If I was slightly more computer savvy I would have stolen a clearer image from Perry Ellis’s fascinating comic strip-based advertising campaign. But go here to see what I’m talking about in better resolution. They have about 8 of these comic strips, each with names like "The Deal" and "The Move" and "The Autograph," and they all seem to feature the same comic strip protagonist, though really it doesn’t matter very much whether he’s the same guy because the whole point is that he’s the archetypal Perry Ellis guy. He’s an idealized stand-in for you, the potential consumer of Perry Ellis sportswear, and you seem to be in your late 20s or early 30s, a modestly successful businessman, and good-looking but not offensively so.
In the image above, from "The Number," the guy is chatting up a woman in a bar even though he’s been dating another woman for eight months. It’s harmless flirting, and in later strips, after he’s married to the other woman, Morgan, and has a son with her, he wistfully remembers his night out on the town as a what-could-have-been moment.
From a menminist perspective these ads certainly aren’t the worst out there, but I still find them exceptionally annoying. In particular, I dislike "The Deal," in which PerryEllisMan and his business partner are negotiating for a contract. The first panel shows them shaking hands with the guys whose money they want, and it’s captioned, "The meeting was perfection, and I was looking for that sign in their eyes. The Tell." In the next panel: "There’s that tell I wanted." In the next panel his partner, "a notorious worrier" who wants to "lower our numbers," asks him how he thinks it went. "We got it," he says manfully.
Granted, I’m a diagnosed "notorious worrier" who’s also bad at poker — I wouldn’t know "a tell" if it punched me in the face, though I did enjoy watching John Malkovich and his oreo cookie tell in the movie Rounders — so this ad seems designed to make me crabby. But the whole idea of poker, and negotiating, as metaphors for how to live the good life seems to come straight out of the Donald Trump playbook for masculinity. Confidence and perceptiveness are certainly valuable character traits, but unless they have content — are in service to something worthwhile — they don’t amount to much. Success and mastery as ends in themselves, which is what this ad is selling, are pretty shallow.
I’m also not a huge fan of "The Monster," which begins with PerryEllisMan looking at his cell phone as he steps into his house after another long day at the office. He thinks to himself, "The conference call went better than expected, but time differences assured that I missed story time. Again." In the next panel, as he’s taking off his scarf, "It sounds trite, but after a week of this, I miss my family." The strip ends with the Dad-of-the-Year sleeping on the floor next to his son to keep him safe from monsters.
Note how the guilt at prioritizing his work over his family is quickly erased by one magnanimous, sentimental gesture. This is a depressing, and depressingly common, notion of what it means to be a good father, only a slight step up from the criteria articulated by Salt N Pepa in "What a Man," where we learn that their ideal man "Spends quality time with his kids when he can/ Secure in his manhood cuz he’s a real man."
