Naomi Shimada on why honesty has to have a real cost

Writer and coach Naomi Shimada rose to prominence during her decade-long modelling career for her outspoken views on inclusivity and body positivity. Now based in Milan where she runs her own body-oriented coaching and guidance practice, Soft Landing, her work explores the interplay between the collective and the personal. She co-wrote Mixed Feelings: Exploring the Emotional Impact of Our Digital Habits (2019) with Sarah Raphael, and since 2021 she has been writing her newsletter Tender Contributions on Substack. Here, Shimada explores how brands can truly commit to transparency.

I was asked to write about radical candour, a theme that’s been present in this year’s D&AD Award-winning work. But honesty is not a trend to me, it is a theme I have wrestled with in my own life and work for years, both as a model inside the machinery of the fashion industry and now as a writer watching how brands borrow the language of truth-telling while keeping the structures of power intact. Which is why I believe that if the industry is going to embrace honesty, it must do so in a way that goes beyond just the campaign, because the decisions made by this industry ripple out to culture, politics and the daily lives of our entire world.

I think part of why I am so attuned to these shifts is because I lived through a version of them before. Over fifteen years ago, I worked as one of the rare UK size 14 models in the early days of what was then called the diversity movement. I used my voice to advocate for more representation, for bodies like mine to be seen as normal, not niche. For a brief moment it felt like something might be changing. But soon the words ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ were absorbed into the same marketing machinery they were meant to disrupt. Diversity became a buzzword. ‘Real’ was stamped onto every ad until it meant almost nothing. That slow drift from sincerity to performance is part of what radicalised me.

I am always suspicious when I see radical honesty being sold back to us now. This is a healthy suspicion to have, because it encourages us, the audience, to think more deeply about the work we see, and because it pushes brands to transform themselves for the better. Burger King’s Bundles of Joy campaign, for example, showed real mothers in hospital beds eating burgers just after giving birth. The divisive campaign was praised by some for being clever, refreshing and raw, while others saw mothers’ vulnerability turned into a spectacle. For our industry to be truly honest, these are conversations we should embrace rather than shy away from.

Libresse’s Never Just a Period campaign was also powerful in the way it showed blood and pain where usually there is only blue liquid and euphemism. But in the spirit of radical candour, we must be able to celebrate successes at the same time as identifying the ways in which brands can do more behind the scenes, whether that’s addressing period poverty or the environmental impact of products.

Few brands truly commit to transparency, but those that do see just how transformative it can be. One example that interested me is FKA Haeckels. In 2024, after confronting the disturbing history tied to its namesake, Ernst Haeckel, a Victorian-era naturalist linked to scientific racism, the British skincare company erased its own name. The brand invited customers into the renaming process, made full price and energy use breakdowns public, redesigned every product for compostability and even introduced a ‘Pay What You Feel’ model that explained exactly how each price point sustained the business and supported workers. This was not marketing gloss. It was structural change, and it risked alienating customers. That willingness to let the mess show felt like something closer to real honesty – a rarity these days.

Often, when brands let the mess show, it is for less progressive reasons. American Eagle’s recent campaign, which featured the line ‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’, caused instant controversy, but that only seemed to work in its favour. The outrage boosted stock prices, even as sales fell. That is how the cycle works: scandal, backlash, publicity, profit. Outrage is attention, and attention is currency.

Transparency is so hard to come by mostly because where we spend our money is one of the few powers left to us, and brands don’t want to take the gamble. Real honesty could win trust or destroy it, which is why most brands will only ever risk the appearance of honesty, not the substance of it. This attitude is not confined to advertising. It shows up in our politics and our media: we see it on a global scale in the way genocide in Gaza is denied or reframed as ‘self-defence’, in the way starvation and mass killing are turned into debates about semantics. We are told not to believe our eyes, not to trust the evidence of harm. The smoke and mirrors we can encounter in advertising, politics and the media should come as no surprise, because they are often so intimately intertwined. The irony is that, at a time when public trust is often said to be at an all-time low, rebuilding that trust demands honesty from those seeking it.

For brands, radical honesty, if it is to mean anything, has to cost something real. Otherwise it is just another slogan, another billboard, another way of keeping us looking. We can play a role in that, always challenging brands to do more, show more, guided by a critical eye. The task is to ask not only whether a campaign is clever or authentic, but who benefits from it, and at what cost. To notice the ways our attention, whether approving or outraged, is commodified. And to decide, when we are smacked in the face by the next billboard, whether we will look away or look closer.

Check out D&AD’s Radical Candour theme in this year’s trend report, where we delve into how Brand purpose has expanded its definition to include unfiltered truth-telling.