J&B and the inclusion that’s in vogue, even in marketing

He’s doing a lot of social media a Christmas commercial for J&B whiskey for the Spanish market. Her title is “She, un cuento”, after the song by Elvis Costello. The protagonist is an elderly gentleman who lives in a small village in Spain and learns to wear make-up like a woman. He wakes up at night to sneak into the bathroom from his wife to put on lipstick, mascara and blush, while he studies make-up magazines and bus-stop posters. Christmas comes and the old man has learned. Relatives, children and grandchildren come for lunch, among them is Álvaro, 26 years old, gentle and melancholic movements, and a large tattoo on his neck. While the family gathered in the kitchen prepares, the grandfather takes Álvaro to the bathroom and, with delicacy and love, transforms him into the girl that his grandson has always felt he was. When they return to the dining room, everyone is already at the table, but they get up in turn to embrace Anna, 26, who has finally transformed into herself. The commercial, shot perfectly, makes you cry and, crying, makes you think about how much, by now, market, fashion and politics converge in an inextricable imaginary because the desire for a better world today is expressed through the possession of objects or, better, of brands.

Stunned by the inclusive message, I was curious to check whether in the last decades of the twentieth century the history of costume was equally marked by the Christmas commercials of Justerini & Brooks (which today belongs to the multinational spirits Diageo, not surprisingly chaired since 2017 by a Spaniard). Even in the fifties, when my summary investigation begins, the protagonist was the old man, the grandfather, immersed however in a Dickensian imaginary that anchored him to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, not to mention Wasp. If in 1959 the subject is an elegant and wealthy fifty-five year old (elderly, for those times) who reads “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens, in 1963 the testimonial is Dickens himself, while in 1969 he is an old man drawn with two bottles of J&B in the snow and the slogan “Christmas Past Is Christmas Present”. Already in 1970 the imaginary and the target slip: a beautiful girl with a Santa Claus hat stares into the camera and smiles: “Have a Dickens of a Christmas – Give J&B Rare Scotch”. “Have a Wicked Christmas – Give etc.”. The objective has changed – from Dickens to dick the step is short – because a generation of young people has appeared who contest, make fun of the old and want to have fun by drinking and having sex in freedom. The target is still male – if you drink J&B women will choose you: “I Don’t Know Who He Is, But He Just Ordered J&B”, whispers a beautiful girl in another advertisement – ​​but in 1972, to broaden the market, the “Scotch And The Single Girl” campaign starts, in which single girls are both product and target, object of desire and another possible buyer.

At the end of the decade, however, the imagery changes again: the 1977 campaign is apparently centered on a post-hippy call to nature (“In A World Full Of Synthetic Everything, We’ve Kept One Thing Natural”), but in reality foretells a new paradoxical desire for the masses, that of distinguishing oneself from the masses: in 1981 Christmas J&B is a cabin that whispers in the snow (“It whispers”), a place to isolate yourself to make love and contemplate the beauty of the world. The idea is to have what no one else has. The 1993 Christmas campaign is very refined: “ingle ells, ingle ells. The Holidays Arent’ The Same Without J&B”. Spirits, from Vecchia Romagna to Chivas Regal to “Michele the connoisseur” of Glen Grant, compete in representing the rampant desire to be considered bourgeois, and more elegant than others. The aspiration of the masses is to stand out, to be admitted among exclusive people, and in fact in 1988 the slogan of J&B is “Enter The Circle”.

The history of mass product advertising is a map of the shifts in taste and wealth. Advertising indicates the target, that is, it delimits those who have money and in the meantime defines the idea of ​​happiness of an era. Fashion is the intuition of the future of the emerging classes, which capture and direct the culture of the time (for this reason they can frighten and favor a negative vote, as in Italy). J&B’s choice to focus on the inclusion of trans people demonstrates that, today, those with purchasing power are sensitive to gender issues, but also that our definition of happiness consists in being accepted, because our deepest fear, staged and exorcised by talent shows, is that of being excluded. The inclusion that is fashionable today is perhaps also a reaction to the thirty-year hegemony of the adjective “exclusive”, but it is rigorously limited to civil rights and keeps economic and social exclusion unchanged, indeed invisible.