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ARTICLE

INTERNATIONAL
journal of
CULTURAL studies

Copyright © 2000 SAGE Publications

London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi
Volume 3(1): 27–55
[1367-8779(200004)3:1; 27–55; 012046]

Women outdoors
Advertising, controversy and disputing feminism
in the 1990s

● Janice Winship
University of Sussex

ABSTRACT ● In this article I engage with three British advertising

campaigns of the 1990s: the Wallis (clothes) ‘Dress to kill’ campaign, the Nissan
Micra car, ‘Ask before you borrow it’ campaign, and the Wonderbra ‘Hello boys’
campaign. Targeted at so-called ‘winning women’ and pivoting around either a
mocking sexual confidence in relation to men or a symbolic violence, I attempt
to understand the controversy courted by these campaigns by placing them in
the context of (some) women’s changed position and shifts in femininity and
feminism since the 1970s. Approaching the ads as fantasy texts organized
around tensions, I suggest that their scopic regimes are different from earlier
ads. The campaigns play across the domains of public and private space to
disrupt more conventional modes of femininity and masculinity. This play
provides humour, but also anxiety because it contrarily associates femininity
with public space and the ‘freedom’ of outdoors, while masculinity is
constrained and trapped in enclosed spaces. However, controversy is further
engendered when the ads literally cross over from inside magazines to the
outdoor and more public space of billboards. The campaigns enter ‘media event
space’ where they are variously judged and discussed, and in this way develop a
‘thicker life’. Moving from a commercial to a civic domain and into a ‘public
sphere’, these advertisement communications are diversely mobilized within the
media, unhinged from their ‘original meaning’ to become part of a shared
currency through which the shifting and tense relations between women and
men, and women’s continuing bid for autonomy, are articulated. The article thus
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28 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 3(1)

contributes to debates about feminist approaches to media representation and

to wider critical discussion about advertising. ●

KEYWORDS ● advertising ● billboards ● controversy ● feminisms ●

Nissan ● public and private ● Wallis ● women ● Wonderbra

Introduction: ‘Winning Women’

London, March 1998. Publicity for the UK marketing conference, Winning

Women: Marketing to High Spending Single Females, declared:
Feminism has come a long way. Bras aren’t burnt any more, they’re flouted
[sic]. Lipstick isn’t shunned, it’s all part of being a girl. Men aren’t hated,
they’re . . . well, just men.
Over-hyped though they may be, the Spice Girls represent modern, indepen-
dent womanhood: confident, up-front, choosy, sexy, uninhibited and free-
spending. Girl Power is where feminism’s rapid evolution has taken younger
women in early 1998.
It is extraordinary how swift the political, social and economic emancipation
of women has been. Less than 100 years ago women were still without the
vote. Now we have the Nissan ad: ‘Ask before you borrow it’ . . .
For marketers, understanding the course of this change is essential. It is not
good enough to rely on old stereotypes. . . . Perhaps more than any other
market, young single women are the most challenging for marketers to keep
up with. (Winning Women, 1998)
This story of feminism distinguishes between past and present, older and
younger women, and public citizen and private consumer. Instead of the
feminist fighting for citizenship, or one allegedly burning bras and hating
men, today’s young woman embraces consumption to assertively demand
of her mate, ‘Ask before you borrow it’ (the Nissan Micra car). Putting
words into her mouth, marketers are analysts challenged by the ‘riddle’ of
this new femininity (Freud, 1966: 577; Bowlby, 1993), and are like the
liberal parent struggling to ‘keep up’ with the young. ‘Winning Women’
refers both to a particular group of women in the UK – ‘high spending single
females’ – and to marketing’s wooing of them.
In this article I engage with three UK advertising campaigns where the
marketers have ‘kept up’ and ‘won’ approval from the target group. Two
featured as exemplary case studies at the Winning Women conference:
Wallis’s ‘Dress to kill’ and Nissan’s ‘Ask before you borrow it’ campaigns,
while the third, Wonderbra’s 1994 ‘Hello boys’ campaign, still reverberates
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in popular culture. Successfully increasing sales and gaining ‘creative’

awards in the advertising industry,1 these ads also engendered mild con-
troversy. Investigated by advertising’s regulatory body and discussed in the
press, the noise points to their cultural significance – something is at stake
here, something matters.
I suggest, first, that we should understand these campaigns in the context
of (some) women’s position having changed.2 Second, I describe the ads’
textual disruption of conventional representations of femininity and mascu-
linity as they are mapped across public and private space. Third, I engage
with the literal crossing over into public space as the ads move from inside
magazines to outdoor billboards and other media. There they court con-
troversy but also become part of a shared currency through which people
talk ‘together about the processes of our common life’ (Williams, cited in
Curran, 1991: 33).

‘New (media) feminism?’

