Magazines / Adbusters analysis

Loubouton ‘Advert’ – page 20 Adbusters The ‘advert’ for ‘Louibouton’ is clearly referencing the Christian Loubouton brand of luxury designer footwear (whose pairs of shoes cost several hundred pounds).

Loubouton logo juxtaposed with image of a black person’s feet in shoes/ flip-flops made from two squashed plastic bottles and tied together with pieces of ragged material to communicate an anti-consumerist ideology.

Representation of ethnicity - black person wearing makeshift shoes, standing on parched earth, connotations of poverty and drought/ famine in a developing country (familiar representation from charity advertising campaigns and television news reports).

Hall’s theory could be applied here - the construction of a stereotypical representation of ethnicity, a sense of ‘otherness’, but to make a specific political and economic point about the inequality of power, reflecting Adbusters’ anti-capitalist stance.

Postcolonial theory would also be relevant here, although it is not specifically identified as a theory for this topic, as the magazine is clearly drawing attention to racial hierarchies and binary oppositions (between the west and developing countries, and between rich and poor).

The tagline ‘red soles are always in season’ – irony as Loubouton is famous for creating shoes with red soles, but the meaning here also refers to the feet of the person in the advert. ‘Season’ refers to both the fashion calendar and the situation of the person in the image who wears the same shoes all year round. The audience is positioned to reject consumerism and to understand/ possibly take action against the issue of inequality.