Allegedly, Supergirl isn’t just for kids anymore:
Designers Team Up for Supergirl Collection
“While Supergirl is as a fictional comic book heroine and the female counterpart to Superman, Barry Ziehl, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Warner Bros. Consumer Products, said the line has nothing to do with the character . . . ‘The whole idea behind the Supergirl shield is a feeling of empowerment — when a girl wears the clothing, she will feel empowered. That’s what we want to get across with this collection,’ he said . . . While this isn’t the first Supergirl branded collection, it is by far the most aggressive, as industry sources estimate the new line could bring in about $10 million in first-year wholesale volume.”
Uh-huh, right — “Buy our sweatshop crap, feel empowered!” Because, you know, a Supergirl emblem embroidered on the buttons of your cute little blazer is going to give you all the strength you’ll need to break right through that glass ceiling . . .
Seriously, they make Superman t-shirts for little boys, comic-con geeks, irony-laden twenty-somethings and gym rats, but you won’t see any guy with his head on half-straight looking to a logo-stamped piece of clothing for empowerment, nor will you hear some marketing hack spouting a line of B.S. about a Superman wardrobe unleashing a guy’s inner-superhero at the office.
So why, then, are they traveling this road with the female consumer? As far as I know, superhero movies are mostly a bomb with female audiences, guys outnumber girls at comic book stores by, like, 100 to 1, and the fantasy life of your average female doesn’t seem to revolve around tossing cars, outrunning bullets, clobbering villains or having a way bigger bicep than the next Jane-Doe on the street.
I could, of course, be completely and utterly wrong, but something tells me that a pair of Supergirl jeans isn’t going to be “empowering” anyone anytime soon, at least, not while this is still the mainstream version of a Supergirl:
Two women fighting over a man. Now, that’s what I call super!