I begin by addressing the changed cultural context of femininity and femin-

ism in the UK and for which the term ‘postfeminism’ is useful shorthand,
both acknowledging and disavowing the alleged tenets of 1970s feminism
(Brunsdon, 1997). The latter, ‘Women’s Liberation Movement’, had a tense
relation to masculinity and posed itself against conventional femininity,
which was regarded as a ‘major aspect of women’s oppression, and a prime
candidate for change’ (Barrett and Phillips, 1992: 3). In contrast, post-
feminism more easily embraces a performative, pleasurable femininity and
regards men as potential friends, as well as (sometimes problematic) lovers
and partners.
Within the academy, postfeminism emphasizes difference, experience as
contradictory, and subjectivities as always in process and troubled. Some
scholars embrace this as ‘feminism’s “coming of age”, – its maturity into
a confident body of theory and politics’ (Brooks, 1997: 1; McRobbie,
1993). Others question whether a feminist politics can any longer be
meaningful, as signalled in Tania Modleski’s Feminism Without Women:
Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age (1991). She is mindful that
‘the postfeminist play with gender in which differences are elided may lead
us back into our “pregendered” past where there was only the universal
subject – man’ (1991: 163). Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips warn of
other limitations to feminism’s turn to culture. Acknowledging that ‘cul-
tural politics are crucial because they are fought out over the meaning of
our everyday experiences’, they urge that feminist cultural analysis should
not neglect a wider engagement with economic, political and social
spheres (1992: 23).
Charlotte Brunsdon engages in a different mapping of shifts, arguing that
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it is the feminist’s relation to ‘her other, the ordinary woman, the non-femin-
ist woman, the housewife, the television viewer . . . which is essential to an
understanding of feminist cultural criticism’ (Brunsdon, 1997: 192). Her
typology defining this relation has three categories: ‘the transparent’ and
‘the hegemonic’ – both key to 1970s feminist approaches, and ‘the frag-
mented’ – characteristic of postfeminism. If a ‘transparent’ relationship
marks the moment of utopian sisterhood when the ‘we’ of feminist criticism
has no ‘other’, a ‘hegemonic’ relationship characterizes criticism where there
is an impulse to defend the pleasures of feminine texts but also ‘to trans-
form the feminine identifications of women to feminist ones’ (1997: 194).
The ‘fragmented’ relationship between feminism and women challenges
such a politics. Positing that ‘everyone here is an other’ (1997: 197) this
critical approach offers historical autobiography or studies acknowledging
the contingency and articulation of gender with other identifications (1997:
196). Providing a ‘less conflictual’ position ‘for women to inhabit as intel-
lectuals’ (1997: 197; emphasis in original), it also returns us perhaps to
Modleski’s fears for feminism.
Jennifer Wicke’s slant on the ‘fragmented’ relationship is that feminist
academic argument has become ‘hermetically sealed’ (1994: 770). With
theorizing of the political only occurring in relation to theory,3 feminist
criticism ignores an increasingly significant ‘other’, the domain of ‘celebrity
feminism’. She elaborates:
The celebrity zone is the public sphere where feminism is negotiated, where
it is now in most active cultural play. This zone lies on the border of academic
feminism, adjacent to it, sometimes invading it, at other times being invaded
by it. . . . The celebrity zone is fed by streams flowing from civil society: con-
gressional hearings, court TV, Hillary Clinton’s health plan, the L.A. riots,
controversial judicial or cabinet nominees, and so forth. Whoopi Goldberg,
hosting the Academy Awards, is in the celebrity zone, as is . . . Oprah Winfrey,
with her media empire. . . . A zone is neither an absolute space nor a perma-
nent terrain. . . . Good things happen in the celebrity zone, and bad things
happen in that zone. (Wicke, 1994: 757–8)
‘Celebrity feminism’ is important as ‘a new locus for feminist discourse,
feminist politics and feminist conflicts, both conflicts internal to feminism
and feminism’s many struggles with antifeminist forces’ (Wicke, 1994: 753).
Wicke thus argues that ‘materialist feminism’4 ignores ‘celebrity-feminist
discourse at our peril’ (1994: 770).
Building on this discussion, I engage with ‘celebrity feminism’ to charac-
terize feminist/feminine culture in the 1990s. But since British culture has
not produced the likes of Camille Paglia, Catherine MacKinnon or Naomi
Wolf – although it does have feminist journalists whose agendas slip into,
and out of, and mark themselves against, more academic feminist discourses
– I use the term ‘media feminism’, linking it to Lisa McLaughlin’s idea of
contestation in ‘media event space’ (1998: 73).
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Much discussed in the UK ‘media zone’ have been two books by jour-
nalists: Natasha Walter’s The New Feminism (1998), a political polemic
rethinking feminism for 20- and 30-somethings, and Helen Fielding’s
hugely successful comic story of the trials of a metropolitan, single, 30-
something – Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996).5 These books define themselves
against 1970s feminism, epitomizing Angela McRobbie’s suggestion that
for younger generations such feminism is the maternal ‘other’ (1996,
1997). Indeed, Walter refers to her mother as ‘a Spare-Rib reading activist
of the old school’ (Benn, 1998: 20). Walter rejects engagement with issues
of sexuality and body image, in favour of the ‘harder’ issues of employ-
ment and childcare. Each chapter criticizes a particular, if caricatured,
aspect of 1970s feminism for allegedly alienating today’s young women.
‘Out of the Ghetto’ argues that the women’s movement represented an
exclusive ghetto for women that today’s generation rejects, and ‘Hello
Boys’ criticizes 1970s feminism’s hostility towards men. Walter’s tone is
celebratory:
Without doubt, when we look at the changing lives of young women today,
we can see a spring of optimism bubbling up. Young women need not apolo-
gise for wanting power and equality. . . . We can see that changes sometimes
create stress and uncertainty, and yet hold on to the underlying truth: we’ve
never had it so good.6 (1998: 197)
For her, a basic tenet of 1970s feminism, ‘the personal is political’, must be
abandoned to give ‘the social and political demands of feminism more edge’
and ‘free up the personal realm’ from the ‘straitjacket of political correct-
ness’ (Walter, 1998: 5–6). Appealing as this viewpoint is – after all, does it
matter what kind of clothes/make-up/boyfriends/girlfriends women desire?
– it refuses to recognize the complex historical processes and power rela-
tions by which public and private are bound together, ‘intimately linked’ to
women’s oppression (Campbell, 1998). Although usefully marking shifts
and highlighting young women’s changed perceptions, Walter tends to inter-
pret the progress of the ‘winning woman’ as progress for all women (Benn,
1998; Mirza, 1998; Watkins, 1998).
If Walter opts for a feminist politics rigorously confined to the public,
Helen Fielding’s fictional account, Bridget Jones’s Diary, occupies the
allegedly ‘freed up personal realm’ beyond politics, playing up feminine
weaknesses and heterosexual desires.7 Each entry begins with a self-assess-
ment of body weight and compulsive oral intakes intimately tied to Bridget’s
love life:
Thursday 5 January
9st 3 (excellent progress – 2lb of fat spontaneously combusted through joy
and sexual promise), alcohol units 6 (v.g. for party), cigarettes 12 (continu-
ing good work), calories 1258 (love has eradicated need to pig out). (1996:
22)
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Some weeks into the new year her mood is morose:

Sunday 26 February
9st, alcohol units 5 (drowning sorrows), cigarettes 23 (fumigating sorrows),
calories 3856 (smothering sorrows in fat-duvet). (1996: 61)
Femininity is revealed, blemished and undignified, in the desperate search
for Mr Right. Bridget moves between work and friends, whose (often prob-
lematic) relationships she envies, and her middle-class family who, against
her better judgement, pull her into the fold. Her own stumbling work and
love life is counterpointed by her mother’s dizzy rebirth, landing both a TV
presenter’s job and a ‘smoothy’ Portuguese lover. A pastiche of Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice, the initially despised romantic hero, Mr Darcy, reveals
his true merits in a denouement where he catches Bridget’s mother’s lover
(involved in fraudulent dealings with time-share apartments), and saves the
family reputation:
I looked out of the window and nearly jumped out of my skin. There was
Mark Darcy slipping, lithe as a whipper-snapper, across the lawn and in
through the French windows. He was sweating, dirty, his hair unkempt, his
shirt unbuttoned. Ding-dong!
‘Everyone keep completely still and quiet, as if everything is normal’, he said
softly. We were all so stunned, and he so thrillingly authoritative, that we
started doing as he said as if hypnotized zombies. (1996: 303)
Darcy declares his love for Bridget and manfully sweeps her away from the
horrors of a family Christmas.
In this tale of the return of the repressed feminine, there is a feminist
‘knowingness’ in the comedy. Zoë Heller, reviewing the Diary and what she
calls the FFPN, ‘the feminine first-person narratives . . . nurtured by news-
papers’, suggests that they ‘replicate the easy, jokey, demotic tone of girl
talk’. Seeing them as a literary genre to counter 1970s publishing (epitom-
ized by Virago books), they were ‘undeniably interesting after years in which
the mandatory line had been Amazonian declarations of independence’
(Heller, 1998: 24). If Bridget’s (desperate) desire for a man comically pushes
the narrative forward, the comedy is also ‘ultimately the comedy of recog-
nition’ (1998: 24).8
If we consider Bridget Jones’s Diary and The New Feminist as one fiction
split across two stories, imitating and transcending life (Beer, 1970: 10), we
gain a more complex account of the ‘winning woman’ and take a first step
towards understanding the ad campaigns. These I address by outlining their
marketing rationales and then by analysing their ads.
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Campaign strategies

