Gap.com Ad

The Gap is generally seen as a store for everyone in the sense that everyone shops there. People from all different races and ethnicities shop at the Gap. Its clothes are affordable but not dirt cheap, somewhere between Macy's and Armani. Like all companies that advertise (which is to say all companies), the Gap's campaigns are not always perfectly diverse and representative of America's overall makeup. Nevertheless, they aren't as bad as some other ad campaigns.

The current front page ad on gap.com is one of the more diverse one's I've seen. It features five people, four women and one man, standing beside each other. The woman on the far right is nearly out of the frame for some reason I can't figure out. The woman on the far left is white and blonde, while the other two women on either side of the man are black with black hair. The man is white with dirty blonde hair. All three women's hair is blowing in the wind, and the man's shirt is half unbuttoned, presumably to show off his chest in a sort of pseudo shirtless fashion. The man and the woman to his right are holding hands. All in all, it seems as though Gap had diversity in mind when it made this ad. Two out of three of the women are not white (this is if you don't count the fourth woman on the right, though if you only glance at the ad you don't notice her). The general feel of the ad is that if you're a man and wear gap jeans, you'll get all sorts of women lining up to be with you.

While this ad definitely deserves criticism, I think it also deserves praise. We've seen countless examples of mainstream companies only featuring white people in their ad campaigns, and Gap is no exception. However, it appears here as though they are trying to inject some racial diversity into their ads, even though the ad is still sexist and racist in that it only portrays blacks and whites.

The ad can be found at www.gap.com