This shot from the recent Saks spring preview catalogue (which of course I get for having Saks card: personal contradiction #1) made me do a double-take. Not that I was surprised; Saks has continually and predictably come up with the most inane, regressive, and - dare I say - evil advertising that I have recently encountered (I only say recently because Monsanto wins the "most evil advertising of all time" award).Here, a woman so tan as to look "native" wears a Carolina Herrera dress, the point of the image, while holding the hand of a child dressed in such a contradictory manner as to clearly not be her baby. While the context of travel, sight-seeing in fashion, makes this mostly just another pretty image, the dialectical jolt is almost impossible to pass by.
The common-sense reading, the one that Saks was probably going for, is that the child belongs to the women in traditional dress observing the scene from the following page. But framing the image as a requisite photo-op with said natives' poorly clad child only highlights the shocking social inequities that are described by the image out-of-context. The clasped hands outline the contingency of seemingly exclusive opposites: done and undone. The child is the condition of possibility of the woman, the potential stain on the pure white of her dress.
And, like I said, this is not the first time that Saks has so shamelessly advertised its questionable (if not ethics) taste. In the still-running "Saks loves ..." series, perhaps appropriately printed in black-and-white, Saks again promotes its binary ideas regarding class and race. A woman in a dress of non-descript historical inspiration and her school-uniformed daughter defiantly roller skate over a marble floor beneath a crystal chandelier. The girl falls, even with the support of the "help," uniformed and black. Clasped hands again reveal the integral relationship between privilege and lack, but this time with a sense of "only just," highlighted by the man's outstanding facial expression.
“Saks loves reinventing the wheel.” The way things are and the way things have “always been” are not remade, but reinforced. For Saks, the past is only reincarnated insofar as any potential antagonist to luxury has been either forgotten or made safe by distance.