Harvey wants me
Posted on December 12, 2006
Filed Under Advertising, Asides, Rant, customer service, design, la-la-land, not funny, odd, review, shopping | Leave a Comment
This photo was an ad-insert in my weekend newspaper. It’s an ad for Harvey Nichols dept store. I guess they’ve opened a store in Ireland, probably Dundrum Shopping Centre, and, since women are genetically compelled to visit and spend shed-loads of money there, they’ve decided, instead, to target men. And, on one level, it works.
I presume the message is buy your clothes in Harvey Nic’s and you’ll be irresistable to women! Just walk into any nite club and women (plural – omigod!) will just melt with desire in front of your red hot sexual magnetism. You won’t even have time to even get to the bar and buy a beer cocktail. Damn, I’m sold. What Dublin Bus do I need to mount to get there? I really want to buy those clothes and put to bed all those rumours that I can’t descend to these below-the-decks venues and make my presence felt.
There was a snag though. An interruptus, if you will. Being a bloke, I took out my pencil and started compiling a list of the clothes I needed to wear. When I got to the belt, I instinctively pulled my pencil back from the page. The belt buckle is a crab and, as everyone knows, crabs is a euphemism for the Pubic Lice sexually transmitted infection. Hmm! Crabs, apparently, make the infectee scratch themselves in an almost uncontrollable fashion. Repeated combing of the infected area is one of the cures.
Suddenly, the picture takes on another, more sinister, meaning. Maybe the man’s head is aflame because he’s (a) red-hot down there (look at his hands?) or (b) he’s red-hot with embarrassment about how he’ll explain himself later on in the evening when he has to strip off his crab-themed belt-buckle.
Or maybe the ladies are ice-cold because they saw him scratch himself on the way down (the stairs) or maybe they spotted his too-perfectly combed hair on the head above his shoulders? One is leaning away with her hand up in mock/shock/horror mode while the woman nearest him has her hands in a position that suggests she’s about to scratch herself!
.
Somehow I’m not sure the ad agency intended to create such confusion. Shurely shome mishtake, methinks?
Aside #1: If clothes maketh the man, why pay admission to the nightclub? Using this logic, why not just stand outside, beside your BMW, and, I dunno, just wait for the prey to start nibbling at the bait?
Aside #2: Here’s a picture of pubic lice.
Aside #3: Here’s a large image of the scanned Harvey Nic’s ad.
Aside #4: His trousers are too long. If I was his mother, I’d point out that he won’t grow any taller unless he visits his mammy more often for a Sunday dinner! You can’t beat Oirish mammy’s.
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