It’s a cold winter evening; I was huddling up in my bed, flipping through the Vogue magazine while popping up chocolate peas – my recently adopted favorite sport for this weather. That’s when I came across this Van Cleep Arpels ad: a double page spread showing a blue blue sky over a green green meadow, a clean-faced young girl with a pony tail and clear-cut fringe. She is holding up a round circle and blowing out gentle bubbles, inside each of the biggest bubbles is a Van Cleef Arpels ring, the round circle in her hand is another ring of course. Upon closer examination, she’s also wearing Van Cleep Arpels earings and bracelets that are very fine, very low-key and very reassuring.
It’s a beautiful advertising. The execution is excellent to the degree of beyond reproach. The consumer insight is so clear that I could almost reproduce the advertising brief: every woman, no matter of what age or income level, wishes to remain a little girl in a May day of blue blue sky and green green meadow, at least down at heart. And if she could be adorned with even a piece of Van Cleef Arpels, then let’s call her a very lucky little girl, but still, let her be a little girl on top of everything.
I was so inspired by this ad that I took a picture of it and shot up a twitter: Being innocent is the last luxury item in the world; you have to be really lucky to afford it. Then a second twitter: So I want to thank my parents, my boyfriend and all my friends to keep me innocent, though they didn’t give me a Van Cleep Arpels ring.
Indeed I’m often embarrassed when people make the comment of me being “innocent” or “naïve”, now into my late 30s. I often feel so out of place as if they’re just wrapping up the terms of “hopeless” or “useless” with a coating of civilization and tolerance. Still, I know that I’m the lucky little girl well protected that the baseness of humanity and the darkness of society but a thin layer of dust that sometimes land on my shoes and got dusted off instantly, they never came hard and sharp and close enough to bruised my skin or cut into my toes.
About Van Cleel & Arpels. I was in a training the day after and the instructor left enough space between the sentences that I tried to fill in the boredom with some meaning activities. I browsed my iPhone, and the application that goes fastest without a high speed wireless, surprisingly, is Taobao.com. I tried the key words “Van Cleef Arpels”, and thank the great Chinese people and the almighty production industry we have, there’re indeed quite some of them, but of course not the golden or silver or platinum type, just the colorful cheerful types with no precious metals.
That’s how I got a Van Cleef ring and a bracelet for my Christmas gifts!
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