mom-daughter lingerie ad campaign has the media in a tizzy

The Lake and Stars lingerie and swimwear company has received a lot of attention in the last few days due to a lingerie campaign featuring a mother and her daughter. Fox News is, unsurprisingly, in a tizzy:

“These ads are highly suggestive. They are clearly designed to titillate consumers; mostly men. The incestuous and lesbian suggestions, with the phallic images of cactus and logs, are juvenile at best,” psychologist Dr. Nancy Irwin told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “I'm disgusted, yet hardly surprised by this. Advertisers (particularly of undergarments) continuously push the envelope on good taste to simply get attention and drive sales."

Comments Fashionism about the ad campaign:

There isn't anything particularly 'humourous' about a mother and daughter pair posing so provocatively. In fact, it is quite awkward and uncomfortable. Some might even think this is disturbing ... Personally, I believe that in a society where girls are already faced with a lot of peer pressure and competition from their friends and colleagues, it is unnecessary to add the burden of comparing themselves to their mothers.

According to the Huffington Post, The Lake and Stars co-founders Nikki Dekker and Maayan Zilberman intended to spark discussion:

"A lot of the themes that we're dealing with are about psychology between women as they're growing up and dealing with family politics or women in the workplace ... We always poke fun at these ideas that people take really seriously, but we're trying to make it so that people can talk about it and have a sense of humor about it."

The mother and daughter pictured in the campaign are not models by trade, Zilberman said. They are just her next-door neighbors in Brooklyn, everyday women, who seem to have an interesting relationship. "They're always so loving and tender towards each other," Zilberman said.

"That's what really drives the collection and what drives the photos: these women who are experiencing something that we're not necessarily experiencing. I wanted to present portraits of them so that people would see the chemistry that they have. I think it's really rare, you don't see a lot of that ... There's no shock value here. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable in order to provoke dialogue ... We're just trying to confront some of these issues that I think people aren't really talking about so much."

Zilberman, who is in her early 30s, said that the goal of the campaign is to spark discussion about how younger generations of women relate to older generations of women, and vice versa.

"So for our customer, for our viewer to see these photographs, you're confronted with this feeling of 'who's the sexy one?' Because there's always someone who's sexier and there's always some kind of competition going on; there's always a tenderness going on; there's always a tension ... We're opening it up to think about: Is it OK for a mother and daughter to feel tender toward each other? And what happens when they're in sexy clothing?"

Apparently, the photos have been on The Lake and Stars website for about a month, but didn’t get widespread exposure until last Friday when the Huffington Post reported on the campaign. LingerieTalk features some of the responses in this post.

I'd be curious to hear what others think about the campaign and the responses it's received. Feel free to chime in!