Wallis,9 the 60-year-old high street fashion label, wished to clarify its
profile. According to marketing director Fiona Davis, the brand was about
‘putting women first’ and the store saw its customer as ‘grown up and com-
fortable with who she is. In her mind she is forever 30.’ Without alienating
core customers, Wallis aimed to persuade non-users ‘to take a fresh look at
Wallis’ and gain support from fashion journalists. It wanted to suggest that
‘at Wallis, we understand the benefit of making an effort, that dressing up
delivers a sense of inner and outer confidence’.
With a modest budget and media spend, the agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty
produced four print ads around the catchline ‘Dress to kill’. The campaign
was launched to the trade and consumer press in July 1997 before appear-
ing in the ‘credible fashion environment’ of women’s magazines
(September–December). Impact was further augmented ‘by translating the
big idea into our windows, instore, bags, postcards, accounts statements’.
However, first seen ‘outside of its intended media channel’, the campaign
was amplified by national and international news media, and introduced to
a public beyond the target group.
In its campaign, Nissan aimed to increase sales of its Micra model
(hitherto perceived as an older person’s car) to women under 40, whom
research suggested took the decision or had an equal say in 80 percent of
all car sales. Research also indicated that if dependability and safety were
important for women, so was ownership, since with a shared car the
woman’s use came second. With the catchline ‘Ask before you borrow it’
the agency TBWA Simons Palmer aimed to tap into women’s feelings toward
their car, again selecting women’s magazines (eight executions), supported
by postcards, billboards and a TV campaign (five executions). Like Wallis,
the campaign’s public visibility beyond women’s magazines again made it
newsworthy.
Wonderbra posed a greater marketing challenge. In 1992, as fashion
emphasized ‘voluptuously womanly curves’ (Baker, 1995: 264), the 30-
year-old Wonderbra, under the Gossard label, enjoyed a renaissance. But in
1993 the Wonderbra licence was transferred to Playtex. Its problem was that
Gossard, with a much stronger fashion image, promptly created a similar
and competitive new product, the Ultrabra, so that Wonderbra, an ‘old’
product weighed down by Playtex’s dowdy image, was potentially the loser
in this ‘bra war’. Much was pinned on advertising to differentiate Wonder-
bra and demonstrate that it was ‘still extremely fashionable and extremely
desirable’ (Baker, 1995: 267). The agency TBWA Holmes Knight Ritchie
saw the ‘Wonderbra woman’ as:

a powerful, image-conscious woman, in control of her life and angered by

advertising which did not reflect that. She enjoyed ‘looking good’ and was a
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great believer in ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it’.

She could just as easily be an 18 year old
raver as a 40 year old mother-of-two; age
was unimportant. She was a liberated ‘post
feminist’ who liked to demonstrate, and
even exploit, her sexuality. (Baker, 1995:
269; emphasis in original)
The agency opted for women’s magazines
(March–June 1994) supplemented by 830
billboard sites (two weeks from St Valen-
tine’s Day). Adopting this new ground for
bra advertising, this strategy boldly dis-
tinguished Wonderbra from Ultrabra’s TV
campaign (Campaign Report, 13 October
1995), while crucially magnifying the
impact of a £330,000 budget by grabbing
Figure 1 Advertisement for journalists’ attention.10
Pittards gloves: ‘Dress to kill’, in But if agency handling of media con-
the young women’s magazine 19, tributed to campaign success, so too did
March 1968. the ‘creative’ executions.

‘Dress to kill’: Wallis

The phrase ‘Dress to kill’ is an old one –
a woman dresses to win her man, as in a
1968 advertisement for red leather gloves
(19, March 1968) (Figure 1) which pro-
vides a benchmark against which to assess
recent shifts.11 The exchange of looks
between the (female) viewer and the
woman represented excludes the man,
whose vulnerable back is the object of the
camera’s and our gaze. Sharing knowledge
of the red gloves’ sexual power, we
become complicit in the ‘killing’, in fact
ideally placed to ‘shoot’. In Wallis’s
opening ‘cover’ to a triptych of ads, ‘kill’ Figure 2 From Wallis’s ‘Dress
is highlighted by a dagger (Figure 2), but to kill’ campaign, this is the
the assumption of knowledge and con- opening ‘cover’ to a triptych of
junction of looks in the ads that follow12 ads inserted into women’s fashion
are different. In ‘Crash’ (Figure 3), Wallis magazines, autumn 1997.
woman gazes out to sea; in ‘Barber’ Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Bob
(Figure 4) she is intent on the path ahead. Carlos Clarke.
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Figure 3 From Wallis’s

‘Dress to kill’ campaign.
Called ‘Crash’ it is one of
four executions in women’s
fashion magazines, autumn
1997.
Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Bob
Carlos Clarke.

John Berger famously suggested that: ‘Men act and women appear. Men
look at women, women watch themselves being looked at’ (1972: 47). Cer-
tainly in these ads he looks at her, and with potentially devastating conse-
quences: the car has crashed and the barber may slit the client’s throat. (In
the third, a guard will be decapitated as a metro train passes beneath a
tunnel.) She, however, seems unaware, except through the female audience:
we notice the male gaze.
In ‘Crash’, unlike in the 1968 ad, there is no exchange of looks between
women. The spatial composition draws the viewer’s gaze along the faultline
of pavement and railing as if we are about to bump into the woman, and
between the crashed car/the man and her as she nonchalantly leans towards
the sea. Our gaze switches from the man’s ‘symbolic castration’ to the
woman’s ‘bodily plenitude’, in the process checking his gaze. In ‘Barber’
(Figure 3) we see the scene in the mirror, our gaze cutting in front of Wallis

