We love it when Curbed readers play detective, or at least when they freakishly retain all information regarding nearly year-old advertising. And because this reader can explain the above far better than we ever could, we'll let her take it away:
Last May this Expedia ad kept popping up in my browser. The copy read, “This Dana found the waves. This Dana found the one.” Waves-Dana being a guy and Found-The-One-Dana being a girl. It reminded me of a man who once lectured me about how all women will never enjoy a vacation unless they meet The One. He reiterated this theory in various ways, repeating the phrase “all women” with each slightly varying iteration. I finally asked him how men feel about vacations and he said “oh, you can’t generalize." So when the ad kept popping up every time I visited the NY Times site it annoyed the hell out of me. I finally made a screen shot and sent it to Ms. Magazine’s “No Comment” department. I guess they weren’t impressed because it wasn’t published, and the Danas remained forgotten on my hard drive. So imagine my surprise when I looked at the Chandelier of Insanity, and one of the pictures is Waves-Dana! I can’t figure it out. Is Philippe loving Waves Dana Surfer Dude from a year-old Expedia popup ad so much that he hopes he will come live in or at least exemplify a tenant of Downtown Insanity Place? (And damn, those pictures on the website look like a parody of a luxury condo site …so scary that it’s not a parody. Or is it? It’s way too postmodern to wrap my wee pea brain around).
While we hope that Expedia pays enough to be able to buy into Philippe's palace of the absurd, we'll assume that some stock photo agency shots were used for both ads. For shame, though, because we either wanted to live next to Waves-Dana or Candle No. 2 when it came time to move in.
· Philippe Starck's Chandelier of Insanity [Curbed]
· Downtown by Philippe Starck [downtownbystarck.com]