Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby’s book Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, has a chapter titled “Aesthetics of Unreality” which explores the process of creating designs that blend real and unreal elements to engage the audience with given concepts. The chapter presents various examples of art pieces created by different artists. These pieces utilize different approaches and techniques at varying levels of complexity to convey ideas and concepts. The advertisement titled “Chi & Partners: Charlotte” was created by The&Partnership London previously known as CHI & Partners London. The team behind this project was directed by the artists Clark Edwards and Nick Pringle. Ewan Paterson served as the Executive Creative Director, while Dan Beckett and Craig Ward handled the typography, and Kelvin Murray was responsible for the photography. The advertisement’s design effectively emphasizes both the surface-level and in-depth consequences of child abuse.
The advertisement design depicts a girl wearing a white and pink dress with red-pink tights, without any shoes, on the left-third side of the poster. Meanwhile, the girl’s right arm is superimposed with the appearance of (what we assume to be) her mother’s arm holding a lit cigarette in her right hand. She is standing in front of a white closet with an empty clothes hanger on the right doorknob and a shirt barely visible hanging on the other knob. The superficial effects behind posting a picture of a girl in a tidy room wearing a typical dress but having a cigarette in her hand convey that the image of a perfect family may not always be what it seems. There is typography that says “[secondhand] smoke in the home hospitalizes 17,000 UK children a year.” on the left corner with a logo and a link on the opposite corner (Dunne, Raby 105). The typography is located on the bottom right quarter of the poster with the number of UK children being subjected to secondhand smoke provides the audience with an indicator of the poster’s concept without sacrificing significance.
The in-depth meanings behind the design of the advertisement have profound symbolism. The design choice of placing a wire hanger on the right doorknob closest to the girl causes the viewer to recall the scene in the film Mommy Dearest directed by Frank Perry where the daughter is trying to do everything right but the overbearing mother is always there to correct her behavior the way the mother feels is correct. The girl’s appearance makes it seem that she is well taken care of but the obvious difference in the size of her arm holding the lit cigarette shows how the actions of the mother are impacting the child and that she can’t escape from it.
Julia Ferguson’s dissertation titled “No More Wire Hangers: Analyzing Abortion, On-screen Representation of Reproduction Rights, and The Leonine Archetype in Pro-Choice Cinema” evaluates the film Sugar Daddy and the historical context of women’s rights to have abortions. Ferguson defines the representation of using a wire hanger as a way that “…the contextual delivery underscores the statistical correlation between abortion criminality and women utilizing domestic partners utensils…to terminate their pregnancies” (70). Ferguson touches on the choice of having a legal or illegal abortion based on the regulations and affordability. The inclusion of the wire hanger in the advertisement provides contradicting viewpoints of its purpose. For one it is implying the regulations and expenses associated with obtaining abortions. Secondly, the wire hanger concerning the film Mommy Dearest associates abuse and neglect to children. For a more radical view, the wire hanger represents future generations being affected by the consequences of their parent’s exposure to secondhand smoke from their childhood.
Another design component that stood out to me is the choice to not put shoes on the girl. From my perspective, the girl being barefoot provides another lens of feeling trapped or neglected and it is up to the audience to realize there could be children who are getting abused in their community directly or indirectly by their parent’s behavior and report it to the proper officials. The team’s use of incorporating the realistic and surreal design components behind the advertisement “Chi & Partners: Charlotte” strengthens their concept of informing and advocating against child abuse through a conversation regarding the impact of secondhand smoke on children.