In this week’s Our Take, Pizza Hut sends a clear message to your ex. Alexis Bittar is the luxury brand serving Oscar-worthy sketches. Modern Day Witch trails are addressed in a cyberbullying awareness campaign. And an Irish art festival hopes to disrupt the status quo.
Disrupting the artist quo
Ireland’s new annual disability arts festival, Disrupt, launches on 7 March at Project Arts Centre.
The jam-packed showcase will run over 5 days and will celebrate art by Irish creatives within the disability community.
With accessibility being an afterthought and ableism being so commonplace in society overall, it’s no surprise that the disability community is often excluded from the notoriously exclusive art world.
Disrupt challenges the way we exhibit art, how we consume it and most importantly, it challenges our perspectives on disability. Ironically, it also plays on the ableist perception that catering to the needs of people with disability is somehow disruptive.
Art has the power to connect us and bridge gaps of understanding between people. We adore this concept and are all for creating a more accessible, inclusive space for all in the Irish creative scene. Go see it. But go see it for the amazing art.
Alexis Bittar Makes a Comeback
Alexis Bittar’s luxury brand has turned its comeback story into a genius social media series. With savvy product placement and a storyline that follows Margeaux, a long-time NY Upper East Side resident, and her long-suffering assistant Hazel, (played by the legendary NY Drag Queen, Jules), the series follows the two characters as they improv their way through iconic scenes that lovingly satirises the typical clients of high-fashion retailers.
Alexis Bittar sold his fashion empire in 2019, and its outlook wasn’t great when the new owners quickly filed for bankruptcy. Thankfully, Alexis managed to buy back his business, and with his creativity at the helm, the brand has been making a comeback ever since.
Brands are often criticised for creating the ‘wrong’ kind of content for TikTok. Polished and staged videos that are high on sales and low on entertainment value fall victim to the algorithm. Alexis Bittar’s content demonstrates this clearly. The older, promotional posts have views typically in the low hundreds. But the new campaign is reaching millions with celebrity cameos (all hail PR Queen Kelly Kelly Cutrone), playful improv, and captivating storylines.
If you haven’t watched it, start from the beginning. It just might be better than anything on Netflix right now.
Modern Day Witch Trials
The Cybersmile Foundation, in partnership with JOAN London, has released a powerful new campaign that takes on a particularly toxic form of cyberbullying and online abuse.
Modern Witch Trials is a short film which draws parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and social media pile-ons to show that mob justice isn’t new, it’s just got a tech upgrade.
Tom Ghiden, managing director at JOAN London, said, “The anonymity of our online lives and ease of response, combined with the desire to be seen as empathetic and socially conscious, has resulted in increasing mob behaviour online. People being targeted may have made poor decisions, or behaved problematically, but this creative is designed to make people question whether vicious retribution is warranted, or if there are more productive ways to drive evolution”.
The campaign addresses the rise of cancel culture and highlights how this problem can affect anyone with a social media presence. Well worth the watch.
GOODBYE PIES
It is hard to end a relationship. But do you know what helps? Pizza. Or at least Pizza Hut thinks so. So they’ve created ‘Goodbye Pies’ just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Surely the best break-up you could ask for, ‘Goodbye Pies’ are honey-flavoured pizzas, decorated with broken hearts and a customised message, hand delivered to your soon-to-be-ex.
With 45% of people believing the days leading up to Valentine’s is the perfect time to call it quits, the Goodbye Pies stunt is an excellent way to jump on the Valentine’s Day wagon in a disruptive way.
I wonder do they have single slices?