Figure 4 From Wallis’s

‘Dress to kill’ campaign.
Called ‘Barber’ it is one of
four executions in women’s
fashion magazines, autumn
1997.
Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Bob
Carlos Clarke.
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woman to the car beyond. Our gaze checks her walk and the men’s admir-
ing looks, even as our mirrored relation to her encourages identification.
Significantly, the men are trapped: the driver is momentarily immobilized
in his crashed car, the barber is able to gaze at the woman/the world only
through a plate-glass window. Diverted from doing their business properly,
a woman’s looks (as in Laura Mulvey’s classic psychoanalytic account of the
pleasures of film [1975]) stop the narrative, but in this moment of erotic
contemplation masculinity is also undone. The men are unable to alleviate
anxiety, or escape ‘symbolic castration’, by punishing the woman or making
her the reassuring fetish: their pleasure in looking is interrupted by our
(female) gaze.
The woman, in contrast, gazes towards the horizon or swings along the
street. She enjoys the ‘freedom’ of public space and the outdoors, not con-
fined and not punished. For a moment she ‘kills’ – she ‘wins’, even if
unknowingly. Or is it that we the spectator ‘win’? For our look, as well as
the look of the camera, is the privileged one accessing a knowledge she does
not have while also being key to the advert’s humour: we laugh at men’s
predicament and relish the exercise of power our organizing gaze grants us
(Hall, 1997). Such a conjunction of looks is described by Christine Bat-
tersby, writing about feminist photography:
it is only by adopting visual shocks that one woman can enable another to
see with a doubleness of vision – irony, parody, anger, satire, humour, mimicry
– which is a necessary part of gazing within a culture that adopts the male
viewing position as norm . . . female gazers have to be more cross-eyed . . .
they have to disturb the directness of the male gaze, by looking in (more than)
two directions at once. (1994: 93–4)
Arguably these ads encourage a ‘cross-eyed’ gaze. But there is ambiguity.
After all, the epicentre of the ads is men looking admiringly at a sexualized
woman who represents a threat to be controlled by the patriarchal gaze. As
our gaze oscillates across the line of vision between ‘him’ and ‘her’ there is
tension between recognition of (and pleasure in?) his surveillance and of his
failure to curb the threat. This double play refigures the one fiction split
across the two stories of Bridget Jones’s Diary and The New Feminism.
Iain MacRury’s psychoanalytic approach to the representation of male
adultery in recent TV car advertising helps push these ideas further. Propos-
ing that advertising, and consumer goods, can be thought of as ‘making
some contribution to various needs for social and unconscious self-expres-
sion’ (1997: 240) he argues that ambiguities in ads relate to readers’ psychic
conflicts. He draws on Heinz Kohut’s model of the psychic apparatus which
poses a narcissistic bipolar infant self as the ‘center of initiative and a re-
cipient of impressions’ (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983: 353).13 The infant’s
feelings of being at the centre of everybody’s universe – ‘baby worship’ –
Kohut characterizes as the ‘archaic grandiose self’, or the pole of the self
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which ‘is about holding: holding attention, objects, power’ (MacRury, 1997:
244; emphasis in original). The other and later developing pole, ‘the archaic
idealising self’ (1997: 244) in which the infant experiences ‘a sense of merger
with an idealized selfobject’ (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983: 354), relates to
‘feelings of being held’ and enjoying ‘pleasure in security’ (MacRury, 1997:
244–5; emphasis in original). In the adult, MacRury suggests that the
bipolar self leans on that earlier developmental dynamic to create what
Kohut describes as a ‘tension arc’ (1997: 245). Considering ads as inciting
particular fantasies which play into and modulate ‘the readership’s bipolar
narcissism’ (1997: 246), MacRury carefully argues for the contribution ‘of
a sociocultural as well as a familial environment’ (1997: 245). Thus the
success of an advertisement rests on the ‘tension arc’ being appropriately
attuned, psychically and socially, to the target audience, and the fantasies
must be relevant, not moving beyond what the reader can cope with (1997:
246).
Even though MacRury14 does not engage with patriarchal relations as a
key social dynamic inflecting the bipolar self, his ideas cast new light on the
ad campaigns I detail. Each differently incites, maps and manages a tension
arc across the woman’s bipolar self, conceding to and rebuffing patriarchal
relations. In the Wallis ads, Wallis woman dramatically holds attention and
power, but the male gaze also holds her. The tension arc, however, is ulti-
mately modulated by the female spectator whose privileged looking from
outside the frame, and beyond danger, slips into humour at men’s expense
and thus secures a bipolar self in which disavowal of patriarchal relations
can safely be uppermost.
If marketing has long recognized that ‘great brands attract mass markets
by resolving conflicts’ (Evans and Rowlands, 1996: 13), in this campaign
tensions are foregrounded for enjoyment and deliberation. Offering a
‘private dialogue’ with women (Winning Women, 1998), such performative
fantasies in magazines are part of the adventurous ‘new sexual discourse’
which ‘destabilizes the more singular femininity . . . magazines once en-
dorsed’ (McRobbie, 1996: 187). But Wallis’s promotion outside of maga-
zines renders such incitements more problematic, as young female spectators
rub against a wider public, an issue I return to.

‘Ask before you borrow it’: Nissan

The Nissan ads15 toy with a threat to men which is consciously enacted
by women. Grainy sepia images16 echo film noir conventions, with side
lighting producing contrasts of brightness and shade and a shallow depth
of focus reinforcing mystery. Women, however, are mostly absent, avoid-
ing any sexual play across their bodies,17 while the male (body) is largely
represented in displaced ways: through the tabloid headline of the US
Bobbitt case in which a wife dismembered her partner (Figure 5), and
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through possessions, whether a Rolex-

type watch being boiled (Figure 6), a
torn jacket or a crime novel with its final
pages ripped out. Alternatively, men are
rendered vulnerable, as in the torso shot
of a man protecting his groin (the cam-
paign’s central image) (Figure 7), and a
man asleep, one side of his hair shaved
off.
The domestic setting in which these acts
against men largely take place is ‘filled
with menace and foreboding’. Woman is
the (absent) femme fatale bringing about
the downfall of the male protagonist; she
is pathological, unfathomable: why has
she performed these acts (Macdonald,
1995)? Explanations are provided in the
Micra Revenge Pack’ of postcards which Figure 5 From the Nissan
Micra ‘Ask before you borrow it’
campaign in young women’s
glossy monthly magazines,
autumn 1997.
TBWA CGT Simons Palmer.

readers can phone for. For example,

‘That’s for getting a kick out of the
irrepressible 16 valve engine’ on the back
of ‘man protecting his groin’ card and
‘That’s for separating me from my most
treasured possession’ accompanying
‘Bobbitt’.18
According to Myra Macdonald ‘fan-
tasies of taking our revenge against men,
and getting away with it, are the most
daring dreams on offer’ (1995: 100).
Figure 6 From the Nissan Having crept into British women’s maga-
Micra ‘Ask before you borrow it’ zine fiction in the late 1980s (Winship,
campaign, this is one of the 1991), in advertising such fantasies have
postcards in the ‘Micra Revenge been pervasive but gentler in their be-
Pack’ that women’s magazine littling of men (Gluck, 1992). With the
readers could send for, autumn much-publicized Bobbitt case the
1997. prophetic quality of Solanas’s S.C.U.M.
TBWA CGT Simons Palmer. [Society for Cutting Up Men] Manifesto
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Winship ● Women outdoors 39

