We are the 99% (of your target audience). How the fashion corporation Esprit hijacked Occupy Wall Street and killed the Fan Sign

People holding up signs with messages have been a common sight on the internet. Half-naked, predominantly female people, that is.

I’m talking about Fan Signs, of course – where people scramble messages like i ♥ achtmilliarden on a piece of cardboard or any part of their body and e-mail a photo of this message to the people or blogs addressed.

This practice has been, ahem, virulent on the web for years and years and years – in the best cases it was cute, in the worst cases it was banal (you can find relatively safe-for-work examples at Driven By Boredom or with a little help of Mr Google).

However, as the world took a turn for the worse, the Fan Sign got serious – and powerful. The messages on the cardboard got longer and longer, the people holding them were suddenly of different ages and genders (also: fully closed) and the act of solidarity that lies at the heart of the Fan Sign now spanned beyond the people immediatly addressed.

This is thanks to We Are the 99 Percent, a confessional blog that invites people to share their stories about how life (or US capitalism) has treated them and why they support the Occupy Wall Street movement.

n+1‘s Marco Roth explains this in an excellent essay (that you can find here):

“We are the 99%,” is one of the few and more remarkable documents to emerge from the Occupy Wall Street movement. [...] By writing “I am the 99%” or in some cases “we are the 99%” at the end of their litanies, the individuals who have chosen to post their post-industrial miseries on the web are doing something that Americans of recent generations have been notionally averse to doing. They are actually creating class consciousness, for themselves and those around them.

However, we all know that if there’s one universal law of history, it’s that there’s no act of protest or defiance that won’t eventually be hijacked by fashion corporations.

(OK, I did read Thomas Frank and I do tend so see things a little more nuanced usually, but still.)

So maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Esprit, a fashion corporation based in Germany, had some semi-talented ad guys adapt the “We Are the 99%”-style for their new add campaign called “Make a Wish” (that you can see here).

Only this time, all the people holding cardboard signs are not only fully clothed but remarkably pretty… and their messages remarkably dull. There’s no trace of consciousness raising, no trace of consciousness at all, actually, only a return to the same old mindless consumerism and ignorance that got us in this mess that started Occupy Wall Street in the first place.

“I wish Mum to win the lottery”, one of the signs says, which seems especially cynical when compared to the messages of “We Are the 99%”. “I wish for a giant snow man made of ice cream”, says another. This is serious, but it ain’t cute.

And here’s what the Esprit executives seem to be saying to anyone concerned about the future:

Hey there, Occupiers! Zuccotti Park is evicted and you have no idea where to go? Why not head to the mall?

And they’re right, after all it’s Christmas time.