Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  In interviews Toscani described himself as “a total anarchist” and “a radical libertarian.” He claimed affinity for the provocations of Debord and the Situationists. He called his fashion shoots “a kind of reportage,” his photos “sociopolitical documents.”1 But if advertising offered the highest profile of the industrial arts, Toscani would use it. “I think it is immoral how much money has been thrown out the window to say, ‘Coke is better than Pepsi,’” Toscani told the New York Times. “With this money, you can do something much more intelligent, much more broadening.”2

  He was Michelangelo, and Benetton was his de’Medici. “I take as an example the Renaissance painters,” he would say. “Just a few of them believed in God, but if you wanted to be a painter you had to paint churches. That was the only place where your art was published. Big multinationals are the modern churches.”3

  So in 1984, when multiculturalism was the idea whose time had come, Toscani pitched Benetton on a concept even bigger than sex: “All the Colors in the World.” Somehow the United States remained indifferent to its gorgeous diversity, its bounty of beauty. But to Toscani, the connection was clear. In Giuliana Benetton’s vibrant fabric palette, the clothing might became a metaphor for diversity and Old World idealism might meet its modern dream of America.

  Perhaps Toscani could not have imagined how perfectly oppositional this notion was in the context of American race politics. President Reagan’s image-maker Hal Riney’s Morning in America was even whiter than Bill Backer’s “Friendly Feelings” for Coke had been. In the neocons’ soft utopia of imperialist nostalgia, consumerism was strength, compassion was weakness, and diversity was the threat beyond the frame.

  As Benetton tried to gain a foothold in the United States, it was taking a big risk by choosing sides in the gathering culture wars. But in the end the children of Benetton were not angry, unquenched orphans ready to riot. They were the bright heralds of the coming “We Are the World” moment. Once, American capitalists had gone to an Italian hillside to teach the world to sing. Thirteen years later, Italian capitalists with a new “global vision,” as they called it, went to America to help colorize the United States itself.

  BRANDING MULTICULTURALISM

  At that moment, the prophets of globalization were pressing American businesses to expand into new markets, not to fear difference but to tame it. In “The Globalization of Markets,” an influential article published in 1983, Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt argued that technology had made the earth flat. The new global business would standardize its product as much as possible, using technology to lower its production costs and communications to align its far-flung customers.

  The best brand “will never assume that the customer is a king who knows his own issues.”4 Instead it “sells the same things in the same way everywhere,” he wrote. “The products and methods of the industrialized world play a single tune for all the world, and all the world eagerly dances to it.”5

  There was an odd resonance between the arguments of multiculturalism’s critics and Levitt’s assertion: pluralism was not the way to address proliferating, bewildering diversity. The success of the new global corporation was no longer based on respecting and adapting to “entrenched differences within and between nations.”6 Instead, he wrote, “The same countries that ask the world to recognize and respect the individuality of their cultures insist on the wholesale transfer to them of modern goods, services, and technology.” Globalization, in other words, was simply a way of making multiculturalism serve a corporate monoculture.

  One afternoon, a committee of UNESCO officials who were considering giving Toscani a prize visited his Paris studio. He had gathered twenty-five kids for a photo shoot for the children’s catalog. They were, he recalled, “of all colors, from very light blond to very dark black.” As Toscani took a break to speak to his visitors, the children began playing with each other. An impressed diplomat mused, “Well, here are the United Colors of Benetton.”

  Toscani’s communications strategy was balanced precisely on the tension between difference and homogenization. “All the Colors in the World” seemed to connect to the claims of the U.S. multiculturalist avant-garde: against “colorblind” conformity, imperialist nostalgia, and state violence, diversity was radical. Benetton could embrace difference even as it clothed everyone in the same bright sweaters. Difference was the means and homogenization was the end.

  Between 1986 and 1993, the Benetton Group—including brands like Sisley, Nordica, and Killer Loop—expanded from 3,200 stores in 57 countries to 7,000 in more than 100 countries.7 The company went public in Italy, Germany, and the United States. It became the world’s single biggest consumer of wool. Its sales topped $2 billion.

