Men’s clothing brand mocked after claiming ‘real men’ don’t carry bags
Men’s clothing brand Jacamo has been mocked online for an ad claiming that “real men” don’t carry bags.
The online fashionwear brand had launched a competition to find a ‘real life’ model to front its PR campaign.
As part of the competition, it pushed a Twitter ad featuring a picture of a scantily-clad model posing next to a leather satchel, contrasted with a man posing awkwardly over a football.
The tweet read: “Real men have balls, not man bags. We’ve launched #RealManRunway to find the face for AW17. Tweet to enter!”
The ad didn’t exactly go down as intended, however – as hundreds of men lined up to question the weird macho message.
One wrote: “Real men don’t give a flying f**k about outdated and damaging gender stereotypes and have a man bag if they bloody well want one.”
Another added: “Your PR team are almost as outdated as your chinos.”
One Twitter user added: “If your masculinity is threatened by a leather bag I really feel for you. Maybe you shouldn’t promote this kind of weakness.”
As one keen-eyed observer pointed out, Jacamo actually sells a ton of man bags:
A spokesperson for Jacamo said: “Here at Jacamo championing male body and fashion diversity is really close to our hearts.
“We want to encourage all guys to feel confident – regardless of age, size, shape, colour or sexual orientation and that’s why we launched our Real Man Runway competition, to make more men feel represented on the high street and to celebrate the diversity of the UK’s men.
“Encouragingly we have loads of entries which are testament to this aim.
“Our social tweets were supposed to be a fun way of illustrating that there is more than one type of man something that the Real Man Runway competition is trying to do. We are mortified that this caused any offence and of course apologise.”
