Last week, in certain stores across the US, something very odd happened. Furious newsagents eviscerated the February 2000 issue of Talk magazine, a slick Miramax publication edited by Tina Brown. The violation reportedly occurred not just in southern US and across the Bible Belt but in sophisticated places like Washington state, and it was prompted not by anything in Talk's editorial content but by an advertisement. An advertising supplement by Benetton, to be precise.
No surprises there. Benetton has been shocking consumers with its arty, provocative images for over a decade. Remember the dying AIDS patient, the bloodstained T-shirt, the newborn baby, the black child with horns? In 1989, Benetton even acknowledged that it had gone too far, when photographs of a white baby nursing at a black breast and a black hand manacled to a white one caused multi-racial outrage in the US and was promptly withdrawn.
Now, however, the fashion company has gone even further with "We on Death Row," its most controversial - and its riskiest - campaign to date. Almost 50 pages long, featuring two essays and interviews with 25 death-row prisoners, Benetton's anti-death penalty supplement is viewed by many here as the latest example of arrogant Europe misjudging complex America while coveting its markets.
"Who do you think you are, calling us a cheeseburger nation?" one caller to a Massachusetts talk-show challenged Oliviero Toscani, Benetton's creative director. Toscani (also the creative director of Talk magazine) countered good-humouredly that Americans called Italians all sorts of things, that he loved America. "I couldn't do this in Iran," he conceded. "But no society that has the death penalty can call itself civilised."
Benetton's critics, however, argue that no advertiser masquerading as a journalist can call himself a social reformer.
"This campaign does blur the line between advertising and journalism," Ken Shulman, the author of "We On Death Row," admits. "But so what? Why not make a marketing statement and a political statement at the same time? The company should be judged by the product - I mean the project - it is promoting."
Then there is the other P-word: Profit. Operating in the world's most competitive markets and spawning myriad imitators, Benetton has long recognised that its public image must be instantly, even shockingly, recognisable. "Our campaigns are an attempt to get away from traditional advertising in the belief that it has no power and no value any more," Luciano Benetton explained almost 10 years ago. Oliviero Toscani echoes the company mantra. "My brief is not to concern myself with commercial images . . . to sell more T-shirts," he observes, "but rather to create an image for the company that touches people in all of the countries in which Benetton is present."
Whatever its motivations, Benetton went to unprecedented lengths to produce "We On Death Row". In March 1999, the company engaged Shulman, who had lived in Italy as a sports and arts correspondent for Newsweek and other publications. Along with a passionate essay by two eminent legal scholars, Benetton wanted the faces and words of those condemned to death. Prison officials were wary. "They thought we wanted prisoners to pose in the electric chair wearing a Benetton sweater or something," Shulman recalls. Wardens who did co-operate ushered Shulman onto Death Row with the standard warning: should he be taken hostage, they would not negotiate.
Shulman interviewed 25 prisoners, male and female, black and white, one of whom, Harvey Green, was recently executed after 19 years' incarceration. "Some days the wall be closing in on you," Green, 39, told Shulman. "And some days you see hope down the line." Convicted on two counts of first degree murder, Green appears in Benetton's pages smiling sweetly and reading a bible.
Other prisoners, like Bobby Lee Harris and Conan Wayne Hale, turn more sinister faces to the camera and communicate a dull sense of days spent with television, ugliness and the prospect of a ritualised death. "I think people like seeing other people suffer and killed,"
John Lotter, 29, sentenced to death by electrocution, observes. "I want to run nude through Africa before there ain't no Africa left," Edgar Ace Hope, 40, sentenced to death by lethal injection, declares.
Their victims had dreams too, a fact that Shulman faces daily in the correspondence he now receives from their families. One woman, recognising in Benetton's pages the man who killed her father when she was 10-years-old, asked Shulman what the murderer was thinking at the time, why he did it. "They're not thinking. If they were they wouldn't be on Death Row," Shulman responds. He adds: "That's not absolution. These people have done horrible things and deserve harsh punishment. But the death penalty is punishment that contaminates all who come in contact with it."
Charges that the Benetton label diminishes Shulman's elegant, moving and well-reasoned essay are neatly volleyed. "When TV interviewers come up with that I always want to ask them `Who signs your pay cheque? Disney?' "
Benetton's smooth response to the current public outrage is what you might expect from a company that has presented people with Down's syndrome, for example, in previous campaigns. Taking on the death penalty, however, Benetton confronts its most formidable adversary to date, one unimpressed by artful photography and inspiring words. Hollywood, after all, has deployed both in numerous films like Dead Man Walking, leaving the institution unscathed.
The statistics speak for themselves. Today, 38 American states and the US federal government are empowered to execute Americans and foreigners by lethal injection, electrocution, gas chamber, hanging or firing squad. Between 1976 and the end of 1999, approximately 600 prisoners were executed - 100 of those in 1999. Texas holds the record with 190 executions. Eighty-two condemned prisoners have been released on proof of actual innocence since 1973, and conservative estimates suggest that 23 innocent people have been executed in the US this century.
But executing the innocent is an acceptable trade-off for the public's increased sense of security, according to Florida congressman Bill McCullom and many less candid supporters.
What has all this to do with fashion? In the world of infotainment and conglomerate convergence, where a pharmaceutical giant may soon bring you your nightly news, it sounds like a naive question.