The Tiffany’s Same-Sex Marriage Ad Is Radical—But It’s Also Retrograde

This week, Tiffany & Co. published its first ad featuring a same-sex couple. The famed luxury jeweler, known for its iconic Robin’s Egg blue boxes, has joined a host of other American companies in not just embracing same-sex couples but actively featuring people who are gay, lesbian and transgender in their advertising. In 2014, Barney’s spring campaign starred transgender models. In 2012, JCPenney’s featured same-sex couples for Father’s Day (or Fathers’ Day) campaigns. And there are many more examples.

Symbols—both the inclusion of same-sex couples in ad campaigns and marriage rings themselves—are powerful, especially in an increasingly shareable digital world, and the Tiffany campaign tells us a lot about the progress of LGBTQ rights in America. It also tells us just as much, and perhaps more, about the gravitational pull of the wedding-and-marriage industrial complex.

In other words, the Tiffany’s ad is just as retrograde as it is radical.

There’s certainly something radical about the presence of a gay couple in a Tiffany ad (insofar as any diamond ad can be radical). Tiffany is, after all, the zenith of marriage industry. As cultural symbols go, it doesn’t get much more powerful than an engagement ring from Tiffany. In popular culture, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to the 2002 Reese Witherspoon romantic comedy Sweet Home Alabama—in which the heroine’s wealthy boyfriend proposes by taking her to the Manhattan Tiffany flagship after hours, flipping the light switch, and saying, “pick one”—the brand is synonymous with romance, wealth and high cultural capital, all of which are widely considered desirable.

The incorporation of “non-traditional” families into the institution of marriage is hardly a new phenomenon, and today’s expansion certainly isn’t limited to same-sex couples; another ad in that same recent Tiffany campaign depicts a couple on their wedding with a young child in tow, a reflection (and endorsement?) of more children being born out of wedlock.

For one of us, Zach, the question of “traditional families,” is personal for him and his two moms, Jackie and Terry. They walked down the aisle on the winter solstice of 1996 in what was described then as a “commitment ceremony,” but what today we would recognize as a “wedding.” In 1996, however, same-sex marriage was not legally recognized anywhere in the United States, let alone in central Wisconsin. Terry already had two children when she and Jackie met—a “non-traditional” family twice over. Yet, when marriage became an option for them in 2009 after Iowa became the third state in the Union to recognize marriage for same-sex couples, they were walking down the aisle again a short six months later.

Marriage, at its core, is about recognition. Recognition is why we put on the fancy tuxes and beautiful gowns. It’s why we publish marriage announcements in newspapers. It’s why we invite friends and family to witness—to recognize—the relationship. Recognition is why we wear engagement rings and wedding bands.

Still, it’s important to separate marriage the institution, the sacrament, the symbol from “marriage,” the industrial complex. This is easier said than done when all the tuxes and gowns and newspaper announcements and rings are themselves the product of the wedding-and-marriage industrial complex, a $50 billion behemoth nationwide.

And it’s easy to see why the marriage industry is so large. After all, it feels good to have a relationship that is important to you—maybe the most important—recognized and affirmed by the people and community who matter to you. Further, in our cultural imagination, marriage is a path to the glamorized love so artfully depicted in Tiffany’s advertising. That love, we’re told, is beautiful, it’s timeless. Like a Tiffany diamond, it’s perfect.

The pursuit of marriage rights for same-sex couples was a deeply strategic choice by leaders of the LGBTQ community, and for all of the triumphs we’ve seen since, that choice was also deeply controversial and bitterly dividing. In the 1990s, momentum was building in the fight against HIV/AIDS and for employment protections for LGBTQ people—more tangible agenda items than the abstract consideration of marriage equality, which many considered a pipe dream that primarily advanced the interests of the most privileged members of the community. Like, for example, those who can afford rings from Tiffany & Co.

Yet, the brilliance in pursuing marriage equality is that the ensuing efforts humanized same-sex couples in a way that fighting for HIV/AIDS resources and employment protections did not. By pointing to an institution that is the cornerstone of so many heterosexuals’ lives and saying, “This is important to us, too,” gay and lesbian couples slowly built a contextual window through which heterosexuals could see the humanity of their homosexual neighbors. And now, nearly twenty-five years after the Baehr v. Miike case was filed in Hawaii, same-sex couples are featured in Tiffany ads.

And this is the thing: Marriage is simultaneously an institution that can create identity and stability, as well as facilitate wealth creation (i.e. capable of enormous good) and an institution that has been carefully guarded for millennia. In addition to being legally exclusive, marriage has been culturally and socioeconomically exclusive: For decades, most American men have been expected to prove their financial viability (and, by extension, their virility) by buying an expensive piece of jewelry for their intended. Among the most desirable of these small, shiny baubles? A Tiffany diamond.

And then there’s Tiffany’s advertising, which, like a lot of diamond advertising, stresses the pricelessness of romantic love and the possibility of proving that love with high-priced jewelry. Tiffany & Co. is a quintessentially American brand, making this new affiliation with same-sex marriage even more symbolic; the fight for marriage equality is, after all, a fight for full citizenship—a fight for the freedom to marry.

This ad, like the fight for marriage equality itself, is at once deeply transgressive and deeply conformative. For many years, advocates for same-sex marriage talked about the 1,138 legal rights, privileges, and protections that accompany marriage. “Equal protection,” was a common refrain. Yet, it was not until a more compelling story caught fire that attitudes began to shift. This ad, like today’s fight for marriage equality, tells a story about love: about what love is and what love looks like and what love means.

The question is whether we want this story about love to fortify the institution of marriage, or to fuel the purchase of luxury jewelry and the reinforcement of an exclusive social strata. It should tell us something about the power of American capitalism that this couple can be featured in Tiffany ads in all fifty states before they can actually get married in all fifty states.

Same-sex marriage can come in a Robin’s Egg blue box—but it can come in lots of other packages, too. We should resist, or at the very least question, the expansion of the wedding-and-marriage industrial complex into the lives of a community that is still excluded from that institution in so many ways. With the expansion of the freedom to marry comes the chance to say it with diamonds. More important is the chance to say it at all and have it be heard.

Chloe Angyal, PhD is a scholar of popular culture whose research focuses on romantic comedies. She is a Senior Columnist at Feministing, an opinion contributor at Reuters, and a facilitator at The OpEd Project.

Zach Wahls is a nationally-recognized LGBTQ rights activist, the New York Times best selling author of My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family, and a Truman-Albright Fellow. His website is ZachWahls.com.