Oliviero Toscani’s subversive advertising campaigns for Benetton in the 1980s and 1990s were both commended and condemned for their provocative depictions of an aspirationally globalised world. As much as his work clashed with cultural realities, Toscani's images remain a rich historical source to trace our divergence from this once progressive, utopian vision.
Text by Stuart Jeffries
Still from “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” advertisement, 1971. Courtesy YouTube
There is just one race – the human race – and they just come in different colours,” said Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani in 2018. “I never really understood why nobody ever really thought that before.” Between 1982 and 2000, Toscani’s controversial advertising campaigns for Benetton turned the Italian company into one of the world’s most recognisable fashion brands. During the 1990s, United Colors of Benetton – as he had suggested renaming the company in 1989 – became one of the world’s most recognisable fashion brands, thanks to Toscani’s striking visuals, in particular those using a diverse roster of models: a “Benetton ad” became a shorthand for a group of ethnically mixed people.
Toscani was following a well-trodden path. In 1971, Bill Backer of Cola-Cola’s advertising agency, McCann Erickson put a bunch of ethnically diverse teens on a hill, gave them each a bottle of Coca-Cola and encouraged them to mime to a reworked version of the New Seekers’ hit song of the same year: “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony /I’d like to buy the world a Coke /And keep it company /It’s the real thing.”
In the final episode of Mad Men in 2015, its creator Matthew Weiner cheekily supposed that lead character Don Draper, after dropping out briefly to meditate with hippies, returned to Madison Avenue to write that very Coke ad. Draper was inspired by the spirit of these countercultural, fellow dropouts to co-opt their philosophy of peace, love and understanding to sell sugary pop. The late 1960s and early 1970s had been a time in which, amid race riots and the ongoing disaster of the Vietnam War, utopian dreams of racial tolerance and harmony were mobilised as hopeful antidotes.
Over the decades, the term “global village” became a way to describe a sense of a diverse utopian future of interconnection. It was first invoked in 1964 by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan to describe the phenomenon of the world’s culture shrinking and expanding at the same time due to pervasive technological advances. Geographer David Harvey would later call this “space-time compression” and suggest it was one of the leading features of postmodernity. Neither McLuhan nor Harvey took the phenomenon to be a straightforwardly good thing. “The global village absolutely ensures maximal disagreement on all points,” wrote McLuhan in his 1967 book Hot & Cool, while Harvey questioned on whose terms the global village was to be run.
Peter Brook, The Mahabharata, 1989
Toscani’s campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s built provocatively on these tropes of the global village. At the same time as he did so, Peter Brook debuted his adaptation of the Indian epic poem The Mahabharata at the Avignon Festival in 1985 and in 1989 adapted it into a film. The British theatre director first thought of adapting it to stage soon after the Vietnam War, as a response to discordant, ethnically divided times. “What is brought out in The Mahabharata,” Brook said in 1985, “is that there is a certain world harmony, a cosmic harmony, that can either be helped or destroyed by individuals.” Bringing the great classic of Indian literature to the stage was to insist on The Mahabharata’s universal message; that it should not belong just to one nation or race.
“I have found out that advertising is the richest and most powerful medium existing today,” Toscani told the New York Times in 1991, “so I feel responsible to do more than to say, ‘Our sweater is pretty’.” In this, Toscani had the full backing of his bosses. The former photojournalist had been hired in 1982 by Luciano Benetton to proselytise for the company founder’s vision of a world without borders, a future in which skin colour and other differences would become irrelevant in the face of human unity.
Toscani was certainly aware that his controversial approach to advertising might well be unpopular. “People prefer our-product-is-better-pitches or fantasies for wannabe Wasps full of self-loathing,” he told New York magazine in 1992. “Advertisers must lie, be hypocritical, or run Claudia Schiffer to escape reproach.” His revolution in advertising rejected such conventional moves. Rather, the test of success of an ad for him was impact, not popularity. Toscani’s work represented both brand activism – a strategy that hopes to court people on the basis of their values – and an unwavering desire to shock his audiences. In 1989, he photographed a Black woman breastfeeding a white baby for a Benetton ad. “[T]here are many types of families and it is in the exaltation of differences that the highest of qualities of human beings is manifested,” he commented. The ad, though, never ran in the United States because it resonated in a way Toscani never intended: the image looked too much like a slave woman wet-nursing a white baby while her own went hungry. In this, Toscani’s global-village aesthetic, his desire to start a healthy dialogue, fell afoul of historical realities. In 1990 he photographed a family wrapped in a blanket for a Benetton campaign. The image subverted traditional norms of what a family should be: one parent was white, the other black and their child Asian; moreover, both parents were women.
