Ad agency designs ‘The Dress for Respect’

WOMEN around the globe apparently often complain about unwelcome attention and gestures from men particularly in the workplace as well as during a night out.

This led to the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault, with celebrities such as Alyssa Milano, America Ferrera and Debra Messing voicing their support for the cause.

An advertising agency has now attempted to prove women are mishandled by men.

The stunt allegedly found that 86% of women on a night out in a major South American city were harassed.

Ogilvy Brazil created a touch-sensitive dress that allegedly tracked how often women were touched.

According to Quartzy, an online lab management platform and scientific research supply marketplace, the campaign was conducted on behalf of beverage company Schweppes with the goal to “elevate the issue to men, who expressed in preliminary interviews that harassment was not a major issue for club-going women”.

Quartzy added that apart from tracking how often women were touched on an average night out in Brazil, the dress also identified the degree of the intensity of the gestures.

For this project, called “The Dress for Respect”, researchers embedded the dress with sensor technology that tracked touch and pressure.

The information was then relayed to a visual system to allow researchers to essentially track touching in real time.

Researchers sent three women to a party wearing the dress.

During the course of a night, Quartzy said it saw a heat-map version of the dress steadily lighting up in the areas where the women were touched.

This showed it to be mostly on their lower back, backside and arms.

The visual was also imposed over footage of the women apparently brushing off the men and asking not to be touched.

Following the women who were part of the experiment’s night out, the research found that in just under four hours, the women were touched a combined 157 times.