Creative Review Ed Less Than Happy With Gap Book

Patrick G over at Creative Review gives the Gap book Individuals a bit of a kicking. Individuals has been published as part of the Gap’s partnership with (Product) Red, a new AIDS–related charity, and features a collection of advertising campaigns that use celebrity portaits. Patrick says:

While the actual items of Gap clothing are entirely secondary, at a subtler level, personality has certainly been subordinated to the brand. Similarly, for all the photographers’ technical flair, innovatio

n has been undermined by the demands of the client. The fallacy of the book’s title is also mirrored in the celebrity essays that punctuate the portraits, especially Tama Janowitz’s comment that each celebrity has made these mass-market clothes “unique.” The Gap’s version of realism is of the MTV Unplugged variety: a high-gloss, ticket-only world in which the rawness of real folk has been relentlessly excised, however much denim is on display. While Janowitz claims that “all you have to do is look at the eyes in the pictures to see an inner strength that all these people have in common,” it seems more likely that the celebrities are looking at the money.

If this republication of the Gap’s campaigns charts the continuing collusion of photographers in celebrity saturation, it also indicates the ways in which the company has now been left behind, less “timelessly” up-to-date than old and tired.

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