Dharma-Burger! Nirvana gets a makeover
Nirvana has gone big-time:
Nirvana Spring water, that is. (Thanks to Gary Steinberg for the tip!) That, above, is the new look of the product, one of many named in honor of the ultimate cessation of suffering.
And here it is as the Horse had seen it in 2007 (presuming it’s the same product, newly relaunched):
(Click here to see that 2007 post.)
Nirvana has come a long way, baby.
…I never know what to think about this kind of co-optation. One one hand, it’s co-optation of something that for people has varying degrees of weight or sacredness. That’s often bad. It can certainly complicate things. But:
Could it be that, in a culture like ours — where products will be part of the fabric of many lives, for better of for worse — it’s a good thing when products are named after positive things and are depicting similarly positive people or activities? As opposed to, say, being named after something negative or somehow depicting mindless or violent or otherwise negative ideas?
It’s better to see a product message that depicts meditation as a positive thing than to see just yet another one that depicts some stupid, typical consumer culture message.
Isn’t it?
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June 30th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
“I’m gonna douse myself in holy water…”
- The American Lite
Julian Cope
August 12th, 2010 at 10:44 am
Yeah, I dunno. It kind of reminds me of how all the yoga magazines went from having, say, spiritual leaders on the front to the current trend of splashing cookie-cutter, anorexically thin pretty girls on every cover, smiling at you with their perfect white teeth as they bend themselves into pretzels.
This particular ad, I think, is not about meditation or even good health, but the idea of posing, of “looking spirtual” in your expensive hippie top, fake tan, and fashionably jutting clavicles. Unfortunately, I think it does convey “some stupid, typical consumer culture message.”
And the photoshopped background . . . well, that’s a complaint for another blog entirely
August 12th, 2010 at 10:44 am
Yeah, I dunno. It kind of reminds me of how all the yoga magazines went from having, say, spiritual leaders on the front to the current trend of splashing cookie-cutter, anorexically thin pretty girls on every cover, smiling at you with their perfect white teeth as they bend themselves into pretzels.
This particular ad, I think, is not about meditation or even good health, but the idea of posing, of “looking spirtual” in your expensive hippie top, fake tan, and fashionably jutting clavicles. Unfortunately, I think it does convey “some stupid, typical consumer culture message.”
And the photoshopped background . . . well, that’s a complaint for another blog entirely