Benetton’s campaigns were annoying. Take the bakers. Spring/Summer 1990. One young man puts his arm around the shoulders of another young man. Together, they put their arms around a loaf of bread. Hands clutching the crusted dome, their fingers meet, a little too tender. The embracer is Black; the embracee is white, very blond. They smile straight into the camera. Flour from their hard, daybreak work bathes them in a whiteness that pops against the gray, unlifelike, photo-studio backdrop. The only traces of clothing purchasable in a Benetton store are the pastel flaps of their shirts, baby blue and pink; the rest is white bakery attire, caps included. Their smiles are questionable. They may come from the contentment of putting bread on their tables, from the glee of blue-collar modesty – from the flour of their sack, we say in Italy. These bakers do not loaf. Italians, the good people. The smiles may also be stirred by the contentment of being so, so different but so, so close.

The ad’s aesthetic language unquestionably innovates by rejecting the glam idealization and supermodel fashion dogmas of its era. And yet, it simultaneously sugarcoats notions of humility, brotherhood, and racial harmony, too staged and deprived of any context or social friction to not annoy.

The campaign belongs to Benetton’s radical rebranding under award-winning photographer Oliviero Toscani, hired as art director in 1984, which coincided with the company’s rise from a small Italian knitwear factory – founded in 1965 by Luciano Benetton and his siblings near Treviso – to a two-billion-dollar fashion empire producing eighty million pieces of clothing a year for seven thousand stores across approximately 120 countries. Adopting the trademark “United Colors of Benetton,” Toscani’s earliest marketing strategy focused on racially diverse throngs of young people in primary-colored attire engaged in a variety of aimlessly jolly acts, just having a very good time. Laughing their heads off, hugging each other very tight, hopping at times, pig- mented.

By 1989, the marketing strategy had shifted: The product is out of the picture ...

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