(1971) was evident and, by 1997, ads too had developed a sharper edge.
Nevertheless, revenge fantasies are still exceptional, partly deriving symbolic
meaning from (the fear of) men perpetrating violence against women.19
Reflecting on the Nissan ads in terms of a bipolar self, the tension arc tips
towards the pole of ‘holding power’, with the female spectator’s gaze exer-
cising power. Nevertheless, Sharon Willis’s observations about the road
movie Thelma and Louise (1991), described by critics as ‘degrading to men’
(Willis, 1993: 120), suggest a different modulation:
The film’s spectacle is made of the play
between plausibility and fantasy, a play
organized around the figure of a body, but a
body catapulting across the landscape in a
car. . . . While this play gathers around the
women’s driving bodies, monumentally
clothed in the car that is iconic of automo-
tive and consumer history, it also saturates
the landscape draped around them. This is a
landscape in which a woman’s gaze can
become the avid consumer of the male
body. . . . (1993: 123)
In the Nissan ads women are not seen
behind the wheel.20 Indeed there is no car
and no landscape. Moreover, the process
of ‘violence’ against men is displaced, and
only with the ‘man asleep’, and more
forcefully in the ‘man protecting his
Figure 7 This execution was groin’, is the violence exercised on his
the main image in the Nissan body and can the spectator’s gaze
Micra ‘Ask before you borrow it’ ‘become the avid consumer of the male
campaign. This version is again body’. Yet, in the first image the lighting
from the set of the postcards in softens the potential threat21 and in the
the ‘Micra Revenge Pack’,
second the man’s pain is not personalized
autumn 1997.
by facial expression. Occurring within a
TBWA CGT Simons Palmer. domestic domain, the woman’s act of vio-
lence is hidden. In these ways the fantasy
drama and Kohut’s tension arc are tempered.
But when this private (revenge) fantasy loomed from a billboard the incited
tensions were sharpened. A Guardian leader column, ‘Woman in control and
flaunting it’, is revealing about the impact of such advertising on men:

This vampish, violent creature . . . is a comic creation intended to shock . . .

if she is not mainly concerned with nurturing, she isn’t nice. Hostile reaction
. . . shows the public is mistrustful of changing roles. If women aren’t helpless,
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40 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 3(1)

or standing at the sink where we [sic] can keep an eye on them, there’s no
knowing what they’ll do. (13 November 1997; emphasis in original)
Outdoors the feminine is dangerous and uncontrollable.

‘Hello boys’ – Wonderbra

Knowingly playing on this power of outdoors, Wonderbra’s imagery con-
tinued the visual tradition of women’s narcissistic pleasure in their own
sexualized and semi-naked bodies (Figure 8). Rampant from the late 1960s
(Berger, 1972) such imagery became the butt of a feminist campaign with
stickers declaring ‘This ad degrades women’ (Coward, 1980). By the mid-
1990s, however, its significance had changed under the impact of women’s
social and economic achievements, the wider range of representations of
women, and the subjection of men’s bodies to the (female) gaze (Moore,
1988; Nixon, 1996; McRobbie 1996, 1997). Affirming the shift, and more
striking analytically, was Wonderbra’s copy – ‘Hello boys’. Advertising’s
conventional address relies on the pronoun ‘you’, as in ‘(You) dress to kill’,
a direct but anonymous address to ‘you’, the target audience (Cook, 1992;
Myers, 1994: 79). Controversially, ‘Hello boys’ engages a male audience
while targeting women, and the only too visible speaker is a sexually confi-
dent (if initially unknown) Eva Herzigova. In ‘Look me in the eyes and tell
me that you love me’, and the take-off of a Mae West one-liner: ‘[Is that a
gun in your pocket] Or are you just pleased to see me?’, her seductive gaze
out of the frame strengthens that address.22

Figure 8 ‘Hello boys’ was

one of the initial three
executions in Wonderbra’s
poster and magazine
campaign from February
1994.
TBWA CGT Simons Palmer
and Playtex UK (Nigel Rose
and Trevor Beattie). Photo:
Ellen Von Unwerth.

Eva’s copy suggests a knowing, flirtatious performance: the Wonderbra is

not for the lonesome night in watching TV, but for ‘party animals who aren’t
afraid of their sexuality, who want to have fun’ (Hailstone, cited by
Mitchell, 1994: 21). Looked at in a women’s magazine, the copy and the
imagined ‘boys’ fall into the fictive space between Eva in the advert and the
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Winship ● Women outdoors 41

female spectator. ‘Hello boys’ incites the tension between the two poles of
the bipolar self, assertively foregrounding the pole of ‘holding attention’ at
the same time as highlighting ‘being held’. This is a joke at men’s expense,
shared safely among women. However, outside, where the campaign
allegedly posed a threat to road safety: ‘Dangerous curves ahead – it’s the
Wonderbra’ (Qualtrough, 1994: 23), the modulation across that tension arc
is different.

‘Fcuk advertising’
To understand the impact of ‘Hello boys’ in the street requires some grasp
of the ‘outdoor industry’: poster advertising on billboard sites, street furni-
ture (largely bus shelters), transit sites (buses, taxis, lorries) and ambient
media (from golf holes to parking meters (Cook, 1999). An old medium,
outdoors took a back seat in the media mix (8.5 percent market share in
1955, only 3.6 percent in 1993 [Brierley, 1995: 86]) with the rise of com-
mercial TV in the UK. Virtually a cottage industry, poorly managed on a
regional rather than national basis, and with buyers unclear about what
their spend delivered (Admap, April 1993), modernization occurred as
media expansion and audience fragmentation rendered media planning
more complex. With the US as the ‘engine for change’ (Reid, 1999a: 26),
ownership became more concentrated,23 maintenance of sites more compe-
tent, the selling more streamlined (Brierley, 1995) and audience measure-
ment more reliable. By 1999, outdoors represented 5 percent of the media
mix (Fry, 1999: 30).
Given the relation between media and advertising, advertisers more gener-
ally must act like guerrilla fighters – be camouflaged to fit into a media
environment but also engage in surprise attacks to force recognition that
amid all the clutter this cultural output is different. For their part audiences
do not choose ads but rather approach them in a distracted state, particu-
larly in the case of billboards which presuppose the motorized traveller.
When a driver’s attention is on children in the back seat, the car radio, the
state of the traffic or an impending appointment, an oblique glance may
catch an image that appears ‘inscrutable and mysterious’ (Bellamy, 1986:
56), but a billboard can as easily be missed.
Billboards counter distraction by gearing sites to people’s routines
through space and over time, and adopting a grandeur: ‘posters become
bigger to shout louder . . . but also to be seen at speed’ (Bernstein, 1997:
118). Executions are made simple so that, at their best, meanings are like a
‘tight spring which the viewer touches and so releases’ (1997: 68), and like
Andy Warhol’s pop art of Campbell’s soup tins, their size and flatness
renders the ordinary different or extraordinary (Hegarty, 1998: 227). A
‘public declaration’, such dreamscapes are particularly telling (Bernstein,
1997: 114).
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During the 1970s and 1980s political parties and cigarette companies
were two of the heaviest and best-remembered users of billboards in the UK,
but with the rationalization of the industry and the increasing importance
of posters as the ‘broadcast glue that can hold a mixed media campaign
together’ (Fry, 1999: 30), the market widened. In 1997, French Connection,
the young fashion label, audaciously used billboards for their ‘fcuk’ cam-
paign (Figure 9). When transposed, the letters of their ‘trademark’ produce
the swear word ‘fuck’ and forthwith the advert featured in the Advertising
Standards Authority’s Top Ten [most complained about] Advertisements for
1997, along with three other campaigns similarly targeted at young women,
and all regarded as ‘offensive’ (ASA, 1997b).24

Figure 9 From French

Connection’s extended ‘fcuk’
campaign in 1997, this was
the first advert to break on the
billboards.
TBWA CGT Simons Palmer
and French Connection UK.

