H&M apologizes

In this article I will talk about a recent controversy due to the new H&M advertising campaign.

A lot of medias and people talked about H&M new bikini collection, but, unfortunately, not in the way that the brand expected!

In fact, in its last advertising campaign, “Beach Sensation”, to promote its new bikinis collection for this summer, the famous Swedish retailer brand H&M, exposes a model in the sand or in the sea and she is wearing a bikini. You will think that nothing is incredible in this campaign because it is for swimsuits! But this model is really really tan, as you can see!

According to the Swedish Cancer Society, the retailer is promoting tanning as a fashion accessory whereas tanning is dangerous for our skin. The group published an article on the Swedish Newspaper Dagens Nyheter, where they were saying things such as "The clothing giant is creating, not least among young people, a beauty ideal that is deadly”, "Every year, more people die in Sweden of (skin cancer) than in traffic accidents, and the main cause is too much sunning."

H&M had to apologize after these declarations: "We are sorry if we have upset anyone with our latest swimwear campaign. It was not our intention to show off a specific ideal or to encourage dangerous behavior, but was instead to show off our latest summer collection.”

After these apologize, the Swedish Cancer Society said that they took in consideration their excuses but they will continue to discuss with the retailer for its future campaigns. Even if the Cancer Society acknowledged that it was possible that the model’s tanning could have been faked with computers, they said that the images were harmful. 

Pauline HAOND