Over the next several hours, Barbara, Shannon and I went through all sorts of thoughts and emotions spawned by the fact that Christy Turlington the supermodel, is also Christy Turlington the student right here at NYU - right here where her classmates are choosing her image above all others to rant about advertising. It was the most bizarre confluence of realities. Supermodels have become ours like actors are ours . College boys create website altars to them. Little girls pin their pictures to bedroom walls in hopes they'll one day be like them.
Activists use their pictures to try to rewrite the messages.
Models are ours to do with and say whatever we want because they are not presented as real people. And so we struggled. Ultimately the ads speak for themselves and we think consumers ought to have an opportunity to respond to ads too. Probably even Christy Turlington and Kate Moss view the ubiquitous images of themselves from a very removed position. Kathy Bruin is the founder of About-Face.