An Interview with Ronald Rosenfeld(1)
Ronald Rosenfeld
J.W.Thompson Co., Senior Vice President,Creative Supervisor
chuukyuu First of all, out of all your works so far done, please pick up two items that you like best.
Ron Well, I liked one of the whole series, the series of ads on Jamaica, the Island of Jamaica that we did several years ago.
And the other is for Great Day, men's hair coloring.
The Jamaica ads I liked because I was writing about a country, really, that had been terribly misunderstood. It was thought of as nothing more than a resort.
After having gone to the Island of Jamaica, I realized that it was a great deal more than that, that it was a very specific country with very specific folkways and customs and attitudes, peoples, and that the service I think that we did for them was to communicate to people that this island was more that just a resort.
There are many resorts rather, a lot of places where you can find beaches and palm trees and bright sun, but when you can combine beaches and palm trees and bright sun, with a special kind of architecture and custom and cooking and an attitude toward life, it is a much more exiting place. You can get terribly bored lying on beach. And also one beach tends to be the same with the other. When you combine the beach with the country, you may go to a much more exiting place.
And we did whole series of ads on Jamaica detailing these various aspects of country. And people began to think of it in a new way and tourism there increased tremendously.In fact I think the whole economy prospered, improved because of this influx of tourists of the new attitude.
If you can take your eyes
off her face for a few moments,
you may pick up a bargain in
silk. Or perhaps even a
Rolleiflex.
In Jamica,you have an excuse to stare. Faces like you've never seen before. Shades from a new spectrum.
Eyes cheekbones, skin, lips, hair -- that have always belonged to different world. Here, together in one face.
You see a girl behind the counter of a silk shop. You Wonder. How much of that loveliness is Africa?
How much China? How much India? How much Europe? You can't always tell. Sometimes, Africa blends into China into India into Europe. Until the divisions are blurred, the lines of difference, lost.
And what comes out is a thing that belong in one of them. Only to Jamaica. At its best, this new kind of beauty is fragile, dreamy, ethereal. At the very least, exciting, interesting, unexpected.
So who could blame you for not paying attention to the purple silk sari.
But if you can shift your eyes to the silk, you'll see that it is quite a buy.60% less than you would in the States. And those French doeskin gloves. And those Egyptian cottons. 40% less.
Jamaica's duty-free prices are among the lowest in the world. (Abridgement)
