Our campaign photoshoot took place in October 2023 and featured five incredible models, each with a very different story to tell. We heard from all five of them about their relationships with their chests and any advice they had to help people feel more comfortable in their own skin. You can watch the full campaign film here.
As a team we knew that there was so much to explore when it comes to breasts & chests: the over-sexualistion of them; shame around breastfeeding in public; experiences of having big, small, saggy, asymmetrical breasts; stories from breast cancer survivors and previvors and mastectomies; trans and non binary folk and their relationships with their chests; and so many more. Here we realised we could only touch the surface with the expanse of these stories but as always, we invite our community to share theirs to help raise awareness.
There was one thing apparent throughout all of this. While we had all of our beautiful photography and stories to explore, we would have some difficulty getting it out into the public sphere. We weren’t able to show our print on billboards (or even talk about these chests!), we were concerned that posts across social media would be deleted or result in our accounts being shadowbanned.
When it comes to social media, we like to think we’re in control of what content we’re seeing, but in reality AI algorithms hold much of the power. And, as it turns out, these AI systems are prone to mistakes and bias – mistakes that negatively impact and over-censor women, plus-size people, sex-positive accounts, non-binary and trans people on social media.
As a brand with an incredible community both in real life and online; Instagram, Facebook and TikTok are important spaces for us to connect with them. And so while we understood that some chests would likely be deemed acceptable to the mainstream media and AI algorithms (see Calvin Klein’s latest Jeremy Allen White advert), we understood that this could directly impact our campaign, with many of the breasts & chests that we were celebrating in all their varied beauty at risk of censorship.
To understand more about censorship bias and how we got here, you can read our latest blog from Dr Carolina Are, who is the pole dancing academic, activist and content creator behind the @bloggeronpole social media accounts and blog.