Fashion advertising, more so than any other form, is in the eye of the beholder. Just ask D&G. While we don’t fawn over fashion mags as much as, say, Anna Wintour fawns over next season’s collections but we’re quite sure Perry Ellis, whose Fall 2007 press release gushes, “the legendary American fashion brand known for pushing the envelope in its seasonal advertising campaigns, is taking yet another unexpected turn…” is doing no such thing with this new print campaign.
We could be wrong. And since we don’t claim to get it right all the time like Bob Garfield does, that’s always a possibility but we don’t think so in this case. That comic book thing from the last campaign? We never got it. Way too hipsteresque for our jaded sense of the world.
The new campaign, which features Sasha Knezevic and Anouk Lepere “on a deserted, wind-swept beach,” is supposed to hearken the halcyon days of Perry Ellis himself on Fire Island and the Matt Norklun-modeled campaign of the seventies.
Maybe we’re too much like the Anne Hathaway character in a scene from The Devil Wears Prada during which she laughs at the Meryl Streep character’s explanation as to why two green belts the Hathaway character claims are the same color when, according to the Streep character, clearly they are not and then follows with a diatribe about the Hathaway character’s frumpy blue sweater and how the purchase of that sweater is an intricate part of the fashion industry. Anyway, perhaps Anna Wintour could eplain the inner workings of this campaign and how it relates to the far less than Perry Ellis-like clothing hanging in our closet.
