There’s a Hanes commercial that’s playing before all of my YouTube videos these days that features, in typical underwear-ad fashion, very, very fit women doing silly dances and backward somersaults in their soft-filtered, pastel-and-white bedrooms while not getting dressed (but pretending to be in the process of getting dressed). I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it kind of depressing. The characters in the commercial are singing along and dancing to a song that’s about being brave, taking risks, and embracing the possibility of failure, but they’re doing it alone in the privacy and solitude of their respective homes. So, like, if the idea of “dance like no one’s watching” is the point of the ad, it’s sort of moot, because in the universe of the commercial, no one is watching (except for a confused cat). You have to dance like no one’s watching while people are watching in order for it to be brave or risk-taking. Add to that the fact that they all have super-typical underwear model body types and it’s just a boring, very conventional underwear ad that’s more about promoting an “ideal” body type than about the underwear those bodies are wearing. I look forward to the day when we have an underwear commercial featuring a woman who’s a size 16 doing a silly, spirited dance and backward somersaults in her underwear, because with our beauty standards, that actually would be kind of brave on the part of the brand.
Anyway, the song is really catchy. It’s “I Spy” by Norwegian artist Mikhael Paskalev, the Tom-Cruise-in-“Risky-Business”-inspired video for which apparently went viral in 2012. It also features a person dancing in their underwear, but the music video’s purpose is to sell the song as fun, not to sell underwear, and it succeeds in doing so. I wish YouTube would play this before my videos! The Hanes commercial convinced me to buy his EP, and also not to buy Hanes underwear. Enjoy it if you’ve never seen it before, and enjoy it again if you happened to catch it when it was in heavy rotation two years ago.
[YouTube]
Original by: Rebecca Vipond Brink