Disgust for a Benetton AIDS ad was shown by Diamanda Galás, a musician and vocal AIDS activist who lost her brother to the epidemic, when she performed a ritual sacrifice by burning a copy of the ad on stage. Courtesy YouTube
Toscani’s images were of their anti-deferential times, akin in subversion to contemporaries like the Young British Artists and Adbusters. Toscani’s work was as corporeal as Marc Quinn’s self-portrait with a frozen head made from pints of his own blood or Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, and as troubling as Marcus Harvey’s portrait of child killer Myra Hindley composed from copies of a single child’s handprint. In another campaign from 1996, Toscani photographed three disembodied hearts in a row and captioned them “white”, “black”, “yellow”. Though the message was about humans being at heart indistinguishable, the hearts he used were later revealed to be those of pigs. His images, designed to prick our consciences and evoke solidarity, might also be seen as attempts to flatter the liberal, tolerant self-images of the demographics Benetton hoped would buy their knitwear. “We’ve become a shorthand for multiculturalism and a progressive worldview,” said Peter Fressola, Benetton’s communications director in 1992.” Benetton’s brand activism unsettled many. For all the diversity of its campaigns, over time the messages read as vacuous rather than sincere.
Toscani’s campaigns clearly courted controversy. In 1982, the Mafia killing of Benedetto Grado in Palermo, Italy, was photographed by Franco Zecchi. Ten years later, Toscani used the photo in Benetton’s Spring /Summer 1992 campaign. Several publications refused to publish the image, and the dead man’s daughter threatened to sue, asking: “How does my father’s death enter into publicity for sweaters?” In 1992, a campaign featured the final moments of David Kirby’s life. The image of Kirby, lying on his deathbed as an AIDS victim, echoed the Pietà in its visual construction. The image was both daring, at a time of great stigma around HIV/AIDS, yet at the same time repurposed this stigma for sales. Equally, ad campaigns featuring images of boats of migrants n life jackets, or a priest and a nun kissing, were not only aimed at maximising Benetton shareholders’ dividends but also provocative deployments of the global-village aesthetic.
From our contemporary vantage point, the presentation of difference and “otherness” in Toscani, for all its command of the visual medium, looks questionable. Today, the exoticising of persons of colour by a white male European photographer and Toscani’s politics of presumed equality seem misplaced given humanity’s many different experiences of racial profiling, homophobia and gender-based violence. If you were the descendant of slaves uprooted from an African homeland to work Caribbean plantations for white men, for instance, you might well be less benign in believing, as Toscani did, that there is one human race and our manifold differences pale into insignificance.
Until his death in 2011, Martinican poet and postcolonial philosopher Édouard Glissant developed a sophisticated account of the Tout-monde (whole-world). Glissant’s revolutionary idea is that every identity is extended through relationships with others. Our identities are not fixed but constantly shifting; our relations with others are not arboreal but rhizomatic. Glissant’s value as a thinker lies in his attempt to shortcircuit the supposed conflict between homogenous globalism and local particularity with the insight that we can be one and multiple at the same time, a postmodern idea whose time perhaps has come.
As a postcolonial thinker, Glissant was committed to a takedown of Western metaphysics, which he understood as rooted in binary thinking that privileged one term over another – man over woman, white over black, master over slave. In a 1981 interview, he reflected how Western metaphysics had played out on the social scale of the slave plantations – whites at the top and Africans and Hindus at the bottom – on the Caribbean islands where he was raised. While he was a disciple and countryman of poet Aimé Césaire, who founded the négritude movement to promote an African culture free of all colonial influences, Glissant ultimately dissented from that movement as he thought it did not do justice to the complicated, deracinated experiences of those whose ancestors had been enslaved.
In this, Glissant was influenced by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. In their 1980 book Mille Plateaux (published in English as A Thousand Plateaus in 1987), they suggested that the rhizome should replace the image of the tree as a model for the human race and culture. The tree, they thought, is an image of centralised power that we need to uproot and replace with a plant structure that sends out new shoots from any point. The force of this metaphor is to indict hierarchies rhetorically, not least the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege. Rather than presenting history and culture as narratives with beginnings, middles and ends, the rhizomatic approach presents history and culture as a wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin.
