Silks lingerie ad banned over sexually suggestive pose

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jun 6, 2018

Lingerie specialists need to think carefully about the way they approach their advertising imagery following the banning of an ad in the UK that featured “sexually suggestive” visuals.

The advertising standards authority said that the ad for lingerie firm Silks, which showed only the model’s body and not her head, “invited viewers to view the woman’s body as a sexual object.”

The ad, which was released in the run-up to Christmas last year, also carried the tagline Tease the Season.

The ASA’s ruling said that as the purpose of the posters was to advertise a collection of lingerie, it considered it was reasonable to feature a woman in limited amounts of clothing. But the fact that the ad “did not show the model’s face, and focused only on her body, which was posed leaning over in a way that emphasised her chest,” was the big problem. 

The pose, plus the image itself and the tagline were all too much when taken as a whole and “in the context of a sexually suggestive pose and byline, the image invited viewers to view the woman’s body as a sexual object”.

The ASA added: “For those reasons, we considered that the ad objectified women and we therefore considered that it was likely to cause serious or widespread offence. [It] must not appear again in its current form.”

The watchdog also told the company not to use ads that objectified women in future.