Benetton put America's death row in its ads — Sears tore up the contract

For eighteen years, from 1982, photographer Oliviero Toscani made Benetton's ads the most argued-about in fashion: a priest and a nun kissing, a man dying of AIDS beside his family, three pig hearts labelled 'white', 'black' and 'yellow'. The clothes were barely in the pictures. The formula worked — until late 1999, when Benetton's new campaign turned to America's death row.

Titled 'We, On Death Row', the campaign ran photographs and sympathetic profiles of 26 condemned men, launched with a 96-page supplement in the February 2000 issue of Talk magazine. The reaction was not the usual controversy. Pennsylvania's attorney general called for a nationwide boycott, the California Assembly passed a resolution urging one, and Missouri sued the company, alleging it had misrepresented its intentions to gain access to the inmates. 'Death row is not for sale,' the state's attorney general said.

Then the money moved. Sears tore up a newly signed franchise agreement and pulled Benetton-labelled clothes from its shelves in February; families of murder victims whose killers appeared in the campaign picketed the company's Fifth Avenue office. Benetton's spokesman admitted the company 'maybe didn't fully calculate the emotional reaction'; Toscani expressed no regret. Within the year, his eighteen-year partnership with Benetton was over.