‘Fcuk advertising’ (where fcuk is part of the noun) also encapsulates a

quality of the ads I focus on: raunchy, assertive and intentionally shock-
ing. It associates femininity with allegedly masculine modes of behaviour,
such as swearing, fighting and adopting an upfront, casual approach to
sex and men. But when ‘fcuk’ is read as a verb then the phrase reads as a
denouncement of advertising. Indeed, the ASA believed that this phrase
‘brought advertising into disrepute’ (ASA, 1997b). The campaign edges
along the Benetton route, whose notoriety came from not representing
jumpers but from their documentary style and allusion to social and politi-
cal issues (Falk, 1997, Giroux, 1993– 4). French Connection also distances
itself from conventional advertising: no clothes, a large expanse of white
space and an oddly cropped model’s face, as if she is saying ‘fcuk adver-
tising’.
The wider issue, giving rise to this advertising, is the problem for mar-
keters of communicating with younger and ‘winning women’, whose media
literacy and discriminating attitude to advertising (Nava and Nava, 1992;
O’Donohoe, 1997) poses a challenge. Advertisers are turning to ‘outdoors’
because this group is ‘time squeezed’ and increasingly mobile, and although
they may still enjoy a strong relationship with women’s magazines they are
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Winship ● Women outdoors 43

light viewers of commercial TV (Winning Women, 1998). Producing

imagery that ‘shocks’ the mainstream guarantees public visibility (at a low
price), but more significantly it bolsters ‘winning woman’s’ subcultural
capital and maintains her necessary generational and gendered distinction
(Bourdieu, 1984; Thornton, 1995).
Indeed the billboard has perhaps become the medium par excellence for
‘in-your-face’ or ‘fcuk advertising’. Impact is dramatized as the large-scale
and vivid communication from a global corporation reaches out into the
material world of the local. If such ads are noticed by a mixed public, the
disjunction between ad ‘dreamscape’ and the ‘real’ may be stark. It is poster
versions of already bold ad campaigns that have provoked most controversy,
with the ASA noting increased public ‘disquiet about the images that con-
front them uninvited on the High Street’ (ASA, 1995; author’s emphasis).
One uninvited image was Wonderbra’s.

‘The thicker life of (shock) advertising’

Such was Wonderbra’s promotional value that Kaliber lager borrowed its
address and on twin hoardings Scottish comedian Billy Connolly appeared
to be in dialogue with Eva Herzigova (Figure 10).25 Whilst motorized
transport offers a safe cocoon from which to enjoy this billboard humour,
for the pedestrian passerby caught in the imagined exchange, the site – at
a junction on a ring road in Sheffield – more shockingly throws into relief
the private and intimate made public. Especially for women, the alienat-
ing urban environment and potentially unsafe subway resonate with the
memory of 19th-century patriarchal precedents – ideas about public
women as out of place, ‘fallen’ women, the street walker, the prostitute
(Wilson, 1994). ‘Hello boys’ becomes a provocative invitation to sexual
advance if not attack. The poster goads onlookers. Indeed, someone –
workmen, boys ‘just’ having a laugh, or could it be feminists? – has
thrown cement to bespatter the danger zone of the breasts (Figure 11).
The direct address, ‘Hello boys’, ‘Hello girls’, intervenes in the ‘real’: the
fantasy of a wholly separate world of the imaginary is shattered and the
fragility of the ‘bubble’ of ‘virtuality in the midst of the material world’
(Morse, 1998: 7) becomes apparent. The female onlooker, fictively pos-
itioned by the ads, is palpably reminded of a gendered and subordinate
identity. In this environment, the Wonderbra ad potentially plays differ-
ently across Kohut’s tension arc.
Not surprisingly, the campaign was (variously) taken up by feminists,
including Jacky Fleming. In her cartoon publicising her book Hello Boys
(Figure 12), the humour depends on knowing about 1970s feminism to
provide a position from which to judge this dumbed-down ‘younger’ post-
feminism.26 Fleming’s cartoons also accompany an article in the radical
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feminist journal Trouble and Strife. Delilah Campbell in ‘This article

degrades advertisements’ insists that the Wonderbra campaign ‘was not
clever, not witty, not ironic or a joke. . . . It was just straight-down-the-line
sexism’ which undermined feminist advances (1997: 30). Similarly invoking
an earlier political moment, she argues that ‘sexist representations . . .
pollute public . . . space. The violence they do us may be symbolic, but it is
not insignificant’ (1997: 39). In the press, only the Daily Mail’s Femail
Forum section condemned the ads outright:
In one swoop the advertising business has turned the clocks back to the
blatantly sexist days of the Seventies. . . . The overriding message is no longer
one of comfort or support, but quite simply: ‘Men like a massive cleavage’
(Atkinson, 1994: 44).
Others, including the ASA, which acts as a cultural barometer of main-
stream discussion and whose ajudications fuel journalistic discourse,27 toyed
with whether ‘the latest ads offer a new postfeminist, aggressive female
image – or are they simply exploiting women?’ (Mitchell, 1994: 21). The
ASA focused on advertisers’ attempts, including Nissan and Wallis, to
capture the ‘essence’ of the term ‘Girl Power’ either ‘by portraying men
being demeaned by women, or by portraying women playing on their desir-
ability to, and power over men’ (ASA, 1997a), advising that these ads ‘raised
the public’s eyebrows enough to warrant complaints that the images were
offensive, sexist, sadistic and likely to condone violence’. Although not
upholding the complaints, it warned that ‘suggestions of violence in adver-
tisements tend not to find favour with the public, whatever the “victim’s”
gender, and however humorous the intention’ (ASA, 1997a). Yet the ASA’s

Figure 10 The Wonderbra and Kaliber billboard

sites (‘twins’ in adspeak) were located on a ringroad in
Sheffield edged by a pedestrian route and subway,
spring 1994. Photo: Stephen Pope.
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Winship ● Women outdoors 45

castigation of ‘ladette culture’ as ‘sexist’ assumes that women’s symbolic

perpetration of violence carries a similar valence to men’s.28
In addition, as campaigns pushed the boundaries of ‘decency’ for pro-
motional gain, the ASA, and the press more widely, worried about a decline
in the quality of advertising: ‘Have advertisers gone too far?’ (Hacker, 1998:
17)
. . . do women who own Nissan Micras really attack their boyfriends’ geni-
talia if they go off for unauthorised spins? One suspects not. These adverts
are trying to cash in on a frisky ‘Watch it, Buster!’ ladette culture that doesn’t
exist outside of a Zoë Ball photo session.
. . . it has to be rather perturbing to see the nation’s female car owners . . .
depicted as . . . pathologically violent . . . (Ellen, 1998: 25)
For 1970s feminism such ‘realist’ judgement was commonplace, with the
political endeavour being to force a more suitable fit between promotional
imagery and ‘real’ women.29 However, the ASA, aware that ‘realism’ might
not now provide an appropriate evaluation, defends the Nissan ads as ‘slap-
stick’.
But from my perspective this advertising does not mark a decline in
quality, or a step backwards for feminism,30 but rather provides evidence
of shifting and contested relations between women and men. Representa-
tionally, the ads refigure the tensions and anxieties involved through the
construction of a fantastical and pleasurable feminine identity which is
organized less around sexual desire/desirability than around auton-
omy/dependency.31 Although dismissed by some as products of men’s
imagination,32 the team behind Wonderbra was largely female and if the

