National Day’s coming very soon, so it’s time to slap on that flag and color scheme on everything but the kitchen sink. Clothing retailer Giordano also recently jumped on the patriotic bandwagon like every other local business — but sadly its attempt backfired hard in its haste to slap an advertisement together.
Just take a look at this:
Geez, what an eyesore. First thing to address — folks are crying foul that an ad to promote a (rather ghastly) attire celebrating the country’s independence doesn’t feature “actual Singaporeans”, whatever that means. They’re mad that the typical Singaporean family aren’t the models for a National Day polo, and they take offence that an obviously Caucasian family (with their ambiguously Asian daughter) is used instead of a Chinese, Malay or Indian one.
In our opinion at least, there’s nothing wrong with the models’ ethnicity. What, you think there aren’t any Caucasian Singaporean citizens? Git outta here.
No, what we take offence with is the fact that it’s so badly photoshopped — so bad that it’s causing a literal eyesore. But that makes sense because it’s actually a recycled picture from a previous ad promoting regular ol’ un-patriotic polo tees.
Nice try, Giordano. No effort whatsoever in getting someone who actually knows graphic design to work on this. Forget the models’ race — look at the horrible re-skinned edits, the poor masking and cutting, and that awful background. It’s like Giordano got an intern to rush out the image in an hour — come to think of it, that’s a likely explanation for what happened here.
Happy National Day!
