“Dress For Respect” – Dress That Reveals How Often Women Are Being Touched Without Their Consent

Touch me and face the consequences is what “Dress for Respect” is all about. While the wave of #MeToo movement brought courage and voice with it, there are several companies who are also trying to shed light on the issue of sexual harassment and feminism through their advertisement campaigns.

Recently, a Swiss beverage company Schweppes teamed up with Brazilian advertisement agency Ogilvy for their new campaign called ‘Dress For Respect’ that aims to bring sexual harassment of women in Brazil under the spotlight.

Designed with powerful sensors, ‘Dress for Respect’ is a smart dress that ensures the wearer is alerted when and where they were touched.  This will shed light on non-consensual public touching as well.

3 women volunteered to wear the dress and visited a nightclub. The results were astonishing. In 3 hr 47 min, they were touched 157 times, which is equal to being touched more than 40 times per hour.

The dress can measure how many times the wearer is harassed and the information is transferred via wi-fi to a control unit and it helps the makers to understand in real-time and give them a broader vision of harassment.

As per the 2016 statistics, ‘86% of Brazilian women have been harassed in nightclubs’ and ‘still, many men say that they don’t see it happening.’

About half of this country’s female population has experienced unwanted contact at least once in 2016. Also, there were other types of harassment and according to Agência Brasil, wolf-whistling is the most common form of public harassment of women (77%), followed by staring (74%), sexual comments (57%) and cursing (39%).

Watch the video here:

This shows the gravity of the situation if nothing else and the problem is not restricted to Brazil but is faced by many women across the world.