Made in Bangladesh: manufacturing hyper-real identities

by Shadman Shahid ︎︎︎

22 Sep 2021

see the image this essay is dealing with on ad.nl

A girl stands topless in front of a white blank wall. She stands tall and proud, looking unabashedly towards the camera. The camera is placed slightly below her eye level, presenting her with an air of importance and she demands respect. Her luscious black hair makes her seem exotic and untethered, like someone who rides wild horses or even better someone who would ride you like a horse. Right in the centre of the image are her bare, firm, round, ample breasts and the words “Made in Bangladesh” branded over her. Her small pleasing nipples peek through the letters, not entirely visible, teasing. From her breasts, her arms lead the viewer’s attention to a pair of jeans. She holds open the jeans, with the purpose of showing the bareness even more blatantly and boldly.

This is a superficial reading of a photograph that was used in an ad campaign by American Apparel. This is what we, the viewers, see at its surface, that’s what is visible to us at first glance. But once we have a closer look, understand the context and look beyond the rectangular frame, we see that the image goes beyond the blatant objectification of a human body. We see the undeniable markings of neocolonial tendencies of appropriating and recreating hyper-real identities.

A beacon for women empowerment

Let us begin at the source: American Apparel is a clothing company that was founded in 1989. They enticed the spotlight to shine on to them by creating an image for themselves of a company that practiced fair labor conditions and by presenting themselves as a beacon for women empowerment in our time. They were known for their provocative advertising often lauded for challenging old traditions and belief systems. In 2014 the founder and then CEO of the company, a Canadian white man named Dov Charney, was sued by multiple women, including his employees, for sexual harassment. In spite of the very real accounts of the victims made public, American Apparel as a company kept backing the Man. Finally, he was fired after it became apparent that it was impossible to make the outpour of the horror stories vanish with sly PR tactics. This reluctance to take immediate action makes it apparent that no matter what American Apparel might want us to think their values are, they are not the harbingers of women’s empowerment they think themselves to be.

The photograph changes once we have this information. The mind starts to wonder what the conditions were during the shoot? What was going through the mind of the model? What interactions did she have with the photographer and the artistic director? And now, do I sense the unease in her eyes? Does the body look slightly uncomfortable? Are her hands grabbing the pants tensely? I am not sure if we all will see the same thing but would the photograph not change completely once we think of all these issues?

Liberated; not Bangladeshi and not American either

Below the photograph there is a text. Again, at first glance seems to be innocent, describing the person we are looking at. The text is as important as the photograph itself and without it the final image is incomplete. Without the text, the American Apparel image can be read as yet another pseudo-voyeuristic and somewhat pornographic attempt at appropriating and objectifying an oriental female body, reminiscent of the postcards from Algeria over a century ago that Malek Alloula writes about in the Colonial Harem. With the text, the intentions and consequences become even more pronounced.

The heading of the text introduces the audience to the model’s name, which is neither typical Bangladeshi nor American. Rather an appropriated version of a Bangladeshi or perhaps Arabic name. Maks is easier to pronounce than Maksuda, I guess.

Then the text begins by telling us that first and foremost, she is an American Apparel employee. That is her leading identity and from here on she embodies the company’s ideology. This anthropomorphizes the company while at the same time, objectifies the human, not an uncommon strategy for advertisers to use. The Marlboro man comes to mind as an example.

The text then goes on to deploy orientalist and civilizational discourse to tell the story of Maks. She was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh but because of a “crucial life-changing decision” taken by her parents she migrated to the United States and was raised there. Thank god for that, because now she can reestablish the myth of the American dream. She initially followed her parents’ religion, and therefore a conventional Islamic tradition, but in high school she somehow achieved enlightenment and forwent her old, backward ways of thinking. She is now fully liberated, unwilling to call herself American or Bangladeshi and unwilling to fit herself into a conventional narrative set by others. She has successfully escaped from Islam and backward, uncivilized Bangladesh with its repressive social mores and “Islamic traditions”.

Those Muslim others

And there was a narrative already in place by the media and the hyper-real identity of the Muslim was already vividly shaped, so why not capitalise on that as well. There are countless academic texts written since the Iranian revolution on the negative representations of Muslims by the western media and the portrayal of Islam as a backward religion of violence. Saifuddin Ahmed and Jörg Matthes talk about it in great details in their writing “Media representation of Muslims and Islam from 2000 to 2015: A meta-analysis”. So, a mere mention of the word “Islam” triggers the deep anxieties in viewers which they have been nurtured with for decades by the western media.

But at the same time the text reminds us of the “American” identity and puts it in a superior position and the traditional Islamic culture is judged as backward. It shows how American Apparel defeats the backward ideology of the invisible enemy, rescues the oppressed woman and emancipates her by allowing her to take off all her clothes. In the process it upholds true American values of individuality, equality and freedom. Patriotic sentiments in the American viewers activated. America, Fuck yeah! Freedom is the only way. But freedom for whom and at what cost?

Exploiting the exploitation of workers

Why the branding on the flesh of this newly liberated brown body? “Made in Bangladesh'', what is the purpose of this? As acclaimed Bangladeshi-American feminist scholar Dr. Dina Sidiqque points out “The absent referent here is the Bangladeshi garment worker, whose conditions of work are veiled or covered up, and who represent the opposite of the secular feminist reality now inhabited by Maks. The absent presence of the Bangladeshi garment worker (underaged, malnourished and hyper-exploited) is essential for the “social message” embedded in the American Apparel campaign. It signals presumed conditions of horror in Bangladeshi sweatshops.”

