He’s been messed up from the beginning. Seriously, look at some of the stuff he’s done. The problem is people excusing it as being an artiste, enabling and taking advantage of him at the same time.
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That’s the sad thing. He’s proven that he has the capacity to be one of the all time great actors, but then does dumb and self destructive shit to fuck up his legacy.
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I’m not going to say that every single invocation of the phrase “attention whore” is misogynistic
but in this specific case, where it’s being asserted that brands that market to women are
and one brand that markets to men is
this is not a good look
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Is it that out of character? Not saying it’s a good idea at all, but there’s certainly prior art:
Wasn’t there also an image here on BB about a fake millenial magazine with the headline “which native american headdress should you pick to wear to Burning Man?” I remember something about that.
Also a quick Google Images search for “burning man indian” is … interesting.
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He looks like he has smelt something deeply unpleasant.
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Is Johnny Depp cheaper than Link Wray?
“I can relate to Native Americans; I bought the fragrance!”
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It isn’t just his claimed Cherokee ancestry that upsets people. It’s that he spouts things which are potentially harmful, never take n enough interest in his claimed ancestry to pay attention.
Adrienne Keene has a page about native appropriation, and has covered Johnny Depp in detail. She has a quote where he basically claims his Cherokee ancestry is via rape. I realize not all mixed marriages were good, but neither were they all forced. Thise marriages also tell a different story, of people who stepped out of their culture to meet halfway, a notion too often missing from the history. My great, great, great grandfather writes about the smiles of native women, and it’s easy to see he’s talking about my great, great, great grandmother Sarah, they were together for 44 years, until he died.
The fact that she was Syilx dudn’t have much impact on me until I was able to read more about family history. That makes it real, not some entry in the family tree, and it carries an obligation to pay attention to history and current stories.
Johnny Depp is lacking in that, hence the bad decsions about movies and fragrance ads.
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If the product was named anything other than Savage would this be newsworthy? Yes it’s using culture of oppressed people to sell shit but seriously throwing the name Savage on it makes an ad that was arguably defensible indefensible.
I’m a bit mystified as to the timeline but the product had been launched by 1966 and was inspired by a surnamed friend of Dior who (Dior that is) died in 1957 so…?.
I imagine that at the time, in naming it Eau Sauvage, he was not thinking about the French obsessions with anthropology and the failures of colonialism, and definitely not about Native Americans, but rather the name serving the marketable contention that men are savages, with a heavy implication that this is what women want or expect from them.
Percy Savage himself was a pretty interesting character. He was the first to leverage red carpet events to promote a fashion designer.
None of the above is meant to excuse such a misstep in 2019.
Last night I was just too tired to do it, but I was gonna remake the whole thing with Eeyore’s tail pinned as a period at the end of the word, and branding it “Christian D’Eeyore.”
(edit)… Link Wray passed in 2005. Do you mean like a tupac’d Link Wray?
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I’m sure that the ambiguity worked for them. After all, you don’t want your customers to buy one note scents. That would be gauche.
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But Rumble is still available (and the less menacing and watered-down Son of Rumble) so presumably his brother’s estate still owns the publishing rights – although that is murky.
a different perfume.
those legs look mighty pale for it to be racist.
I would agree. The real fashion items don’t involve the logo covering 90% of the item. Those are for people who want to be sure people know they can afford an expensive bag (or whatever).
Same company.
They put an “African tribesman” leopard-skin skirt on pale legs to sell a perfume called Eau Sauvage. It’s not rocket racism.
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“Sauvage” is french for wild (from nature) or untamed.
Personally i think they should have gone with “Feu sauvage”, which combines
“Feu” (fire) with “sauvage” (wild), except in French, that’s slang for zits/acne.
Still, having a bunch of people asking for “wildfire” cologne, even if it makes them seem like a bunch of zits would have been funny.
It also would have been less racist too.
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Though my guess was they sort of aimed for the ‘wild-pure’ connotations of the 19th century noble-savage cliché.
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When applied to flowers, it’s not racist.
When applied to groups of people it is.
Would you describe aboriginal people as wild and untamed? (Rhetorical question, do not describe aboriginal people as wild and untamed.)
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