These Creative Veterans Hope Peaceful Protest Underwear Can Save Lives

Last year a group of prominent black creative directors—BSSP executive creative director Keith Cartwright; Twitter group creative director Jayanta Jenkins; Amusement Park chief executive officer Jimmy Smith; Geoff Edwards of Creative Artists Agency; and Chobani managing director Kwame Taylor-Hayford— announced the launch of Saturday Morning, an initiative designed to facilitate conversations about social justice both within and beyond the marketing industry.

Today the group debuted its first product: Peace Briefs, a line of underwear that looks to achieve a similar goal by way of “purpose built waist bands” touching on issues related to the Black Lives Matter movement and minority communities’ relationships with law enforcement.

Each pair of underwear comes inscribed with one of the following lines: “I am not armed,” “Please don’t shoot,” “I have a family,” “My life matters,” “I am a father” and “We don’t hate.”

“When we started Saturday Morning, our goal was to use our super powers—which for us is creativity—to create ideas, solutions and products that could impact the issues of racial injustice and division that our country faces today,” said Edwards. “Wearing a pair of Peace Briefs is a way for inner-city youths and minorities to express their values and beliefs peacefully.”

Cartwright described the concept as “a simple but powerful idea,” adding, “We believe that a pair of underwear could potentially save lives, especially in a city like Chicago where the concentration of dissidence between the police and the South Side of the city is at an all-time high. Our hope is that the simple messages on the waist bands will help ease the tension and reduce the violence.”

The original “Peace Brief” concept, which the founders discussed at last year’s Advertising Week New York, asked the larger creative community to address the question, “How do we reduce the violence?” Saturday Morning partnered with Syracuse University, whose students have submitted more than 8,000 related ideas over the past year. Hundreds more came in from artists, designers and agency creatives.

The Saturday Morning website currently showcases several of these ideas, though the founders developed the underwear concept themselves as a solution to their own brief.

The group plans to use proceeds from the sale of the products to distribute them to “inner-city youths in Chicago, Los Angeles and other markets.”

Patrick Coffee

@PatrickCoffee

Patrick Coffee is a senior editor for Adweek.