The Bodies Advertising Finally Found

For most of the past decade, underwear advertising operated from a single premise: the body wearing it should make everyone else feel vaguely deficient. Hairless, symmetrical, twenty-two, backlit to within an inch of its life. You knew it was constructed. You bought the underwear anyway. You moved on.

Swedish label Monki launched their #NoFilter campaign with the opposite brief—cellulite, stretch marks, body hair, tattoos of questionable vintage, the full working inventory of what people actually look like when nobody’s doing anything about it. The politics are legible: position the brand as honest, earn the loyalty of everyone exhausted by aspirational imagery. But the execution is more coherent than the usual body-positivity campaign. The images don’t look apologetic. They look like people who simply got dressed.

The counterargument is obvious: does performing authenticity in an ad campaign change anything, or does it just replace one impossible standard with a slightly messier one? Probably the latter, eventually. But for now, the women in these photos look comfortable in a way most underwear photography doesn’t bother to achieve. If the actual argument is just that buying underwear shouldn’t make you feel bad about yourself, that argument lands. The rest is still marketing. At least it’s more interesting marketing.