Heels click and boots thud against the stone floor. People rush to the trains, buses, and subways in Grand Central Terminal, a microcosm of travel, sophistication, and urban life, while twenty-five women wearing structured black suits, black leather gloves, and black heels, and carrying black briefcases and purses stand completely still in the middle of the Main Concourse. The women stare forward with focused gazes and blank facial expressions as the cameras click and record. The women do not smile. Accent pieces break up the monochromatic palette: some women sport a prominent piece of gold jewelry and others wear a white blouse underneath their suit. Their faces are young and fresh. Makeup is minimal and natural and no women appears to be a day over thirty-five. The low camera angle accentuates the women’s tall stature and thin frames. These women are dressed for success in corporate America, and Jones New York is ready to celebrate the success of women in the workforce and the role of Jones New York in the success of working women.
Corporate interests often influence how women are portrayed in the media and affect messages conveyed about female opportunities in the public sphere. The Jones Group, Inc., an American apparel company for women and men that produces clothing, shoes, and accessories and operates Jones New York retail stores, launched a campaign titled “Empower Your Confidence” through website links, print advertisements in magazines, and television commercials, which celebrates women’s emergence into the work world and the role that Jones New York has played in female empowerment. By closely analyzing the print advertisement and television commercial, I argue that this campaign exemplifies embedded feminism by presenting a narrow conception of success that does not accurately express the experience of most women in the work world, fails to limit the power of multiple systems controlling female opportunity by emphasizing women’s business attire and appearance and neglecting reform efforts and relevant concerns such as wage discrepancies between men and women, and presents a nebulous connection between Jones New York as a retail chain and the empowerment of women in the American workforce.
The motion and travel associated with Grand Central Terminal may allude to the advancement and progress that Jones New York suggests women have achieved, traveling from a disempowered status to a more empowered position today in the corporate world. However, the women stand completely still in the middle of the terminal, intensely focusing their eyes forward. Does this indicate their intense focus on goals of success in the corporate world? What do we make of their lack of movement? How do we interpret the lack of smiles or emotion on their faces? It is possible that success in the corporate world is constraining emotionally and physically. Maybe women don’t actually possess the mobility and empowerment suggested by Jones New York.
Embedded feminism exists at the forefront of media and displays strong and accomplished women. These women are treated as the norm and their visibility suggests that the goals of the feminists have been achieved and that women are no longer limited in their opportunities. The commercial urges women, “Don’t dress for the position you have, dress for the position you aspire to be at,” implying that simply by dressing in classy business wear, women can have a change to achieve a position in the corporate work world. The definition of success conveyed in this campaign consists of contributing monetarily through a career in the corporate world. It is not important for women to enjoy their work. Success and high earning can be achieved through corporate occupations, by wearing black, gold, and white, and by being an attractive, young, predominantly white woman. The world of leather, gold, and structured suiting equals the world of success.
The question of power and empowerment is in the forefront of this campaign. The reality is that a company, Jones New York, benefits and profits from these portrayals. The actual power lies with the company, not with women. The ad focuses on women’s appearance and emphasizes that power can be obtained through attire and image. However, it does not address the problems women encounter and the forces that pull power away from women, like poor working conditions and limited rights. The ad does not motivate anyone to take action to improve conditions and opportunities for women, nor does it empower women to change the condition of their status. Jones New York seems to agree with Douglas’s statement that “women are to be judged first and foremost by their appearance” (198) and the company wishes to influence how women dress and maintain power and control over some clothing choices women make.
The advertisement on a whole lacks diversity and therefore targets a specific audience, those who are actually included in the advertisement and those who can afford the products the ad is attempting to market. Out of the ten women in the print advertisement, seven appear to be white (five have blond hair), one appears to be black, and one appears to be Latina. The quote cited from the Shriver Report, “Women as half of all workers changes everything,” suggests that the advertisement targets all women workers, but the image only displays women in extremely formal business attire, devoid of color or discernible differences. Jones New York suit sets, which start at $250, target a specific group of women and exclude women who cannot afford significant clothing expenses.
The entire campaign and the attire of women in the business world is ironic because women are praised for being successful, but they don’t actually look much like women at all. In order to be successful, women wear clothes resembling men’s suit wear, as the world of success is made up of men so women should appear like men. Being successful is a compromise; women must enter a man’s world. Unlike many advertisements in fashion magazines, this advertisement does not display hyperfemininity. Instead, it suggests that, to exert power, women have to act like men and wear menswear-inspired garments, while preserving some indicators of femininity like emphasized gold jewelry.
I am unsure why this campaign was launched at all. What monumental event occurred for women in the past five, ten, or even fifteen years that would generate a campaign of this type? As Stacy Lastrina, Chief Marketing Officer at Jones Apparel Group, comments in the commercial, “This moment in time is ours. We’ve been empowering women for over thirty-eight years.” Why does Jones New York identify their thirty-eight-year commitment to women’s business apparel with women’s empowerment movements? What is significant about thirty-eight years? The campaign seems to celebrate the success of women in all levels of employment in the working world, supported by statistics in the television commercial that “over two-thirds of women are sole or co breadwinners in a family,” but the women represented in the campaign are only employed in the corporate world. It is clearly a clothing marketing scheme to increase the visibility of their line because there have been no significant or striking advancements in women’s empowerment in recent years that would spur a campaign of this type.
The campaign commercial claims that empowering your confidence is “the making of a movement.” A fourth-wave feminist movement? Or a general movement of economically and occupationally privileged women toward Jones New York retail stores? It seems unlikely that large-scale systemic change that positively affects women came out of the last thirty-eight years of Jones New York women’s business apparel or will result from this campaign.
Works Cited
Douglas, Susan. Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s
Work is Done. New York: Times Books, 2010. Print.
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