One of Second City Style’s contributors, Andra, sent me a link to this article that appeared in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune. I really couldn’t have said it better myself. Thanks Andra!
Steve Johnson
Tribune staff reporter
Published October 12, 2006
a classy but deceased actress, somebody must pay. Tribune staff
reporter Steve Johnson has some ideas about exactly who that should be.
Dear Gap:
Because this is a reverse ransom note, I don’t feel compelled to make
it up out of letters cut from different magazine headlines. I can just
come out and say what I want to say, I can use a normal typeface and I
can even sign it with my own name.
What I want to say is this: Give her back. Give her back, or else.
For a few weeks now, you’ve been holding Audrey Hepburn hostage to your
perceived marketing needs. Pushing something called "the skinny black
pant," you’ve used Hepburn’s "bohemian" Parisian nightclub dance from
the movie "Funny Face" in a television ad. It’s backed, with what is
supposed to be charming dissonance, by AC/DC’s pop-heavy-metal hit
"Back in Black," and it wouldn’t surprise me if you were to get irate
letters, too, from the AC/DC fans who happen to be literate.
The ad’s suggestion is that Hepburn, who died in 1993, did that dance
not to express her creativity and free spirit, as the movie’s plot
would have it, but to sell Americans on cluttering their closet with
yet another iteration of casual slacks.
This makes one of the classiest actresses Hollywood has seen into the apparel industry equivalent of Ron Popeil.
Give her back.
Like United Airlines grabbing "Rhapsody in Blue," you have no right to
purloin something so valuable from the popular culture, even if your
lawyers tell you that, in some technical fashion, you do have the
right. While it matters, legally, that her son OKd the ad campaign, it
doesn’t matter, morally.
