Nike jumps on 'real women' bandwagon

updated 9:01 p.m. ET Aug. 18, 2005

PORTLAND, Ore. - It’s no longer just rail-thin models who are showing up in fashion magazines and on billboards. Large women, or what are being called "real people," are now gracing ads of companies selling everything from tuna to cellulite cream.

Nike Inc., the world’s largest maker of athletic shoes, has jumped onto the bandwagon with a campaign featuring close-ups of “big butts” and “thunder thighs.”

Look closely at the text, however, and you discover that the body parts featured in the pictures belong to women who spend a lot of time working out.

“It looks like a volleyball player. Like a very athletic woman — not someone fat,” said Britt Hansen, 20, poring over the “thunder thighs” spread inside the locker room of a local gym in downtown Portland.

“It ain’t that big,” agreed Douglas Burzell, a computer tech who glanced at the “My butt is big” ad while sipping his Starbucks coffee about 10 miles from Nike’s Beaverton, Ore. headquarters.

The new Nike campaign, said company spokeswoman Caren Bell, is attempting to portray “what is real” as opposed to “the ideal.”

When a woman works out, her body develops, becoming more muscular, instead of model-thin. And that’s a look the ads are trying to celebrate, she said.

It fits right in with a reality trend in the beauty industry overall, said Cindi Leive, editor-in-chief of Glamour magazine, which is prominently featuring the “big butt” ad in its September issue.

“If you’re born a size 12, you will not become a size 0 and any product that tells you (that) you have to do that to be happy will not get your attention anymore,” she said.

A recent survey of 1,000 American women by Allure magazine supports that conclusion, said the magazine’s publisher, Nancy Berger Cardone. Editors at the magazine were astonished, she said, when 91 percent of the respondents said they were satisfied with what they see in the mirror.

For that reason, it makes sense for advertisers to pitch products to women who hope to improve their looks in a realistic manner, rather than those indulging in a faraway fantasy.

“Women are wanting to be themselves — but better,” she said.

Nike’s campaign comes on the heels of ads for cellulite cream by Unilever N.V.’s Dove showing unretouched, “real” women of varying sizes in bras, panties and a broad smile. “As tested on real curves,” reads the text underneath the photograph.

In the food industry, Chicken of the Sea just launched a TV campaign featuring a beautiful woman, who runs into an elevator and allows herself to exhale, exposing her large tummy.

The people in Nike’s new campaign are toned women, whose curves are the results of swimming, dancing, playing soccer and running.

“My butt is big and round like the letter C,” states the text that goes with a picture showing a woman’s tight derriere. “And ten thousand lunges have made it rounder. But not smaller. And that’s just fine.”

Showing an image of a woman in shorts from the waist down, another ad proclaims: “I have thunder thighs. And that’s a compliment because they are strong and toned and muscular.”

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