  Lifestyle and identity, national emergings and global longings—all had finally come together. By 1989 the green logo of “United Colors of Benetton” had become the company’s brand. Its transformation from family-run village shop to worldwide sign of racial unity was complete.

  THE WHITE SPACE

  More than any other culture industry, fashion is ruled by the calendar of novelty. There is always a new season to be designed, debated, distributed, sold, and discounted. So it was that Irving Penn and Richard Avedon came to remove their subjects from time and place, photographing them before blank white backgrounds. Emptiness endowed the subjects with timelessness and distinction. “White space is extravagance,” design critic Keith Robertson once wrote. “Clutter has come to represent working class (just as white space identifies high class).”8

  From his earliest days Toscani had followed Penn, Avedon, and other fashion photograph pioneers. At Max’s Kansas City, for instance, he had shot the club’s outlandish regulars against the white wall in the club’s stairway.9 With this blank canvas, he could isolate, foreground, and transport them. “It’s like pulling them from their space into my space,” Toscani said. “It’s a philosophical choice, an aesthetic choice.”

  Against the emptiness Giuliana Benetton’s pastels and primaries glowed. So did the spectrum of skin tones. Toscani could be heard loudly objecting to the Claudia Schiffer standard of beauty as “extreme” and “Aryan.” Instead he brought in African, Asian, and biracial models. It was as if Toscani had moved Riney and Reagan’s figurative whiteness to the background. For people of color, the shock of the new was accompanied by the shock of recognition. Non-whiteness was suddenly, shockingly sexy. In Toscani’s world the very borders of desire had shifted.

  Toscani’s white background was the screen for a new global economy and the bright children of Benetton were the flickering projection of a colorized ideal. Hung outside Benetton’s storefronts on crowded streets around the world, Toscani’s photos beckoned consumers. Inside the white-walled stores consumers were separated from the time-kept tyranny of production. After the end of history, here you were—out of both the Old World and the New, at home in the bright heaven of heavens, you alongside everyone everywhere, inside the market. All that was left was to buy something to cover one’s Edenic nakedness back in the fuss and rumble of Babel’s real streets.

  The multiculturalists had valorized people’s struggles and hopes, but fashion photography was about a utopian eternal Now. Toscani felt that this act of decontextualization could be useful for promoting peace, love, and understanding. In most of his early photos, young models of different backgrounds wrapped their arms around each other. He might have an Orthodox Jewish boy and a Palestinian boy posing, each with a hand on a small globe and an arm around the other.

  Ad from the “United Colors of Benetton” campaign by Oliviero Toscani. 1985.

  Toscani shot two Black toddlers—one wearing a Stars and Stripes sweater and holding an American flag, preparing to kiss another holding a Russian flag and wearing a Communist red sweater. Toscani’s human subjects—for they were being sold as much as the clothes—lost almost everything about them that made them different. The clothing was the only context.

  Out in the
hot crowded world, critics from the left found such images at best naive and at worst exploitative. Critics from the right sought to ban them. The ad of the Black toddlers was censored in the United States; its opponents cited the Flag Protection Act of 1968. It would be the first of many controversies that Toscani and Benetton would face.

  TOSCANI IN AMERICA

  The photographer in Toscani wanted to make Benetton look cutting-edge and consumer-ready. But the provocateur in Toscani raged against a monoculture in which all goods were the same, and the affluence that made it possible for First World consumers to own enough goods for three lifetimes. He held extravagant contradiction in a way any Whitmanite or Marxist could admire.

  Advertising agencies were simply “product pushers,” Toscani said. “Ad people spend all that time brainstorming and thinking down to their customers.”10 Lifestyle advertising plagued consumers with guilt and insecurity, made them physically and existentially bulimic, forced them to retreat into an imaginary world. “The advertising industry has corrupted society,” he argued. “It persuades people that they are respected for what they consume, that they are only worth what they possess.”11

  It was not that Toscani was anticapitalist. “A market is where people meet and love each other, make war, peace. The market is the world. So I think of ways to adjust to affect the market,” he would say. “I’m a man of the market.”

