Who is Olivero Toscani?
Oliviero Toscani is an Italian photographer born in 1942 in Milan and best known for designing some particularly controversial poster advertising campaigns for Italian textile company Benetton in the 1990s. (Famous Photographers, n.d.)
The most famous of these is a man who died of AIDS lying in a hospital bed surrounded by his family. Others deal with racism, war, religion or the death penalty. In 2005, the photographer’s ad campaign for menswear brand Ra-Re sparked new controversy. The photos, showing gay people hugging each other, sparked a backlash in Italy and a statement about community rights.
Oliviero Toscani’s vision of controversy
According to Toscani, a company’s promotion of a product or service is as important as demonstrating its sAccording to Toscani, a company’s promotion of a product or service is as important as demonstrating its social sensitivity and intelligence to society. So he started working on such a subject as a reference and kept trying. The results showed that this strategy of controversy was successful. For him, the most important thing about an advertising campaign is the concept and communication.
Controversial advertisements are common in the fashion industry. Effectively, fashion products have emerged as vehicles to communicate positions and opinions about movements and controversial policies and social behaviours, a phenomenon called craftivism (Greer, 2014; Reimel & Arneson, 2017) The are other controversial campaigns in the industry campaigns such as Terry Richardson.
G. Vanbosterhaut
References
Reimel & Arneson (2017) in Greer (2014). Ethics in the Fashion Industry.
Famous photographes (n.d.) Oliviero Toscani | Photography and Biography. [online] Available at https://www.famousphotographers.net/oliviero-toscani. [Accessed 25 May 2022].