H&M’s new campaign is hair, curves, and everything it means to be a ‘lady’ in 2016

H&M really dgaf.

In their most recent campaign, gender norms and ideas of traditional beauty have been completely screwed over as women are empowered to be who they want to be. We’ve been taught that it’s OK not to shave our body to the core, it’s OK not to have the perfect stylised locks and it’s OK to not be 18-years-old and 98lbs and seven feet tall.

The video features trans actress Hari Nef, as well as 72 year old Lauren Hutton, designer Pum Lefebure and model Adwoa Aboah, highlighting that a woman can be a lady whatever her shape, age, racial background, sexual identity or behaviour.

The Swiss campaign is encouraging women to be fierce and independent and to break the social norms which surround them. No one model is the same, and none of them fit into what you may see on the catwalk of London Fashion Week.

And everyone is going crazy for it.

The video, featuring a Lion Babe reworking of Tom Jones’s “She’s a Lady”, shows a huge variety of beautiful women ironically yet inspirationally breaking every lyric, and social expectation, in that song.

The behaviour in the video is not exactly what your granny would call “ladylike” and may be called by some as radical, with Lion Babe’s Jillian Hervey picking food from her teeth at a restaurant, one model flaunting her armpit hair and another leading a male dominated boardroom. 

The campaign shows real women wearing clothes how they would actually be worn in real places, and not how they would look on a size 0 model after a hell of a lot of photoshopping and lessons in etiquette.

Basically, H&M is telling us that a woman can be exactly who she wants to be and behave exactly how she wants to behave whilst still being a powerful, beautiful and influential lady.

And it’s exactly the kind of lady I’d prefer to be.