About two years ago, a clothing brand called Free People released a commercial for its new dancewear line. While unnoticeable to the untrained eye, it is obvious to any dancer that the actress who claims to have been dancing since she was 3 has no formal training in pointe what-so-ever. Although overall ineffective because of this one giant mistake, Free People’s commercial does have some redeeming qualities: the cadence of the voiceover follows the movements, and the camera crew strategically blurred obviously bad blunders of the “ballerina.”
The commercial starts with the girl says, “I don’t even think about it at this point; I just express myself and I let myself go and it’s not really--I don’t think about what I’m gonna do I just do it?” This sentence, while grammatically incorrect and redundant, move and flows just like the “dancer” and the music do. This adds to the effect of movement, which is the desired effect for the brand’s movement theme. Unfortunately the actual content of the actress’s statement is atrocious. While this would be okay to say for almost every other style of dance, it is not okay for ballet. When a ballerina dances, she is always thinking; if she doesn’t she falls and gets hurt.
However, someone along the way of the product of this video must’ve known how untrained in pointe this actress was. At 1:12 there is a strategically blurred clip in which the “dancer” attempts a step that she obviously looks bad doing. While covering one of her bigger blunders is a plus, this person on the production team wasn’t versed enough in ballet to be able to cover all the rest of the dancer’s mistakes.
Overall, Free People tried very hard to fool people into thinking they hired a trained ballet dancer but failed miserably. On the off chance that the actress really was a trained dancer in a different style of dance, the brand should’ve showed off her strengths. Either way, the commercial had the opposite of the desired effects. I know I’m definitely not buying any clothes from a store that hires fake ballerinas that make ballet seem easy.
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