PICTURES AND MEANINGS

It's all Greg Rowland's fault. He uses cultural theory to analyse and develop brands. 

So when I saw this picture today, having met up with Greg at a conference recently, I was suddenly struck by something very odd about it. So I had to look into it. So, in this picture, do you see:

a) a tennis player modelling

b) a model playing tennis (and/or, a model who may actually play tennis)

c) a model modelling

Wimbledon is coming up of course and women tennis players are increasingly celebrated for their glamour and style. Her stance and grip are sort of about right (speaking as a tennis player). And yet...

... the overriding impression I got was not about tennis but about, um, modelling, coming from the overall treatment and 'look' (glossy/plastic, and the pose), the lack of muscle definition... and there is something very odd about the relative size of her and that racket. Is she just very petite, or is that racket an over-sized prop? Is it even a real tennis racket? And that's not really a tennis outfit. Is it? 

But it was those shades that ultimately gave the game away.

So it has to be (c), surely. But is it intentional?

Pull back and of course it's an ad for Evian, the official bottled water of Wimbledon. The writing bottom right is not Livia Young, rising tennis star, but 'Live Young' the brand slogan.

Do Evian want us to think that their brand is cool and stylish and has added status given its Wimbledon connection? (Argues in support of a model merely modelling, against Wimbledon backdrop).

Or do they want us to think that Evian has authentic sportiness and refreshment values, in amongst its stylishness? 

And is the model in fact a dab hand at tennis? Maybe even an up-and-coming Russian tennis star, who they have wittily dressed in very un-sporty shades? How post-ironic!

And Evian spelled backwards is?

Comments

[Paul]

This woman stands in the same relation to tennis as Marie-Antoinette to a shepherdess. As Marie Antoinette could ironically assume the simplicity of the peasant in dresses of the most expensive lace, so this woman assumes the physicality and energy of tennis playing while remaining pristine and poised and glamorous. She wears a sweat band that can never know sweat. Thus she points up the contradiction between the physical reality of the human body and the platonic ideal of the body that is presented by models and advertising. The highly charged pink colour of the two elliptical shapes (racket and sweat band) similarly provide abstract symbols for the erotic subtext created by her physical stance. If there is a hermeneutic interpretation to all this, it must be the promise that drinking Evian offers a platonic purified version of the human body which at the same time incorporates its energy and eroticism.

[Greg Rowland]

Yep -- you nailed it Paul. Madonna/Whore on the tennis court. The excessive size of the tennis racquet reinforces the notion that this is a made up world. That everything is performance, made up of its own arbitrary stupid rules. Tennis, fashion, the economy, love are all games. It's quite nihilist. Or liberating.

The objects itself, pulled taught with straight string, both phallic and vaginal is particularly interesting to those with certain irresolvable imaginary desires. (Which is where Rosie came in....)

The only way to resolve and bathe within this sublime excess is through a cleansing in holy water... supplied bY Evian.

[Paul]

Is this not also clearly a discourse about bodily fluids? Have you noticed the words 'peed' and 'bled' appear on the wall behind her? To be replaced by the pure and colourless Evian.... well I guess Judith Williamson would have anyway

[Rosie Campbell]

And I have always felt that Evian tasted decidedly soapy....and believe it or not I am playing in a tennis match yesterday and the opposing team brings out a large bottle of Evian, which, she apologised, was not Evian at all just refrigerated tap water. So I said that was preferable tastewise - but didn't bother the assembled tennis players with ... Read moreany further and more unsettling comments about fluids in case they thought I'd had a bit too much sun....'faux Evian', a distraction through the entire final set....

[Kevin]

Paul, Greg, Rosie, thank you for these comments. Gosh, semiotics is fun! I shall look up the references (and some of the words) in Paul and Greg's learned posts and Rosie, you experience bears out the authentic/inauthentic dialectic, which is uncovered within tennis as SIGNIFIED and modelling as ... no, sorry, I just can't do it!

[Dominic]

Is a model playing tennis a tennis player? Is water in an Evian bottle Evian? If the client would not pay for reality why should we?
Dominic

[Alison]

Her dress is too long and too fitted - she looks like she just stepped out from the front row of the Prada spring collection and picked up the massive pink racket.

Mind you, the thing that is really worrying me is what happened to her left hand and forearm.

[Kevin]

Alison - we wondered the same thing, on second (or fourth or fifth) viewing. Maybe her left arm is just not as glamorous or good looking as her right arm. It's deep, isn't it? We also just discovered that the agency behind the sponsorhip deal is called ... Fantastic Thinking!

[Dominic]

Let's piece these clues together: the backward spelling of Evian,the playfully unrealistic model, the background secret messages 'peed' and 'bled', the missing left arm ( a subliminal reference to Venus), and the final ironical signature Fantastic Thinking (referencing the hidden meaning of Fantasy).I think this poster is anything but 'official', to those who can decode it, it is treason.
Dominic