  But as the apparel industry rushed to imitate his images, he increasingly positioned himself as antifashion, an enemy of advertising itself. Indeed Toscani insisted he was not making ads, he was making art. He was not promoting products, he was promoting social awareness. He vowed to make a new kind of realism, one that would confront its viewers and shock them out of their complacency. In a Benetton manifesto, he wrote, “I think that attempting to actively engage the public is more exciting than simply trying to convince them our product is better than others.”12

  Ad from the “United Contrasts of Benetton” campaign by Oliviero Toscani. 1989.

  So in 1989, he began to transition beyond pretty pictures. For a new campaign called the “United Contrasts of Benetton,” he employed a William Klein–style focus on visual contrast to explore racially charged content. He photographed a Black man and a white man in Benetton denims and coal miner’s helmets laughing together. The Black man pointed to the blond man’s face and skin, which had been colored with coal in a kind of blackface.

  The wet nurse ad from the “United Contrasts of Benetton” campaign by Oliviero Toscani. 1989.

  Two other images brought Toscani and Benetton their first racial controversy. In the first, a Black woman naked under her red sweater cradled a white baby who suckled on her breast. In the second, two hands, one white and the other Black, were handcuffed together. The photos won art prizes in France, Austria, Denmark, Italy, and the Netherlands. But in the United States many African Americans recoiled. The first seemed to be presenting a modish nursing Mammy; the second, yet another Black man destined for prison.

  Clarence O. Smith, president and cofounder of Essence magazine, met with Benetton’s American buying agency, J. Walter Thompson, to let them know he was not interested in running the wet-nurse ad. “For the most part, we applaud the effort Benetton makes in seeking to present different ethnic groups with an unusual and positive sensitivity,” Smith later explained carefully to the media. “But we thought they erred in this execution, and were not aware of what the connotation would be to Americans. It conjures up images of a time when Black people were highly subservient to whites.”13

  The handcuffs ad from the “United Contrasts of Benetton” campaign by Oliviero Toscani. 1989.

  The handcuff ad eventually ran in Rolling Stone, GQ, Seventeen, and Glamour, but not without loud protests from the NAACP, the Urban League, and others. “Is that brotherhood?” Black ad agency UniWorld director Byron Lewis asked of the image. “What are they trying to sell—handcuffs?”14

  Toscani responded that he was asking viewers to confront their prejudice. For the handcuff ad, he alluded to Brecht’s famous quote about the ethics of the bank robber and the banker: Who is more at fault here, he wanted to ask, the prisoner or the jailer? Who was to say which hand belonged to the jailer and the prisoner? The interpretations, he argued, said more about the interpreter than the artist.

  And yet perhaps he was happy to discover that the photos had produced this kind of reaction. The reaction confirmed that the ads had transcended a merely transactional mode of advertising. They had a truth to them that the rest of advertising did not. That, to Toscani, was the real meaning of diversity: images that transgressed conformity.

  Controversy was the price of championing diversity against conformity. Indeed it was, he said, “a sign of generosity,” his personal gift to consumers. “A lot of people don’t want to move their point of view, they don’t want to be disturbed by new vision, by a different vision,” he said. “People don’t like diversity. So every time you offer diversity, you get into trouble.”15

  In 1990, he returned for a do-over. He shot a Black chef and a white chef holding a loaf of bread, flour wiped across both their faces; a Black toddler and a white toddler sitting on bright potties, the Black boy smiling and touching the white boy’s face; a white hand passing a race baton to a Black one (a note on the end of South African apartheid); a Black infant’s hand held in a white adult’s.