Figure 11 The same ‘twin’ site as Figure 10; cement

or mud can just be seen bespattered over Eva
Herzigova’s breast zone. Photo: Stephen Pope.
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46 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 3(1)

Figure 12 A cartoon by Jacky Fleming which

appeared in the Guardian (Women section), 27 March
1997: 5. © Jacky Fleming.

ads emerged from research into women’s lives (Butler, 1994: 4; Hailstone,
1994), the campaign was also carefully pre-tested with (among others)
nearly ‘4,000 female lingerie sales assistants . . . [whose] clapping and
laughter confirmed the potential of the campaign’ (Baker, 1995: 271).33
This target group was clear about limits: ‘I wouldn’t want to see a bloke.
She’d only be wearing it for him then’ (age 16–24), and outlawed some
captions as ‘too crude, male orientated’ or ‘demeaning to women’ (Baker,
1995: 270; Atkinson, 1994). Such evidence points to the necessary fine
tuning of Kohut’s tension arc for a campaign to be acceptable to the target
group.
Nevertheless, once in the public domain these campaigns courted
comment. Wonderbra in particular was a ‘noisy’ campaign, picking up
‘additional attention through clever spin’, no longer ‘merely advertising’ but
becoming ‘part of the media’s editorial’. From early Wonderbra stories
playing on the promotional field, the caption ‘Hello boys’, the model Eva
Herzigova, and the ads’ look, became (partly) unhinged from their original
signifieds. Walter and Fleming both borrow the phrase ‘Hello boys’, Kaliber
lager ‘talks back’ and a breast cancer awareness campaign announces
‘National Wonderbra Week’.34 As a 1990s icon, Wonderbra featured in the
Victoria and Albert Museum’s ‘The power of the poster’ exhibition
(Timmers, 1998), and made it into The Chambers Dictionary (1988) while
Herzigova sustained tabloid coverage and gained celebrity status (Sun, 22
July 1998). Later campaigns for the Wonderbra Bliss were seamlessly appro-
priated into the Sun’s ‘Page Three’ discourse: ‘Wonderbra model Brenda
Schad . . . shows the world how to get a lift’ (Holland, 1983; Sun, 19 March
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Winship ● Women outdoors 47

1998: 17), at the same time as its Woman section carried the ‘full story’, ‘A
bra is born’, on Brenda as a ‘single mum’ raised by adoptive parents and
reunited with her natural mother, ‘a half-Chocktaw Indian’ (11 March
1998: 6–7). In the Guardian, the stark differences between the French and
British Wonderbra ads offer the chance of engaging with women’s position
in the two countries (Duval Smith, 1997: 4).
In this way knowledge around Wonderbra became part of a publicly
shared cultural currency: the campaign entered McLaughlin’s ‘media event
space’ and Wicke’s ‘celebrity zone’. This ‘thicker life’ of a campaign35 high-
lights the paradox of contemporary advertising, that its constructions of the
consumer self are backgrounded by the primacy of communicating mean-
ingfully to audiences (Hartley, 1996: 207–10, Twitchell, 1996: 13–14).
According to Irene Costera Meijer, who also engages with ‘shock’ advertis-
ing on billboards, by (partially) severing advertising from consumer culture
and relocating it within media culture, we place it in a ‘traditional Haber-
masian public sphere as a legitimate object of discussion and civil consider-
ation’ (1998: 245).
Though agreeing with her discusssion, I would argue further that the con-
sequent ‘talk’ is mediated. The meanings of controversial campaigns, fuelled
by adjudications from the regulatory bodies, are amplified and redefined by
other media for their own narrative ends. Second, the textual characteristics
of controversial advertising need to be teased out: why does it ‘confront
people with their (often subconsciously held) values and beliefs’? (Meijer,
1998: 246). In the campaigns targeted at ‘winning women’, the confron-
tation is with social and psychic (patriarchal) tensions, mapped textually on
to a disruption of the gendered separation between private and public
domains. When these ads shift outside of women’s magazines that disrup-
tion is accentuated: private and intimate feminine fantasies enter public
‘media event’ space, and the alleged boundaries between commercial and
civic speech (and between consumer and citizen) fall away.36

Conclusion

My central argument has been that ads for ‘winning women’ offer a scopic
regime different from that of earlier ads, and incite fantasies that play on
psychic and social tensions pertinent to women in the 1990s. This argument,
however, rests on two other related lines of argument, one about the field
of feminism, and the other about advertising. If feminism has always been
fraught with tensions, in this analysis of 1990s feminine culture in Britain I
have emphasized the tensions across generations of feminists who tend to
refuse each other’s ‘feminism’ and ways of being a woman; between the
feminist academic and her various others; and across the ‘bipolar self’ of the
individual female psyche which, exemplified culturally by The New
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Feminism and Bridget Jones’s Diary, is replayed in the ad campaigns. Yet

perhaps the field of feminism has also been refigured in another way.
McLaughlin’s concept of ‘media event space’ and Wicke’s ‘celebrity femin-
ism’ point to how negotiations of gendered relations are not only increas-
ingly played out in media texts, but that audiences also articulate their own
views by reference to them. Issues and arguments grounded in private rela-
tions enter the public domain of representation and debate and then return
to personal life. The ‘thicker life of (shock) advertising’ highlights a modal-
ity in which advertising gets close to its audience by invoking through fantasy
what Christine Gledhill refers to as ‘the state of the contest’ in gendered rela-
tions (1997: 383). It intentionally provokes, and of course reaps publicity
benefits, but only by opening up private and personal tensions for public
examination. Accepting this view, of advertising in particular and media
more generally, is to argue that Walter’s new feminist demand of abandon-
ing ‘the personal is political’ is misplaced. It is also to insist, as counterweight
to the common critical condemnation of advertising (discussed by Nava,
1997), that advertising is no worse and perhaps ‘better’ than some other
popular media forms in the kinds of stories it tells about women.

Notes

This article is based on a paper presented at the Japan-International Symposium

‘Changing Images of Women in the Media’, University of Hokkaido, Sapporo,
Japan, November 1998. I am indebted to Professor Hisae Hashimoto, and
Yoshiko Asano at the British Council, for their invitation and hospitality, and
to Sussex students Jess Harvey, Clare Stephenson and Charlotte Adcock, who
provided newspaper cuttings, ads and academic articles I had missed. All photo-
graphs and advertisements are reproduced here with kind permission.

