Scope and Content of Collection
This finding aid provides a single access point for four separate collections related to
Robert Heinecken's ...wore khakis project, a five-year endeavor centered on
the GAP's 1990s khaki pants advertising campaign. Heinecken dissects, with the deft
precision of his X-acto knife, the narrative proffered in the advertisements, which feature
vintage photographs of celebrities wearing khaki pants, and bear the slogan "[famous name]
wore khakis." By cutting through 28 of the advertisements and binding them together to
reveal numerous layers of famous people wearing khakis, Heinecken twists the ad campaign's
implied intimacy between celebrity and consumer. By these actions the viewer no longer
simply shares a one-on-one connective moment with a single personality, but rather is
confronted with multiple personalities whose body parts have been recombined to create new
hybrid individuals, much as in the way the pages in children's flip-flap books can be
endlessly rearranged to create figures with amusingly mismatched heads, torsos and feet. It
is within these layered relationships created by Heinecken's manipulations that the viewer
is ultimately left to reconsider one's real and suggested connections to both the individual
celebrities depicted, and to a vast, uniformly khaki-clad population.
Each of the first three acquisitions in the collection comprises as single, discrete
iteration of Heinecken's …wore khakis: Series I (accession
number 2017.M.30), GAP/NY Headaches, is a revised magazine
that represents the first stage of the project; Series II (accession number 2017.M.31),
contains the prototype for Heinecken's final publication …wore
khakis; and the publisher's proof is found in Series III (accession number
2017.M.32). Finally, Series IV (accession number 2017.M.33) comprises Nazraeli press records
related to …wore khakis, including correspondence between
publisher Chris Pichler and Robert Heinecken; original materials relating to the various
components of the project; documentation of the project; and related ephemera, as well as
legal correspondence related to the GAP's objection to Heinecken's use of their advertising
campaign.
Arrangement
Arranged in four series, each representing a separate acquisition:
and
Series I. Revised Magazine:
Gap/NY Headaches, (Accession number 2017.M.30), between 1994 and 1999;
Series
II. Prototype for Robert Heinecken's ...wore khakis (Accession number
2017.M.31), 1998;
Series
III. Publisher's proof for Robert Heinecken's ...wore khakis (Accession
number 2017.M.32), 1999;
Series IV. Nazraeli press records related to
Robert Heinecken's ...wore khakis (Accession number 2017.M.33),
1994-2000.
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