  There were shots of a Black baby sleeping in a blanket of white teddy bears, a white wolf licking a black sheep, and finally, a set of look-alike test tubes of blood labeled after world leaders: “George,” “Nelson,” “Margaret,” “Jiang,” “Yasser,” and “Fidel.” The images brought the desired protests—Milan’s church authorities banned a billboard of the innocuous shot of the toddlers on their potties as offensive to the Sunday faithful. But they must have felt unchallenging.

  In 1991, a photo of a blond toddler, her hair tightly curled, and a Black boy in an embrace provided the last race protest over a United Colors of Benetton ad. Toscani had shaped the boy’s hair into devil’s horns. He said later that he had wanted to ask: could one really look at these toddlers and deem one more angelic than the other? But to some African Americans, it looked like “Shirley Temple and Buckwheat,” another example of “age-old cultural stereotypes.”16

  The children’s ad from the 1991 United Colors of Benetton campaign by Oliviero Toscani that sparked the last major protest from organizations of color.

  Such images failed the positivity test. And when Toscani attempted to infuse them with significance they toppled over from the burden of history. The same racial innocence that had brought Toscani to America in the first place was doing him in now. In turn, Toscani seemed to have become bored with this conversation.

  Benetton’s sales had reached the height of penetration into the American market. Sales were peaking at over $2.1 billion. Perhaps just as important, his aesthetic had taken hold. In 1989, the radical art collective Gran Fury, which had designed the “SILENCE=DEATH” banners for the AIDS activist group ACT UP, parodied Toscani’s look for twelve-foot-long ads on the sides of city buses in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Against a white background, three handsome young multiculti couples—two of them same-sex—locked lips over copy that read, “Kissing Doesn’t Cause Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.” Gran Fury’s ad became a signature moment in “subvertising,” the guerrilla design practice of turning ads against themselves and advancing anticonsumerist aims.

  When they were producing it, Gran Fury’s members had gleefully called it their “Benetton ad.”17 Yet when the ad was chosen—reappropriated—to illustrate the editorial/manifesto of Benetton’s new magazine, Colors, difficult questions arose: Should the collective extract a price from the corporation? Did that mean they had sold out?

  On the other hand, now that Toscani had helped bring multiculturalism inside the market, he could leave it to the catalog. There seemed little more controversy left to wring—it had lost its concussive novelty. He
needed new taboos to smash, a new aesthetic to forge.

  THE SHOCK CYCLE

  As the Gulf War begin, Toscani released an ad featuring a photo of tombstones in a soldier’s cemetery. A series featuring multicolored condoms spoke to the AIDS crisis while poking at the Christian right. A nun kissing a priest targeted Catholic sexual edicts. A striking shot of a screaming mucus-covered newborn suggested that Toscani was readying himself for a new era.

  Central to this new phase would be a new collaborator, the renegade designer Tibor Kalman. Born in Hungary, Kalman’s family had fled the Communist advance and brought him to the United States. There he had been a ’68er, joining the NYU chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. He left to cut sugarcane in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade and returned to the East Coast to organize factory workers. But he soon decided to leave the revolution. He went to work for Leonard Riggio, a bookseller who would eventually buy a store called Barnes & Noble. Kalman talked his way into becoming the house designer for the burgeoning empire.

  By the early 1980s, Kalman had opened his own firm, M&Co., and gained the confidence of the downtown creative scene—Warhol on the one end, David Byrne and Brian Eno on the other. He had secured a rep as a bomb-thrower at staid design industry conferences and functions. “99% of design is about selling stuff. And I believe that in order to sell stuff, you can’t really tell the truth,” Kalman would say. “Graphic designers have become the liars for corporations, just in the way that I think accountants are liars, and I think that lawyers are liars.”

  The old standards aggravated Kalman. “I mistrust design and I mistrust style and I mistrust form,” he said. “Good communications begins with content. It begins with an idea, as opposed to a look.”22 He called himself an anti-designer, an “un-designer.” He said his method was purely about “fucking things up.” He was partly color-blind.