Auto shows around the world, notably those in Milan, Seoul, Frankfurt, and Tokyo, are known for featuring scantily-clad women posing with the latest cars for photographers – many of whom focus on the human models rather than the new car models. There are Web sites that devote much of their content to those show girls.
But male equivalents have been rarely seen at those events and Web sites – except in China. At the Guangzhou auto show, which ends today, a host of carmakers, including both established global names and Chinese upstarts, have been using male models to promote their new cars. Among those seen in Guangzhou mobilizing male models: Audi, Volkswagen, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, and Peugeot, as well as China’s Chery and Lifan.
The male models tend to be fully clothed, and executives say they’re there to appeal to both men and women. A Beijing-based executive with Mercedes-Benz says suggesting how people could dress to drive a certain car fashionably is “a good way” to communicate to the consumer what kind of vehicle the carmaker has designed for people.
Other cultures are a fantastic lens through which one can come to see unusual activities within one's own. From the western habit of saying 'Bless You!" when someone sneezes to the very concept of standing in queues, certain things that one might think are universal traits are quickly proved false with exposure to 'the other'. In this case we have an unusual take on gender stereotyping and sexuality in the form of China's new habit of putting male models next to its cars.
While it is not unheard of to have a male model for a car show in a western showroom, one could say it is the very tiny exception that has often proved the norm that women are expected to be placed next to objects of intense male desire (or to create the intense male desire for a status indicator and condition women to respecting the indicator). Yet our friends over in mainland China have begun to make us investigate the very point of models near cars, with their take revealing a bit of our own cultural habits when it comes to beauty and fashion.
The Chinese intention with the male model, and sometimes several models of different gender, is to indicate what kind of people are expected to buy this car and to appeal (unsurprisingly) to the female audience who may want their husband to look the way the model does. While purchasing power does tend to rest ultimately in male dominated hands in China, according to the article, the influence of women on expectations of men seems to have retained great traction.
So conversely, what does it say about our culture's overt bias towards female models? Perhaps it is indicating just how much we have relegated fashion and culture to the female gender, with the recent breakouts in male fashion of the last 20 years being more and more oriented to the gay subculture. That being said, there are certainly a wonderful array of male clothing options that straight males are able to wear, but they admittedly are put beneath the surface culturally. China continues a trend observed in Japan of far more culturally accepted male fashion that is consistent with a 'desire for good appearance'.
It is truly fascinating that in a culture based on consumerism, no major retailer has gone to great lengths to push male appearance as a critical issue; as if the men would be 'less inclined to deliver similar returns' or 'just aren't likely to impulse buy'. Most studies on testosterone in men will tell you that men, when their testosterone levels rise, are far more impulsive shoppers than women could even dream to be.
Read the full article here.