Haeckel’s tree of life from Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General Morphology of Organisms), 1866, that Deleuze and Guattari proposed as the binary, hierarchical opposite to their theory of knowledge based on the rhizome.
Glissant took this figure of the rhizome and applied it to his own experience. “My own genesis,” he wrote in his 2003 essay “The French Language”, “what is it if not the belly of the slave ship?” For him, though, there was no direction home, certainly not the African home posited by Césaire, who supposed that in a globalised world colonised Black men and women might find stability, identity and succour in asserting their African roots against rapaciously capitalistic Western values. While Césaire coined the term négritude – defining it as “the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and culture” – Glissant doubted that matters concerning displaced daughters and sons of African slaves such as he and Césaire, were so straightforward. In postmodern fashion, he distinguished between “atavistic cultures” grounded in some “creation myth of the world” (a group to which sub-Saharan African cultures belong) and “composite cultures … born from history”. Instead of yearning to trace back one’s ancestry along the family tree back to Africa, Glissant invited us to a different kind of unstable, continuously proliferating, rhizomatic identity. Glissant was part of the créolité movement in the Caribbean and claimed “creoleness” as a continuous process of hybridisation. “Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles,” wrote the leaders of the créolité movement in a 1989 manifesto – words that Glissant endorsed.
And by the Tout-monde, Glissant meant not just other humans but the natural world. That is significant since, in his postcolonial critique, Glissant saw the imperialist West as trapped by a conception of the world as something to be dominated and controlled (and that conception of the world as a resource to be exploited to death is one of the impulses of globalisation), rather than as he put it “a world in which one is, quite simply, one agrees to be, with and among others”. William Blake wrote of seeing the world in a grain of sand; Glissant’s philosophy is similarly miraculous: any object contains the whole world in the form of relations it has with everything else. For Glissant, we are all shifting, unstable, scarred by our pasts and yet not defined by them, able to become other than our ancestors by ceaselessly renewing and multiplying relations with others.
A no-less postmodern idea has been developed by French anthropologist Bruno Latour, who exploded the idea of a global village with his notion of a “critical zone”, a space between two and three kilometres thick “above and below the surface of the Earth” that contains “all discovered life”. His critical zone was, like viticultural terroir, something to be nurtured rather than exploited to death. “In the critical zone, we must maintain what we have because it is finite, it’s local, it’s at risk and it’s the object of conflict.” Like Glissant, Latour thinks the object of proper concern should not be the human race, but everything within that critical zone. If we are to survive, Latour thinks we need to learn that, like insects, we are neither the discrete individuals of neoliberal theory nor global villagers.
Still from Nike “Just do it” ad for its 30th anniversary campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick from 2017. Sections of the American population took offence to Kapernick’s taking the knee and took to social media with hashtag campaigns #JustBurnIt and #BoycottNike, which had the opposite effect, boosting Nike sales. Courtesy YouTube
In 2020, Toscani was asked on Italian radio about the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa that had killed 43 people. Benetton is a principal shareholder in Atlantia, the holding company that controls Autostrade per l’Italia and managed the bridge. “Who cares that a bridge collapsed?” he replied, arguing that Fabrica, the creative school he founded and which is financed by Benetton, should not be conflated with Autostrade. “Enough already,” he said. Soon after the interview was broadcast, the hashtag #ANointeressa or #Wecare, hit social media along with calls to boycott Benetton. Toscani was fired as the brand’s creative director for a second time.
Neither this ignominious end nor Toscani’s earlier controversial career should necessarily be taken as implying the Italian adman was cynical, yet his blueprint for advertising and brand activism is nonetheless still exploited at Benetton and beyond. Advertising as a whole has embraced progressive values as a means of reaching audiences. Toscani’s naively optimistic dreams of a united human race were if anything the bien-pensant hopes of a privileged white European, expressed with a flair for controversy. It is perhaps this legacy as a provocateur that feels most apposite today; the global-village aesthetic of his work remains a fantasy. If digital technology has given us the opportunity to communicate better and share in our common humanity, it has also buried us further into our echo chambers, as we wait to be shocked out of them. ◉