By Andrew Adamides
NICOSIANS are up in arms over posters advertising French Connection clothes and prominently featuring the acronym FCUK – which stands for French Connection United Kingdom.
The posters carry a simple message: “Christmas Shopping: FCUK It”. And since they went up around the capital last week, the municipality has been inundated with phone calls from outraged citizens who’ve misread them, demanding to know who put the posters up and what they’re advertising.
In fact so many were angry at the posters that Mayor Lellos Demetriades himself contacted Soula Messiou, the owner of French Connection’s Cyprus operation, in order to sort the matter out.
“I explained to him, and thank God, he laughed about it,” Soula told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.
She explained that the problem had partly arisen because a printing glitch had seen the removal of the Registered Trade Mark logo, and therefore nobody could tell it was a legitimate advertisement.
The FCUK slogan has been brazenly used to promote French Connection for three and a half years overseas. Its first appeared in London, with the slogan “FCUK Fashion”, provoked a similar uproar, and French Connection were told to change it by the Advertising Standards Authority.
This only say the appearance of the second-generation campaign: “FCUK Advertising”.
Since then, the campaign has gone from strength to strength, with the latest incarnation, “FCUK Xmas”, provoking an outcry from the churches in the United Kingdom. French Connection have now withdrawn their “FCUK Xmas” posters, but are still using the slogan on T-shirts and bags.
This is the first time the fashion company advertises on billboards in Cyprus. Soula says she didn’t at first introduce the slogan to Cyprus for fear of shocking people, but never expected them to still react in this way now.
“Whenever we have FCUK T-shirts,” she said, “they sell faster than anything else.”
Of the 13 posters, only one, opposite the Hilton Hotel, has actually been defaced, and will be replaced today. If you want a look at the posters, though, you’d better be quick, because they’re due to come down on Sunday.
