I love Sally Hogshead’s “Watch the women watching the men watching you” for Harry Winston, shot by fashion God Richard Avedon because (no consumer ever needs to know it, but) it plays on John Berger’s eloquently twisted moralist approach in his significant book, Ways of Seeing (based on a British Broadcasting Corporation television series). Berger declared that “according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
He has also stated, “The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.”
Berger’s notion that a woman’s sense of self is supplanted by the sense of being appreciated as herself by another allies Michel Foucault’s concept of subjectivity, in that subjectivication precedes the actual subject. Consequently, models in advertising images manipulate a targeted woman’s wish to epitomize and identify with specific qualities like beauty, a slender body, and confidence, since men (and the larger cultural unit) value and admire those attributes. It seems women can never actually feel a certain way about themselves without the infiltration of her perception of the gaze of society’s esteemed aesthetics.
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