ABSTRACT
In 2002, the cover of lifestyle magazine Ready Made spelled it out, loud and clear, in bold, brown and blue type: ‘Real is the New Fake’.1 The article inside proclaimed the exhaustion of gloss culture, the fatigue of perfect looks, and hailed the recruitment of the Average Joe as the next supermodel. It argued that consumers are tired of fabricated, touched-up visuals, too aware of advertising’s underlying mechanics, even the most complex ones. Time for advertising that looks like it’s not there; time, then, for advertising to jump out of media and become immediate, threedimensional, real.