1 Wallis won ‘Creative Circle’ awards for best magazine and press ads, and
Wonderbra won the IPA Effectiveness Awards in 1994 as well as Campaign’s
1994 ‘Campaign of the year’.
2 Sociodemographic trends provide hard evidence of ‘winning women’. More
women are now middle class (from 36 percent in classes ABC1 in 1975 to
49 percent in 1995) and better educated (28 percent of 25–34 year olds went
on to further education in 1977, 59 percent in 1997). A higher proportion
work full time (25 percent in 1977, 43 percent in 1997), and fewer are
married (88 percent in 1977, 69 percent in 1997). Only 10 percent of 30
year olds from this group have children, 83 percent of them are homeown-
ers, 48 percent are the chief household earner and 41 percent live in London,
the South-east or East Anglia (Winning Women, 1998).
3 Wicke cites the ‘estimable’ Feminists Theorize the Political (Butler and Scott,
1992).
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4 Wicke’s ‘materialist feminism’ aligns with Barrett and Phillips’s ‘wider

engagement . . .’.
5 Walter, who has worked for Vogue magazine and the Independent and
Guardian newspapers, was hailed as the UK’s answer to Naomi Wolf and
a modern-day Germaine Greer. Fielding has worked in television and
published a novel, in addition to writing for several broadsheets. Bridget
Jones’s Diary was a bestseller in August 1997–March 1998 and in the
top 15 of the ‘mass market’ list until September 1998 (The Bookseller),
selling between two and three million copies and translated into 20 lan-
guages.
6 Ironically, Walter’s phrase ‘We’ve never had it so good’ echoes the celebrated
and criticized statement attributed to British prime minister Harold
Macmillan in 1957.
7 Pertinently, this overly feminized narrative appears in a newspaper eager to
win women readers but with no women’s section. I am grateful to Charlotte
Adcock for alerting me to this point.
8 Heller, herself an arch-exponent of the FFPN in her column in the Indepen-
dent, declares the genre bankrupt. But in spring 1998 Victoria Mapplebeck
referred to the ‘The BJ hype’ spreading across the media (1998: 10).
9 All information about Wallis and Nissan in this section is from Winning
Women, 1998.
10 The first advertising burst generated ‘386 television and press features’
which the Institute of Public Relations reckoned ‘generated £40–50 million
“free” publicity’ (Campaign Report, 13 October 1995).
11 Discussed in Winship (1980). This offers one benchmark from which to
evaluate the shifts in advertising targeted at women, and a 1970s feminist
analysis.
12 There was one other execution, Pulp Fiction.
13 Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) suggest the prominence of Kohut’s writings
beyond the psychoanalytic community, and point to his use of Freudian
theory focusing on development of the individual psyche, and object-
relations theory focusing on the relation of self to external others.
14 Focusing on car advertising, which pivots around adultery and commitment
to marriage, MacRury explores how the ‘modulation’ of the ‘tension arc’
differs depending on the imagined (male) target audience for specific brands
of car (1997).
15 The TV campaign was stylistically different, targeted at men and women and
adopting more stereotyped constructions of femininity, as in Tantrum and
Betty Blue.
16 Black and white film is printed with a colour reprographic process to
produce the sepia effect, and in the Wallis and Wonderbra ads to enrich the
texture.
17 Following the long-held equation of car body as woman’s body, the Micra
is object of desire.
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18 The ‘Revenge Pack’ is a ploy to stimulate reader interaction and make the
campaign memorable, a tactic increasingly necessary as the volume of clutter
expands.
19 See Carter (1998) who argues that the tabloid press over-represents femi-
cides and incites fear to ‘normalize’ violence against women, inside and
outside the home.
20 In the TV commercials men get to drive the Micra car.
21 In ‘man asleep’, as if shot by another photographer, the lighting also breaks
with the conventions of film noir.
22 In the initial burst there were three ads. A year on, the campaign had run to
13 executions (Campaign, 6 January 1995) and it had crossed the Atlantic
and moved into Europe. In Mexico, Herzigova was more modestly attired
(Crawford, 1996: 4).
23 In Britain between 1996 and 1999 the outdoor industry was ‘the subject of
no less than 20 separate acquisitions’ (Fry, 1999: 30). There are now four
big players with fairly equal market shares: TDI, More Group, Decaux and
Maiden, which are global and increasingly cross-media companies (Reid,
1999a, 1999b).
24 The ASA demanded that the advertiser insert full stops on poster executions
– ‘f.c.u.k.’. In the less provocative medium of women’s magazines the
caption remained ‘fcuk’.
25 An alternative argument is that Kaliber’s masculine discourse attempts to
gain the upper hand, after being the butt of Wonderbra’s feminine
humour.
26 Jacky Fleming’s other publications include Be A Bloody Train Driver (I’m
Going To Be A Surgeon), and Never Give Up, whose ‘message’ and style –
the simple execution and unadorned non-fashion look – connotes 1970s
feminism.
27 Brierley (1995) discusses regulation of print advertising by the ASA.
28 The ASA reported, on the basis of its own research, increasing concern about
the portrayal of men as well as women (ASA Background Briefing, ‘The new
advertising taboos’, August 1998).
29 Although written later, Kane (1997) offers such an account.
30 Nor do I think it represents ‘womanism’ – ‘the corralling of all humanity’s
negative attributes into the male’ – as Ros Coward argues in relation to this
kind of anti-men (behaviour) and imagery (1999: 4).
31 This characteristic perhaps marks these 1990s representations as different
from earlier ones, for example those discussed by Brunsdon in ‘Postfeminism
and Shopping Films’ (1997).
32 Wonderbra was wrongly attributed to creative ‘lad’ director Trevor Beattie.
See Campaign (12 July 1994: 28, 6 January 1995: 21), and Guardian (Media
section, 14 July 1997: 6–7) for squabbles over creative credit for the Won-
derbra campaign (largely a fight between men). On the patriarchal organiz-
ation of advertising, see Nixon (1997).
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33 The draft of this paper was prepared by the account handler Susanna Hail-
stone but her authorship is not acknowledged in Baker (1995).
34 For criticism of Wonderbra’s contribution to Breast Cancer Awareness see
Virginia Matthews ‘How aware can you get?’ (The Times, 19 June 1998: 42).
35 I use this phrase partly as counterpoint to Daniel Boorstin’s reference to
packaged (that is, advertised) commodities as ‘the thinnner things of life’
(1973: 424) and to suggest something of Clifford Geertz’s injunction of
engaging in ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973).
36 For further discussion of this problematic boundary, see McLaughlin (1998)
and Hermes (1997).

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● JANICE WINSHIP is lecturer in Media Studies in the School of

Cultural and Community Studies, University of Sussex. She is author of
Inside Women’s Magazines and more recently has been working on
chain stores in Britain: ‘New Disciplines for Women and the Rise of the
Chain Store in the 1930s’, in M. Andrews and M. Talbot (eds) (2000) ‘All
the World and her Husband’: Women in Twentieth-century Consumer
Culture. Address: Essex House, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1
9RQ. [email: j.winship@sussex.ac.uk] ●