Category: Appropriation

For my third and final piece, I decided to parody a pre-existing brand. The brand that is being parodied as you can probably tell is Polo Ralph Lauren. I decided to replace the old logo with a similar looking vector image of a grim reaper that I also “appropriated”  and slightly edited to fit the look I was going for.

The addition of the “YOLO” (You Only Live Once) to replace the “POLO” text also adds to the general theme of the piece as the acronym has become so well known that it speaks for itself. I suppose that the image could be interpreted as a social commentary on the growth of blind mass consumerism and the need for “stuff” as well as the futility of being materialistic as you cannot take any of these physical items into the afterlife (if you even believe that such a thing exists). The image also blends icons of two different generations together in a way that I feel works for the look that I was going for, as the Ralph Lauren logo has been recognisable for decades now and the popularity of using YOLO has come and gone as an internet fad. The irony of its short lived presence in popular culture is even almost poetic.

This image was formed mostly by chance. I actually made it for a friend who needed it for a presentation on his course not even thinking about the brief. But after a while of thinking about what I wanted to appropriate next, I realised that I had answered my own question a few days in advance. I cropped his head out of his selfie with the lasso tool and tweaked the colour balance and contrast of both images. I then added a texture to the final image to allow the two images to blend together more naturally.

This is the first image I have produced for the appropriation brief it was inspired by one of my ideas for the digital media brief for the film “Forever My Love”. I saw this as being a sort of Cold War-esque spy/action movie, akin to the James Bond film “From Russia With Love”. Also, when I searched for appropriation on google images, there were many examples of communist propaganda posters. This led me to attempt to recreate one with a more modern twist.

A large number of elements of this text have been appropriated, from the images of Putin and the Soviet flag, to the hands in shackles (and the chain linking the shackles). These elements were sourced from news sites and free stock images and edited in Adobe Photoshop.

I used the polygonal lasso tool to crop the images out of their backgrounds to give them a vintage, more handmade feel and also because it was the quickest way to crop them out in a way that wouldn’t look completely horrible for this task. I also made use of the well-known communist colours of red and yellow before doing a quick search for Vladimir Putin quotes to help guide the final look of the poster. In hindsight, the text should have been formatted to better fit the image. But for something I did half awake at an ungodly hour of the night, I’m quite happy with the overall result.