Kenneth Cole's 'Awearness' Whores For Peace, Love and Understanding

Rehab, the cats behind Gap's Sound of Color effort, just produced a series of videos for Kenneth Cole's most current campaign "We All Walk in Different Shoes," put together by Kenneth Cole's in-house creative crew.

As always with Kenneth Cole, the campaign exploits the language of fashion to raise awareness for popular social issues. (Or maybe it's the other way around.) At left is the creative for Regan Hofmann's HIV video. See other shorts -- including stories about a Sikh businessman and a duo of Israeli and Palestinian film directors -- at KennethCole.com/Thinkers.

And here's the campaign blog, Awearness, which generated winces all around with the all-caps tagline, "To be aware is more important than what you wear."

We dig Rehab's audio/visual spin on an old Kenneth Cole agenda. But we can't say we're crazy about using tacky puns like "Awearness" to generate trendy cause mojo.

When Oliviero Toscani used the Benneton brand to draw passive eyes to global crises and whatnot, we were crazy about it. The "We, On Death Row" campaign, for example, generated strong emotions and plenty of media and public discourse.

Maybe it's because Toscani had his own agenda. Sometimes it's anorexia, other times death row, and occasionally he pokes at religion. (He definitely did the AIDS thing, to much social chagrin.)

But it seems like Kenneth Cole hopped the cause bandwagon because it'll make them look all cool and sympathetic. It doesn't. Frankly, it makes us sick.