Level: Item
Reference: HAT2/1/42/86
Alt Ref No.: 1980s_Silk_Cut_Quarry_HAT2_1_42_86
Extent: 1 commercial
Duration: 00:03:00
Colour: Colour
Brand: Gallagher
Product: Silk Cut
Product Category: Tobacco
Physical Form: Video Tape
Technical Description: Digital Betacam
Position on Tape: 11:09:28:14
Keywords: Lorry, mountains, countryside, heavy machinery, art in advertising, grand, scale, cutrain, silk, purple, cigarette, smoking, tobacco, advertising laws, knife, speech, quotes,
Admin History: In 1983, Saatchi & Saatchi won Gallaher's Silk Cut cigarette account. In the face of continuing legislative restrictions on cigarette advertising, Charles Saatchi and his Creative Director Paul Arden came up with a concept based on a cut across a piece of silk fabric in the product's purple branding. Unlike the Benson & Hedges campaign, the packaging did not appear at any time. While the images in the campaign are undoubtedly surreal in their nature the initial inspiration came from paintings in Saatchi's art collection by the Italian conceptual artist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), famed for puncturing and slashing his canvasses.
The variations of a 'silk cut' became ever more elaborate. In 1985-6 Arden even took the installation artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude as his inspiration for a cinema commercial by stretching a mile of purple silk across an American canyon before it was slashed with a hunting knife (shortlisted for the British Arrows advertising awards). Entitled 'Valley Curtain' (Saatchi & Saatchi) the commercial was directly influenced by Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work of the same name where they suspended a 18,600 metre orange nylon sheet across two Colorado mountain slopes in 1972 for a period of 28 hours. The temporary, but labour intensive, infamy of Christo's work was repeated in the 3 minute cinema commercial where the silk cut curtain is painstakingly suspended and subsequently slashed apparently moments after construction. The build up to the final reveal accounts for the majority of the commercial, much like that of Christo's work which takes years of planning only to be executed in a matter of moments.
The 'silk cut' campaign was immensely successful and underwent numerous incarnations, only ending with the banning of cigarette advertising in 2003.