The image was made after one year of the Rana Plaza disaster. The Rana Plaza disaster was a structural failure that occurred on 24 April 2013 in Bangladesh, where an eight-story commercial building collapsed. The search for the dead ended on 13 May 2013 with a death toll of 1,134. Approximately 2,500 injured people were rescued from the building. It is considered the deadliest structural failure accident in modern human history and the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history.

The advertisement was a direct response to that incident. The factory collapse made visible the working conditions of the Bangladeshi garment workers to the western world. As the building housed several factories that produced garments for the western world, western consumers immediately started to question the ethical values of the fashion industry. Questions were raised on the exploitative nature of the fashion industry in general. American Apparel went a step further and exploited the exploitation of the workers.

The everyday girl

The campaign does not stop there, as it was clearly the advertisement’s intention to be controversial and being successful at that, the campaign was run in news outlets and magazines being attacked and defended by numerous writers. It made sure that the advertisement had a long life in the attention cycle. In an interview with Fashionista, the artistic director of the advertisement campaign mentioned that American Apparel values a “healthy body image”, not dowsing the women in their pictures with make-up, not retouching them in Photoshop, etc. They value the everyday girl and don’t find supermodels cool. This too, however, is not as innocent and chivalrous as it first appears to be, rather it is an ironic strategy and completely unoriginal which the process creates an identity of the stereotypical everyday girl. This method of advertising or propaganda has already existed for decades.

Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. By blending Freud’s theories of the unconscious with Gustave Le Bon's researches into crowd psychology and Wilfred Trotter's theories of herd instinct, Edward Barneys started to develop the initial concepts of public relations or in other words a non-violent, subtle, acceptable method of manipulating the crowd. One of his very first clients was the American Tobacco Company. In 1928 George Washington Hill, president of American Tobacco Company, was faced with an unsolvable conundrum. While men smoked with the utmost freedom with a delusional sense of pride and manliness, women who smoked were considered whores and prostitutes at best and even prison sentences were handed out to them to punish this kind of immoral behavior.

The 1920s were a time of intense movements demanding equality for women. Edward Bernays exploited that collective state of mind to convince women how smoking cigarettes would lend them a worthwhile victory in the fight for equality. So, he set out to do exactly that with an ad campaign known to us now as Torches of freedom. He decided that the women hired for the project had to be convincing and appealing enough to influence the masses, yet not too good looking or ‘model-y’. In other words, the everyday girl. So, at the height of the Easter Parade, a young woman named Bertha Hunt, who was Bernays’ assistant at that time, stepped out into the crowded fifth avenue and created a scandal by lighting a Lucky Strike cigarette. And the rest was history. Cigarettes became torches of freedom, and centuries of work done by feminists and activists was appropriated by consumerism, the beginnings of neo-liberal exploitation of freedom movements. The Made in Bangladesh advertisement is just one example in a long line of such exploitations.

Guilty? Let me absolve you of all responsibility

The text concludes by mentioning that the sole item of clothing that she is wearing in the picture is in fact made by American Apparel who manufacture only in America and who pay their skilled workers properly. They also have healthcare. The image ends with American Apparel written in bold letters, the last thing the audience will see before turning away from the image. This is a play on the guilt of the western viewer and offers them absolution from that guilt. The guilt of having privileged lives as the majority of the world suffers, the guilt of having to satisfy their needs of the latest fashion trends by exploiting thousands of men, women, and children, some of them even dying while making clothing. The road to absolution is simple and easy. Buy American Apparel.

So, what does the image of the provocative, unveiled, branded, “not-American-but-not-Bangladeshi”, liberated, self-actualized, exotic-looking, everyday girl born in Bangladesh but raised in America, achieve in the end?

Its primary goal, like any other advertisement, may be to trigger the libido in the viewer and the reptilian brain in us so that we become less logical and our psychological defenses get somewhat compromised and therefore we become more prone to manipulation. But ultimately it does more than that. Through a neoliberal twist to old narratives of orientalism and the western savior, it manages to manufacture, propagate and reestablish identities of: Bangladeshis, the oppressed woman, the free woman, the everyday woman, the “American woman”, the American dream, the followers of Islam, the invisible garment worker, the benevolent buyer, the absolved westerner all at once. All of which are hyper-real in nature.

- Alloula, Malek, et al. (1986) “The Colonial Harem”, NED - New edition ed., vol. 21, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

- Ahmed, Saifuddin & Matthes, Jörg. (2016), “Media representation of Muslims and Islam from 2000 to 2015: A meta-analysis”, International Communication Gazette, vol: 79 issue: 3, pp. 219-244.

-https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2011/03/08/american-apparel-ceo-dov-charney-accused-of-forcing-teen-to-be-sex-slave

- Siddiqi, Dina M. “Solidarity, Sexuality, and Saving Muslim Women in Neoliberal Times”, Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 3/4, 2014, pp. 292–306.

- Bernays, Edward. “Propaganda”, Ig Publishing, 2004.

- https://fashionista.com/2014/03/american-apparel-made-in-bangladesh-campaign