and Brett Cooper from The Daily Wire, who are exploring how to reshape love, sex, and marriage after the wreckage deeded to us by Feminism 2.0.
However, there are also significant societal oppositions to reality, such as woke advertising that ignores the core consumer and the removal of DEI policies from the Human Rights Campaign indices of vice. We are finally, as crusader Robby Starbuck put it,” Understanding that ]our ] wallets are a weapon”, and big brands are falling like ninepins.
In 2024, May Weitzman will sell a lot of pumps and slingbacks!
Stephanie Gutmann has written for publications as diverse as the New Republic, Playboy, Elle, and the New York Times ‘ Styles section. She is the author of two books,” The Kinder, Gentler Military” ( Scribner ) and” The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Struggle for Media Supremacy” ( Encounter ). She lives in Rockland County, New York.
